Frank gave another rattled cough as they walked deeper into the forest. The tone was appropriately somber now. The air had turned cold. Shadows tossed back and forth across the ground. In the distance, Jeffrey saw the yellow police tape wrapped around the trees. Lena had cordoned off a wide circle around the body.
Sara’s foot slipped on a rock. Jeffrey reached out, steadying her at the small of her back. He thought about how this would’ve played out a year ago. Sara would’ve reached behind and squeezed his hand. Or smiled at him. Or done anything other than what she did now, which was to make a point of pulling away.
Frank coughed harder as they traversed the hill. They stopped at the yellow tape. The victim lay about fifteen feet away. The girl was slim, maybe five-six, one hundred twenty pounds. Eyes closed. Lips slightly parted. Dark brown hair. Dressed for running. The rock by her head was half-buried in the ground, about the size of a football. Dark blood webbed across the surface. A trickle of blood had dribbled out of her right nostril. No visible marks on her wrists or ankles. No visible signs of bruising, but she had likely been dead for less than an hour. Bruises took a while to make themselves known.
Jeffrey was about to ask Lena to verify again that she hadn’t turned over the body when he heard sobbing.
He turned around. Dan Brock was slumped against a tree. His hands covered his face. His body shook with grief.
“Brock.” Sara rushed to him. She had taken off her sunglasses. Her eyes had dark circles underneath. Top Gun better not get used to late nights. “I’m so sorry about your daddy.”
Brock wiped away his tears. He looked embarrassed, but only because Jeffrey and Frank were watching. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m so sorry.”
“Dan, please don’t feel the need to apologize. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” Sara pulled a tissue out from her sleeve. She had always had a soft spot for Brock. The man’s life had not been easy. He was very strange. He’d grown up in a funeral home. All through school, Sara had been the only kid who would sit with him at the lunch table.
Brock blew his nose. He gave Jeffrey a contrite look.
“Sara’s right, Brock. It’s normal to be upset at a time like this.” Jeffrey came from a family of drunks. He should be more sympathetic. “We’ll take care of the scene. Go be with your mama.”
Brock’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to squeeze out some words. He settled on a nod before leaving.
“Jeesh,” Lena breathed out.
Jeffrey shut her up with a look. She was too young to understand what it meant to lose somebody. Unfortunately, sympathy had to be learned the hard way.
“Okay, let’s get this over with before the rain comes.” Sara reached into the supply kit Brock had left. Specimen tubes. Evidence bags. Nikon camera. Sony Camcorder. Lights. She pulled on a pair of exam gloves. “The victim was found half an hour ago?”
Jeffrey raised up the yellow crime scene tape so Sara could cross under. He relayed the information Frank had given him on the phone. “A student called it in. Leslie Truong. She was heading to the lake. She heard music playing from the victim’s headphones.”
Sara noted the headphones, which were on the ground by the victim’s head. They were corded to a pink iPod shuffle that was clipped to the hem of the girl’s shirt. She asked Lena, “Did you turn off the music?”
Lena tilted up her chin by way of a yes. Jeffrey wanted to shake her by the collar. Lena must’ve picked up on his disapproval, because she said, “I didn’t want the battery to run down in case there was something important on it.”
Sara’s eyes found Jeffrey’s with a big, fat seriously?
She had never liked Lena. What Jeffrey viewed as youthful ignorance that could be trained away, Sara interpreted as a willful arrogance that would become a lifelong affliction.
The problem with Sara Linton was that she had never made a stupid mistake. Her high school years had not been riddled with drunken parties. In college, she had never woken up beside a frat boy in a hookah shell necklace whose name she couldn’t recall. She had always known what she wanted to do with her life. She’d graduated from high school a year ahead of time. She had completed her undergrad in three years and still earned a double-major. Then she’d graduated third in her class at Emory Medical School. Instead of taking a high-powered surgical fellowship in Atlanta, she had moved back to Grant County to serve as a pediatrician to the perpetually underfunded, rural community.
No wonder the entire county despised him.
Sara asked Lena, “She was found exactly like this? On her back?”
