Sara told Gary, “During embalming, cotton batting is used to pack the orifices and any open wounds. This keeps the fluid from leaking out.”
Sara tugged down the skirt. There was no underwear. The thighs parted. Will saw more cotton packed between her legs, almost like a diaper. He could not help but think of Leslie Truong, Tommi Humphrey, Alexandra McAllister, and all of the other women from the spreadsheet.
Sara gently turned Shay’s head. She rubbed her finger down the cervical vertebrae. Next, she looked at the armpits. She had to use the tweezers to strip away the cotton batting. From five feet away, Will could see nerves and veins sticking out of the woman’s armpit like a bunch of cables that had been ripped out of a computer.
Sara used the magnifying glass to study the wound. She looked up at Will. She nodded. The puncture wound at C5. The cleanly sliced nerves at the brachial plexus.
Shay Van Dorne was showing the same damage as Alexandra McAllister.
While Sara called out the findings for the recording, Will took his phone out of his pocket. He kept it low, out of the camera frame. He texted Amanda a thumbs up. She tapped back an okay. He was about to return the phone to his pocket when he thought of Faith. She was hooked into Will’s location services. He saw that she had made good time. Faith was about twenty minutes out from Gerald Caterino’s subdivision.
He considered sending her a text of encouragement, but a thumbs up felt wrong. Faith had already been forced to deal with Callie Zanger on her own. Will didn’t know how she would handle it if Gerald broke down again. The sound of the man’s sobs in the small closet had been agonizing. Will had been reminded of the new infants that would sometimes end up at the children’s home. They would cry for days until they figured out that no one was going to comfort them.
He ended up texting her a yam emoji. Faith would understand.
“Why?” Gary said.
Will looked up.
Sara was explaining, “We won’t find anything remarkable by opening her eyelids.”
Will put away his phone. He knew that she meant remarkable in the literal sense. Because of animal damage, the sockets would be empty under the plastic eye caps that kept the shape of the lid. There was nothing to remark upon.
Sara peeled away the wax that shaped Shay Van Dorne’s lips. The jaw stayed closed. Sara laid the wax on the brown paper. She pointed into the mouth, telling Gary, “See the four sets of wires attached to the top and bottom gingivae, or gums?”
Gary said, “They look like bread bag ties.”
“The embalmer used a needle injector to close the mouth. The device looks like a cross between a syringe and a pair of scissors, but think of it as operating like a small harpoon. The injector punches a pointed pin with a wire attached directly into the maxilla and mandible. You twist together the top and bottom wires to hold the mouth closed. I need the small wire cutters.”
Gary pressed the pliers into Sara’s hand.
She clipped open the wires. The mouth slacked open, falling down and to the side like the jaw was broken. Sara pressed her fingers along the bone. “The joint is dislocated.”
Will could tell from her voice that she was troubled by the finding. He picked up the coroner’s report on the cart. The form was standard. He knew that the box labeled DESCRIPTION OF INJURIES – SUMMARY was on the third page. His finger followed the single line of text.
Animal activity in sex organs, as detailed in drawing.
Will studied the anatomical drawing. The breasts and pelvis were circled. The eyes and mouth had Xs on them. Nothing was marked in the area of the jaw. The Dougall County coroner was a dentist by training. The man would have noticed a dislocated jaw.
Will looked back up.
Sara was shining a light into the mouth. She dragged the footstool back over. From the higher vantage point, she could see directly into the back of the throat. She pressed down the jaw, opening the mouth as far as it would go. Then she used the magnifying glass to look inside.
For the recording, she explained, “I’m looking at the upper right quadrant. A piece of latex or vinyl is lodged between the last molar and her wisdom tooth.”
Gary had picked up on the change in demeanor. He asked, “Is that weird?”
She talked around the question. “Wisdom teeth generally come in during your late teens or early twenties. Most of the time, they’re misaligned. They can crowd the other teeth and cause significant pain. They’re normally removed in pairs or all at once, so it’s remarkable that a thirty-five-year-old woman only has one wisdom tooth remaining.”
