3rd Degree

Chapter 69

I KNEW I WOULDN'T be able to sleep that night. I didn't want to go home.

So I stayed at the crime scene until the lab teams had come and gone; then for about an hour I crisscrossed the deserted streets of the port searching for anyone, a night worker, a vagrant, who might've seen who dumped Jill off. I drove around, afraid to go to the office, afraid to go home, reliving the awful sight over and over again, tears streaming down my face. Turning over that tarp - seeing Jill!

I drove until my car seemed to know the place I was headed. Where else did I have to go? Three o'clock in the morning. I found myself at the morgue.

I knew Claire would be there. No matter what time it was. Doing her job because it was the one thing that could hold her together. In her blue scrubs, in the operating room.

Jill was laid out on the gurney. Under those same harsh lights where I'd seen so many victims before.

Jill...My sweet darling girl.

I stared through the glass, tears wending down my cheeks. I was thinking I'd failed her in some way.

Finally I pushed through the glass doors. Claire was in the middle of the autopsy. She was doing what I was doing. Her job.

“You don't want to be in here, Lindsay,” she said when she saw me. She drew a sheet over Jill's exposed wound.

“Yeah, I do, Claire.” I just stood there. I wasn't going to leave. I needed to see this.

Claire stared at my swollen, tear-stained face. She nodded, the tiny outline of a smile. “At least make yourself useful and hand me that probe on the tray over there.”

I handed Claire her instrument and traced the back of my hand against Jill's cold, hard cheek. How could this not be some dream?

“Widespread damage to the right occipital lobe,” Claire spoke into the microphone on her lapel, “consistent with a single, rear-entry gunshot trauma. No exit wound; the bullet is still lodged in the left lateral ventricle. Minimal blood loss to the affected area. Strange...,” she muttered.

I was barely listening. My eyes still fixed on Jill.

“Light powder burns around the hair and neck indicate a small-caliber weapon fired at close range,” Claire continued.

She shifted the body. The opened rear of Jill's skull appeared on the monitor.

I couldn't watch that. I looked away.

“I'm now removing what looks like a small-caliber bullet fragment from the left ventricle,” Claire went on. “Signs of severe rupture, symptomatic of this type of trauma, but... very little swelling...” I watched Claire as she probed around and removed a flattened bullet. She dropped it into a dish.

A jolt of rage tensed me. It looked like a flattened.22. Caked with specks of Jill's blood.

“Something doesn't fit,” Claire said, puzzled. She looked up at me. “This area ought to be covered in spinal fluid. No swelling of the brain tissue, very little blood.”

Suddenly Claire the professional clicked in. “I'm going to open up the chest cavity,” she spoke into the mike. “Lindsay, look away.”

“What's wrong, Claire? What's going on?”

“Something's not right.” Claire rolled the body over, took out a scalpel. Then she slipped the blade down a straight line from the top of Jill's chest.

I did avert my eyes. I didn't want to see Jill like that.

“I'm doing a standard sternotomy,” Claire dictated into the mike. “Opening up the pneumo chest area. Lung mem-brane is soft, tissue... degraded, soupy... I'm exposing the pericardium now....” I heard Claire take a deep breath. “Shit.”

My heart started racing. I was fixed on the screen now. “Claire, what's going on? What do you see?”

“Stay there.” She put up a hand. She had seen something horrible. What was it?

“Oh, Lindsay,” she whispered, and finally looked at me. “Jill didn't die from a gunshot.”

“What!”

“The lack of swelling, blood seepage.” She shook her

head. “The gunshot was delivered after she was dead.” “What are you saying, Claire?” “I'm not sure” - she looked up - "but if I had to

guess... I'd say ricin."