Broken Promise

Sixty-five

Something had been nagging at Wanda Therrieult.

The Promise Falls medical examiner had been reviewing the pictures she’d taken during her examination of Rosemary Gaynor. Photos of her entire body, with several close-ups of the marks on her neck and the gash across her abdomen. She had transferred them to the computer and was looking at them shot by shot as she sat at her desk, a cup of specialty coffee — a flavor she could not even pronounce — resting next to the keypad.

She kept coming back to the pictures of the bruising on the woman’s neck. The imprint of the thumb on one side, four fingers on the other.

The knife wound that went from one hip to the other. The slight downward curvature toward the center. What Barry Duckworth had said looked like a smile.

She thought back to her very personal demonstration on the detective of how she believed Rosemary Gaynor had been attacked. She recalled how she’d positioned herself behind him, put one hand on his neck, wrapped her other arm around the front of him to illustrate how the knife went in.

Not that easy to reach around Barry.

They’d known each other a long time — long enough that Wanda could do something like this without it having to mean anything. She loved Barry as a friend and colleague. Sometimes, working where she did, it was just nice to touch a live body once in a while.

The dead bodies she’d always thought of as customers. And she treated them with the utmost respect, because they got to visit her shop only once.

“The customer is always right,” she liked to say, because the dead did not lie. The dead, Wanda believed, desperately wanted to speak to her, and what they wanted to tell her was the truth.

Over the years, she’d accepted invitations from a number of groups — Probus, Rotary, the local chamber of commerce — to talk about her job.

“I like to think that everyone who ends up on that table is an individual. That each and every one is special. You don’t want them all to become a blur, if you know what I mean. Even after all these years, I remember every one of them.”

Sometimes she’d see something on one victim that brought to mind something she’d seen on another. Ten years back, police were looking for someone who was mugging johns after they’d visited prostitutes in the south end of town. Hitting them in the head with a brick, lifting their wallets. Often he came up with nothing, evidently not learning that if you’re going to rob someone who’s visiting a hooker, if you do it prerendezvous, your target’s likely to have a little more money on him.

A couple of these poor bastards ended up dead.

Wanda Therrieult noticed that even though the murders were several weeks apart, the microscopic chips of stone in their skulls were similar. The killer was using the same brick.

One night, police patrolling the south end pulled over a driver for failing to signal. And there, on the front seat, was the brick.

“It was my lucky brick,” the man told the judge before being sentenced to fifteen years.

There was something about Rosemary Gaynor’s death that was making a bell go off, ever so faintly, in the back of her head.

Given Wanda’s photographic memory for these things, she wondered why it wasn’t coming up right away. She could usually close her eyes and call up bludgeonings and gunshot wounds as though they were snapshots from a family album.

What had happened to Rosemary Gaynor reminded her not of something she had seen, but of something she had heard about.

Something three or four years ago.

Another murder.

Three years ago, right around this time, she’d taken a two-month leave of absence. Her sister Gilda, in Duluth, had been dying, and Wanda had gone up there to look after her in those final weeks. It had been a sad time, but also profoundly meaningful. It became one of the most important periods in her life. Wanda still made calls back to Promise Falls, checking in, catching up on what was going on. Gilda had jokingly accused her at one point of being more interested in the fully dead than the aspiring.

Wanda opened another program. Photo files from other cases, arranged by date. She went back to the beginning of her leave, opening one file after another.

A five-year-old girl run over by a car.

A forty-eight-year-old roofer who tripped off the top of a church he was reshingling.

A nineteen-year-old Thackeray student from Burlington, Vermont, who’d brought his father’s Porsche 911 to school for a week, lost control of it, and crashed it into a hundred-year-old oak at eighty miles per hour.

A twenty-two-year-old woman who—

Hang on...

Wanda clicked on the file.

Opened up the photos.

Took a sip of her coffee as she studied the images.

“Oh, boy,” she said.