Sara stepped down from the stool. The glance she gave Will told him something was terribly wrong. She spread out the photographs from the Dougall County coroner. She found what she was looking for. “The latex wasn’t there when the coroner took the mouth photos.”
Gary said, “The embalmer would wear gloves, right? Because of disease?”
“Yes.” She told Gary, “I need the forceps.”
Sara returned to Shay’s body. She angled the overhead light. She stuck the long tweezers into Shay’s mouth. The latex stretched as she tried to pull it out. Then the jaw started to slip.
“Steady the jaw,” she told Gary. “It’s really snagged in there.”
Gary cupped his fingers on either side of the chin and forced open the mouth as wide as it would go.
Sara tried again, pulling at the latex. The material was thin, almost translucent.
Her phone started ringing. The sound was muffled in her back pocket.
She turned to Will, frowning. “Could you get that? It could be—”
Sara didn’t want to say Delilah Humphrey’s name on the recording.
Will fished the phone out of her back pocket. He showed her the screen.
Sara told Gary, “I’m going to take this in the hall.”
Will followed her out of the room. She kept her gloved hands in the air. She couldn’t touch the phone.
She told him, “You can hear this.”
Will tapped the speaker icon on the screen, then held the phone close to her mouth.
Sara said, “Mrs. Humphrey?”
There was static. Will thought they’d let too many rings go by, but the timer was still counting up on the screen.
Sara said, “Mrs. Humphrey, it’s Dr. Linton. Are you there?”
More static, but a woman’s voice said, “What’s up, Doc?”
Shock flashed in Sara’s eyes. “Tommi?”
“You got her.” Tommi’s voice was deeper than Will had imagined. He had thought of the woman as timid, broken. The voice on the other end of the line was as hard as steel.
Sara said, “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“‘It’s possible you were right about the photo.’” Tommi was quoting Sara’s email. “I told you it wasn’t Daryl Nesbitt eight years ago.”
Sara pressed together her lips. Will could tell she hadn’t gotten this far, that texting her own mother, emailing Delilah, had been the only steps she had walked herself through.
“Tommi,” Sara said. “I need to know if you’ve remembered anything.”
“What would I remember?” The steel turned into a razor. “Why would I remember?”
“I know this is hard.”
“Yeah, I know you know.”
Sara nodded before Will could think about how to ask the question. She had told Tommi about her own rape.
“Tommi—”
Tommi interrupted her with a long, pained sigh. Will could imagine cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth.
She told Sara, “I can’t have kids.”
Sara’s eyes found Will’s again. She held onto his gaze. “I’m so sorry.”
Will realized she was speaking to him.
He shook his head. She didn’t ever need to apologize for that.
Tommi said, “I wanted to be happy, you know? I looked at you, and I thought, ‘If Dr. Linton can be happy, then I can be happy.’”
Sara didn’t insult her with platitudes. “It’s hard.”
More silence. Will heard a lighter clicking. A mouth sucking in smoke, blowing it out.
Tommi said, “I don’t know how to be with a man unless he’s hurting me.”
The revelation came out in a rush. Will could see that Sara was doing the same thing he was doing—slowing it down, trying to find a way around the certainty in the woman’s voice.
Sara slowly shook her head. She couldn’t find a way. She could only feel devastated.
Tommi asked, “Are you that way, too?”
Sara looked up at Will again. She said, “Sometimes.”
Tommi blew out a long stream of smoke.
She inhaled again.
She said, “He told me it was my fault. That’s what I remember. That it was my fault.”
Sara’s mouth opened. She took a breath. “Did he tell you why?”
Tommi paused again to smoke, going through the deep inhale, the slow exhale. “He said that he saw me, and he wanted me, and he knew that I was too stuck up to give him the time of day, so he had to make me.”
Sara said, “Tommi, you know it’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, we need to stop asking rape victims what they did wrong and start asking men why they rape.”
There was a sing-song quality to her voice, as if she’d heard the mantra in a self-help group.
Sara said, “I know you can’t logic away that feeling. You’re always going to have moments when you blame yourself.”
“Is that what you do?”