Criminal (Will Trent 6)

He said, “Deena, my love, you’re looking beautiful as ever this afternoon.”

Deena laughed even as she rolled her eyes. “Shut up, fool.”

“Only a fool for you, my dear.”

Evelyn supplied, “They do this all the time.”

“Oh.” Amanda tried to pretend she heard white men flirting with black women every day.

“Come on, Dee.” Pete tapped on the window. “You gonna let me buy you that drink?”

“Meet me outside at ten-after-never.” She snatched the drapes closed. “Y’all go on in.” She told Amanda, “When you throw up, aim for the floor drain. It’s easier to hose down that way.”

“Thank you,” Amanda managed.

She followed Evelyn into the autopsy room. The temperature was as cold as expected, but it was the odor that caught Amanda off guard. It was clean, like Clorox and Pine-Sol mixed with apples; nothing like what she expected.

There had been two calls during her uniform days wherein she was sent out to take a missing persons report and found that person not far from the house. One had been a man who’d been locked in his trunk. The other had been a child who’d gotten trapped inside an old refrigerator on the family’s shed porch. Each time, Amanda had taken one whiff and called for backup. She did not know what happened to the cases. She was at the station filling out reports by the time the bodies were removed.

“Who is this elegant lady?” Pete Hanson asked, his eyes on Amanda.

“This is—”

“Amanda Wagner,” Amanda told him. “I’m Duke Wagner’s daughter.”

He paused a beat. “So you are,” he finally said. “Duke’s quite a character, isn’t he?”

Amanda shrugged. She was bruised enough about her father for one day.

“Pete.” Evelyn put on her cheery voice again, but her fingers snaked into her hair, giving a telltale sign of her discomfort. “Thanks so much for letting us watch. We were in Lucy’s apartment last Monday. We never met her, but it was quite a shock to learn about the suicide.”

“Lucy?” Pete’s brow furrowed. “Where did you get that?”

“It was in Butch’s report,” Amanda supplied. “He ID’d her off her license.”

Pete walked over to a large, cluttered desk underneath the window. There were piles of papers stacked in a hodgepodge, but he somehow found the right one.

Smoke drifted from his cigarette as he read the preliminary report. The paper was thin. Amanda recognized Butch Bonnie’s scrawl reversed on the back where he’d turned the carbon paper the wrong way.

“Bonnie. Not the sharpest tack in the box, but at least it wasn’t that jackass Landry.” Pete put the report back on his desk. “In a case like this, the license ID is a last resort. I generally prefer dental records, fingerprints, or a family member coming in before I feel comfortable signing off on the identity.” He explained, “Learned my lesson in Nam. You don’t send someone home in a body bag unless you know the right family’s waiting on the other end.”

Amanda found relief in his words. For all his eccentricities, the man was at least good at his job.

“So.” Pete flicked ash off his cigarette. “What’s Kenny been up to? I haven’t seen him around.”

“This and that,” Evelyn said. She was watching Pete’s every move—the way he wiped his nose with a tissue from his pocket, the bobbing of his cigarette as he talked. Meanwhile, she pulled so hard at her hair that Amanda was certain she was going to yank some out. “He’s working with Bill on a shed at the house today.” She chewed her lip for a few seconds. “We’re having a barbecue later. You should come.”

Pete smiled at Amanda. “Will you be there?”

She got a sinking feeling. It was her lot in life to be attracted to the Kenny Mitchells of the world while the Pete Hansons were the only ones who ever bothered to ask her out. “Maybe,” she managed.

“Excellent.” He rolled over a metal tray. There were scalpels, scissors, a saw.

Evelyn stared at the instruments. Her face was pale. “You know, maybe I should give Bill a call. We dashed out without telling him when we’d be back.”

This wasn’t actually the truth. Evelyn had been clear that they weren’t sure what time they would return. Bill, unsurprisingly, had been very accommodating to his beautiful wife.

“I should go call,” Evelyn repeated. She practically ran out of the room.

Which left Amanda alone with Pete.

He was looking at her, but this time she saw the kindness in his eyes. “She’s a great lady, but this is one of the more challenging spectator sports.”

Amanda swallowed.

“Would you like me to take you through the process?”

“I—” She felt her throat tighten. “Why do you have to do an autopsy if it’s a suicide?”

Pete considered her question before walking across the room. There was a light box mounted on the wall. He flipped the toggle, and the lights flickered on. “The word ‘autopsy’ means, literally, ‘to see for oneself.’ ” He waved her over. “Come, my dear. Contrary to rumor, I don’t bite.”

Amanda tried to conceal her trepidation as she joined him. The X-ray showed a skull. The holes where the eyes and nose were supposed to go looked eerily empty.

“Do you see here?” he asked, pointing to the neck on the X-ray. Pieces of vertebrae flexed apart the way a cat’s paw opened when you pressed the pad. “This bone here is called the hyoid. That’s pronounced ‘hi-oid.’ It’s horseshoe shaped, and free-floats at the anterior midline between the chin and thyroid.” He showed on his own neck. “Here.”

Amanda nodded, though she wasn’t quite sure she grasped the point of his lecture.

“The wonderful thing about your neck is that you can move it up and down and side to side. The cartilage helps make that possible. The hyoid itself is fairly fascinating. It’s the only jointless bone in your entire body. Supports your tongue. Jiggles when you move it. Now, as I said, it’s right here—” He pointed to his neck again. “So, if someone is choked with a ligature, you’ll generally find bruising around the hyoid. But here”—he moved his fingers up—“is where you’ll find bruising if someone is hanged, above the hyoid. That’s a classic sign of hanging, actually. I’m sure you’ll see it more than once in your career.”

“You’re saying she tried to hang herself first?”

“No.” He pointed to the X-ray of the neck. “See this darker line here that bisects the hyoid?” Amanda nodded. “That indicates a fracture, which tells me she was choked, probably with great force.”

“Why great force?”

“Because she’s a young woman. Your hyoid starts out as two pieces. The bone doesn’t fully fuse until around the age of thirty. Feel for yourself.”

She thought he meant for her to touch his neck. Amanda desperately did not want to touch him. Still, she started to reach out.

Pete smiled, saying, “I believe you have your own neck.”

“Oh. Right.” Amanda laughed through her discomfort. She gently touched her fingers to her throat. She palpated the area, feeling things shift back and forth. The noise clicked in her ears.