Second Chance

Chapter 11

THE MORGUE was on the ground floor of the Hall, out a back entrance and accessible from an asphalt path that led from the lobby. It took me no more than three minutes to rush down two flights of stairs.

Claire met me in the reception area outside her office. Her bright and usually cheery face bore a look of professional concern, but as soon as she saw me, she eased into a smile and gave me a hug.

“How you been, stranger?” she asked, as if the case were a million miles away.

Claire always had a way of defusing the tension in even the most critical of situations. I'd always admired how she could relax my single-minded focus with just a smile.

“I've been good, Claire. Just swamped since I got the job.”

“I don't get to see you much now that you're Mercer's pet butt-boy.”

“Very funny.” She smiled that coy wide-eyed smirk of hers that was partly Hey, I know what you mean, but maybe a lot more, You gotta make the time, girl, for those who love you. But without as much as a reproving word, she led me down an antiseptic-linoleum-tiled hallway toward the morgue's operating room, called the Vault.

She glanced behind and said, “You made it sound like you were sure Tasha Catchings was killed by a stray bullet.” “That's what I thought. The gunman fired three clips at the church and she was the only one hit. I even went and cased the area where the shots came from. There was no way he had anything even close to a clean shot. But you said two... ”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded. We burst through a closed compression door into the dry cold air of the Vault. The icy chill and chemical smell always made my skin crawl.

And it was no different now. A single inhabited gurney was visible from its refrigerated vault. A small mound was on it, covered by a white sheet. It barely filled half the length of the gurney.

“Hold on,” Claire warned. Naked post-op victims, rigid and terrifyingly pale, were never an easy sight.

She pulled down the sheet. The child's face shot into my view. God, she was young.

I looked at her soft ebony skin, so innocent, so out of place against the cold, clinical surroundings. Part of me wanted to just reach out and lay a hand against her cheek.

She had such a lovable face.

A large puncture wound, freshly cleaned of blood, tore up the flesh around the child's right chest. “Two bullets,” Claire explained, “basically right on top of each other, in rapid succession. I could see why EMS might've missed it. They almost tore through the same hole.”

I sucked in a horrific double take. A fit of nausea gripped at my gut.

“The first one exited right through her scapula,” Claire went on, easing the tiny body over on its side. “The second bounced off the fourth vertebra and lodged in her spine.”

Claire reached over and picked up a glass petri dish resting on a nearby counter. With a tweezer, she held up a flattened lead disk about the size of a quarter. “Two shots, Linds... The first tore through the right ventricle, doing the trick. She was probably dead before this one even struck.”

Two shots... two one-in-a-million ricochets? I replayed the likely position of Tasha as she exited the church and the killer's line of fire in the woods. One seemed plausible, but two... “Did Charlie Clapper's crew find any bullet nicks in the church above where the girl was positioned?” Claire inquired.

“I don't know.” It was standard procedure in all homicides to painstakingly match up all bullets with their marks. “I'll check.”

“What was the church constructed of where she was hit? Wood or stone?” “Wood,” I said, realizing where she was heading. No way wood on its own would deflect a bullet from an M16.

Claire pushed her operating glasses high on her forehead.

She had a cheery, amiable face, but when she was certain, as she was now, it had a glow of conviction that admitted no doubt. “Lindsay, the angle of entry is frontal and clean for both shots. A ricocheting shell would likely have come in from a different trajectory.”

“I went over every inch of the shooter's position, Claire. The way he was firing, he'd have to be a goddamn sharp-shooter to set up that shot.”

“You say the fire was sprayed irregularly across the side of the church.”

“In a steady pattern, right to left. And Claire, no one else was struck. A hundred shots, she was the only one hit.”

“So you assumed this was a tragic accident, right?” Claire peeled off her plastic medical gloves and tossed them deftly into a waste receptacle. “Well, these two were no accident at all. They didn't ricochet off of anything. They were straight and perfectly placed. Killed her instantly. You willing to consider the possibility that maybe your gunman hit exactly what he was aiming at?”

I brought back the scene in my mind. “He would have only had an instant to line up such a shot, Claire. And only a foot or two of clearance from the wall to squeeze it in.”

“Then either God didn't smile on that poor girl last night,” Claire said with a sympathetic sigh, “or you better start looking for one hell of a shooter.”