“Fuck you. ”
“No,” he said firmly. “Don’t close me out. I’m on your side, remember? How many ways do I have to say it? But you have to tell me what happened here. ”
Dez pointed a finger at the corpse.
“She could not have been dead, JT. No way. I don’t care how it looked. We made a bad call on that. You want a story, then that’s the story, and it’s the truth. She tried to fucking bite me. ”
“Bite you,” JT repeated without inflection. He crossed to the corpse, squatted down and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek, her forearm, the inside of her wrist. As he rose he flicked back toward the prep room where Doc Hartnup lay. He walked back slowly to Dez, his dark features lined with concern and doubt.
“Yes, she tried to bite me. Guess biting’s a frigging theme around here. ”
“Her skin’s pretty cold, Dez. ”
“I don’t care if she’s packed in ice, JT. She had me pinned down and I punched the shit out of her and told her to back down and I might as well have been pissing up a rope. She came after me and tried to tear my throat out. ”
“So you shot her. ”
“Yes, I fucking shot her. ”
“An unarmed woman. ”
“Yes,” Dez snapped.
“A seriously injured unarmed woman. ”
“Ah—Christ, JT. ”
The sirens were close. Turning off of the highway onto the access road.
“You shot her four times, Dez. How many shots does it take to—”
Dez suddenly shoved him, and JT staggered backward into the row of filing cabinets. A vase of gardenias fell off and smashed on the edge of a secretary’s desk. Before he could recover his balance, Dez snatched her Glock out of his hands and shoved it into her holster.
“I never thought you’d turn on me, JT,” she said bitterly. She wanted to punch him, to knock him down and stomp on him. She wanted to cry, too, but she would eat her own gun before she’d do that on the job. Even after what just happened.
JT got slowly to his feet, his eyes flicking from her face to her gun hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Dez. You’re acting irrational here and—”
“I’m perfectly rational. I didn’t lose it and I’m not drunk. Or hopped up on anything. You want to Breathalyze me? Fine, and when it comes up clean I’m going to shove it up your ass. ”
“Calm down, Dez. I didn’t say—”
The sirens were right outside now, the wails filling the room with implications. Dez closed her eyes for a moment as she heard car doors open and feet crunch on the gravel. Voices began yelling as the front and back doors banged open and officers from Stebbins and two neighboring towns flooded into the mortuary.
“Dez,” JT said slowly, “you know what they’re going to say. They’re going to look at the body. They’re going to take her temperature and test lividity and do the science that’s going to show how long she’s been dead. And then they’re going to match that against our response time on the call logs. Then they’re going to look at those bullet wounds. ”
“So what? Let them look!”
“Come on, Dez. … You shot her four times. How come none of the wounds bled?”
Dez took an involuntary step back as if JT had punched her. “What?”
JT pointed. “Corpses don’t bleed. Either you killed her on the first shot, in which case they’re going to want to know why you kept shooting—and from different angles and distances—or you killed her with the head shots and they’re going to ask you to explain why the perpetrator you shot in the chest didn’t bleed. ” He shook his head, and his voice had a pleading note to it. “What do we tell them, Dez?”
There didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe, and Dez could not answer his questions. Her chest was tight with tension, her heart hammered with fear. She looked down at the dead woman, following the line of gaze of the arriving officers, seeing the extremity of the violence. Seeing the blood and pieces of human debris as if through their eyes.
Jesus Christ, she thought, this is it for me. If JT doesn’t believe me, then no one will.
Wild panic flared in her, and she looked around as if hoping to see a door marked “EXIT. ” But one door led back to the c