Lena nodded. “I took pictures with my BlackBerry.”
Sara said, “Download and print them out as soon as you’re back at the station.”
Jeffrey nodded his agreement. Lena wasn’t going to take orders from Sara. Which was a problem for another time.
He told Sara, “The way she fell doesn’t make sense.”
He caught a flash in her eyes. She was too decent to disagree with him in front of his team.
Jeffrey asked a leading question. “Can you explain how she’d fall face-up?”
Sara looked back at the tree root sticking out of the ground. There was a deep furrow in the dirt that matched the dirty tip of the victim’s left sneaker. “The etiologies of falls are well documented. They’re the second greatest cause of unintentional injury behind auto accidents. So, this is classified as a Same Level Fall, or SLF. TBIs—traumatic brain injuries—appear in twenty-five percent of all SLFs. Roughly thirty percent of victims experience what’s called an uncontrollable shift—so by degrees, you’d get a spiral fracture in the wrist, or a hip fracture, or a TBI. Ten percent of victims rotate one-eighty. The center of gravity falls outside the supporting area of the trunk and feet. Damage is due to absorbed energy at the time of impact, so kinetic energy equals body mass and speed, which is related to the height of the fall.”
Jeffrey nodded thoughtfully, more for the expert goat-roping than a fundamental understanding of what Sara had said. He tried, “Her left foot stopped, her body kept moving forward, she spun around mid-air and slammed the back of her head into the rock.”
“Possibly.” Sara knelt down by the body. She pressed open the girl’s eyelids. Then she rested the back of her hand on the girl’s forehead.
This seemed odd to Jeffrey, the kind of old-wives’ tale that led mothers to think they could tell if their kids had a fever. Sara was extremely scientific, sometimes to a fault. If she wanted to check for a fever, she used a thermometer.
She asked Lena, “You were first at the scene?”
Lena nodded.
Sara pressed her fingers to the side of the girl’s neck. Her expression went from concern to shock to anger. Jeffrey was about to ask what was wrong when Sara pressed her ear to the girl’s chest.
He heard a faint clicking noise.
Jeffrey’s first thought was that an insect or small animal was responsible. Then he realized the sound was coming from the victim’s mouth.
Click. Click. Click.
The noise slowly tapered off into silence.
“She stopped breathing.” Sara jumped into action. Up on her knees. Hands pressed against the victim’s chest. Fingers interlocked. Elbows locked as she started compressions.
Jeffrey felt panic stab into his brain. “She’s alive?”
“Call an ambulance!” Sara yelled. Her words jolted everyone into action.
“Shit!” Frank had his phone out. “Shit-shit-shit.”
Sara told Lena, “Get the defibrillator!”
Lena scrambled under the yellow tape.
Jeffrey dropped to his knees. He tilted back the girl’s head. He looked into the mouth to make sure the airway was clear. He waited for Sara’s signal, took a breath, then exhaled into the girl’s mouth.
Most of the air came back into his own mouth. He checked the throat again, making sure nothing was lodged in the back.
Sara asked, “Is air getting through?”
“Not much.”
“Keep going.” Sara resumed compressions, counting out each rapid push. He could hear her panting from the effort as she tried to manually pump blood through the girl’s heart.
“Ambulance is eight minutes out,” Frank said, “I’ll go down and flag it.”
Sara finished counting, “Thirty.”
Jeffrey gave two more short breaths. It was like blowing through a straw. Air was going through, but not enough.
“Half an hour,” Sara said, starting another round of CPR. “Lena didn’t think to check for a fucking pulse?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer, and he couldn’t give one. Jeffrey waited for Sara’s count to hit thirty, then leaned over and breathed out as hard as he could.
Without warning, vomit spewed up into his mouth. The girl’s head jerked forward, smashing into his face with a hard crack.
Jeffrey reeled back. He saw stars. His nose throbbed. He blinked. There was blood in his eyes. Blood on his face. In his mouth. He tried to spit it out.
Sara started slapping the front of his pants. He didn’t know what the hell she was doing until she pulled the Swiss army knife out of his front pocket.