Where All the Dead Lie

CHAPTER FOUR

Dr. Samantha Owens Loughley stood poised over the body of an older man who’d passed away on the porch of his home, taking notes. Slight skin slippage. Facial congestion. Insect activity on legs. She was relatively certain he’d died of natural causes, but an unattended death meant an autopsy.

The rest of the day’s autopsies were lined up on their individual tables, attendants at the ready, waiting for her to stop by and do the external exam before they turned the pristine stainless-and-white autopsy suite into a Technicolor rainbow-the subcutaneous fat gamboge under the skylights, the organs a muddy sinopia, limp inside their dead homes, the blood as vivid and intense as a burning fire. There were four techs but five bodies, so she’d offered to take one of the guests herself to make things go quicker.

She finished her notes, made her rounds.

Everyone was situated now.

“Let’s go,” she said.

She returned to her table. Consulted the case file one last time. Pulled on her mask and picked up her scalpel. She was just about to make the Y-incision when the lab phone rang. It startled her; she’d been very much lost in thought, not seeing the body beneath her blade, not mindfully thinking about the possibilities of the apparent cardiac infarction. She’d been watching the sharp tip of a large knife slide into her sweater, then slowly, inexorably, pierce the skin of her lower abdomen.

Son of a bitch.

“You got that, Doc?” Stuart Charisse was her favorite tech. He was handling the body of an overdose on the other side of the wall.

She tossed the scalpel onto the tray to her right with a clatter. The phone rang again.

“Let it go. If they need me, they’ll page.”

Sam turned away from the autopsy table and took a seat on a stool near the sinks. Though snow was expected in the afternoon, for now the skies were misleadingly sunny, the frosted skylights dropping warm beams onto her shoulders. She breathed in deeply, counted to four, then let her breath out. The phone stopped ringing. Her breath didn’t slow. Shoot.

“I’m stepping out. I’ll be back in a second.”

There were murmurs of assent. Her team understood; she’d had to step out a few times over the past month.

She stripped off her gloves, pushed through the door to the changing area, and sat at the desk in silence, her breath a background noise to the snapping, sawing and clanking behind her.

This had to stop. Her work was her sanity. She’d always had a comfortable level of detachment from her cases. The precision of the human body was fascinating, and she was damn good at her job. She was helping, she knew that. Giving answers. Putting minds at rest. Solving cases. But being lost entirely outside the room while she was cutting wasn’t fair to the bodies she worked on. They deserved better.

But damn, would she ever be able to look at her work the same way again?

When Barclay Iles had finessed his way into her life, she hadn’t even seen him coming. She’d laughed with him, trained him, worked alongside him, shared meals, late nights, even gave her blessing to his union with her receptionist. When that same man dropped the pretenses and alias, kidnapped her, tied her to a chair, revealed himself as the Pretender and divested her core of the small, innocent life within, she thought she might go insane. It was one thing to miscarry, to have your body make the decision for you. But to lose a child by force, before it was even born, that was too much for her to handle.

The moment replayed itself over and over and over. She could swear she felt the child tear away from the wall of her uterus; the ripping sensation found her in her dreams. The knife wound had been nothing compared to the massive cramp that had seized her midsection. She’d simply wanted to roll into a ball and cry, but with her arms handcuffed behind her, she was forced to make do with a slight bending at the waist. She didn’t want him to see her pain, which was a mistake. He liked pain. He liked to inflict it, and loved to see the effects his actions had on her frailty. When she finally admitted to it by crying out, he had stopped.

But the damage was done. Sam was alive. But her child was lost.

My God. If Taylor had just arrived sooner. If she and Baldwin had figured out who Barclay was earlier. If Taylor had only…

If Sam hadn’t trusted him like a fool.

If, if, if.

She wanted to blame Taylor. Wanted to lay the blame at her feet like a dog drops a rolled-up newspaper. Here, you take it. It’s your responsibility. Now I’m going back to my life.

Her rational brain repeated, over and over, that it didn’t work that way. That she was wrong to blame Taylor because a serial killer decided to target her. That it was inevitable that Sam would be caught in the cross fire. That Sam was the one who’d opened their doors to the Pretender instead of helping to catch him.

Sam had sat back and watched her best friend take ever-increasing risks. She should have known better. Taylor had a breaking point, just like all people. She wasn’t a superhero, she was just a woman, who’d been pushed too far.

Sam could have done something. She could have seen the madman for who he was, instead of being charmed by him. She could have looked more closely at her friend, paid attention to the cracks in her ever-present armor.

But Taylor didn’t have to take things into her own hands, either. If she’d just told someone of her hunch-that she suspected the Pretender had returned to his former lair-someone could have gotten to Sam in time. If Taylor had just let her team in, let them know what she was planning, maybe Sam wouldn’t have lost the baby. Maybe Taylor wouldn’t have been shot.

Instead, they’d all sat back and let Taylor run off the reservation. Sam thought she was the only one who knew that Taylor wanted to be the one to annihilate the threat. Baldwin had been distracted, worried about his son, and hadn’t realized what Taylor planned to do. Had he? Surely he hadn’t. He’d never condone murder.

Then again, Sam knew Taylor better than she knew herself. And Sam was the one who was there, locked in that attic, when Taylor had come through the door. She’d seen the look on Taylor’s face: for once all the masks pushed aside, all the walls dropped, hate and righteous fury emanating from her…it had frightened Sam. Perhaps her best friend was a better actress than she gave her credit for. She’d always kept the dark side of herself hidden.

Sam pushed her bangs off her forehead and regloved. She went back into the suite, made the rounds, looking at the hearts in situ, then returned to her table, took up the scalpel and made the incision into the dead man’s chest a bit harder than absolutely necessary.

She felt so worthless. She could blame no one but herself. She was the one who’d let the monster into their lives. And he’d taken from all of them-her child, Fitz’s eye, Taylor’s voice.

The man’s breastplate was off now, the rhythm of the posts around the room underway. The bone saw whirred to life, a few moments later there was an audible pop and Stuart called out, “Head’s ready.” Sam dropped her scalpel and went to the body, smoothed her fingers across the young man’s brain, saw nothing unusual, then nodded her okay. Stuart took the brain from the cavity with a few quick cuts, set it in the scale to be weighed, and as she went back to her own table again, he shouted, “Brain’s ready.” It would wait; she’d have to dissect the organs of all five bodies in turn, searching for the clues that would affirm the cause of death. No murders this morning, nothing extraordinary, so no special precautions were being taken. Just another day at the office.

Cutting and sawing and weighing and measuring soothed her tired mind. This was her world, finite, sure, and expected. Unlike Taylor, she had the luxury of being able to work, of finding herself again through her job. To throw herself into the sameness of each day. Every body held its secrets, but in side, they’re all alike.

Was she still?

She didn’t think so.

Oh, the rational part of her understood that all of her organs were in their proper places. The doctors said there was even a chance she could conceive again. But the thought of losing another child brought her up short. Her grief had been tremendous, but it was the reaction of her husband, Simon, that had been more than she could handle. He did blame Taylor, hadn’t wrapped his head around the situation yet. They still went to bed stiff and unloving, his back turned to hers.

He blamed Sam, too. She knew that. And she agreed with him. She could have fought harder, could have seen what was coming. Could have protected their child. She vacillated between understanding his frustration and hating him for blaming her. She hated herself a bit, too. What kind of mother lets her child be murdered?

The haze of the past weeks had finally been lifted by her son’s first steps. The twins, Matthew and Madeline, weren’t fazed by their mother’s inability to pick them up, to look at them. They had each other. They knew, inside, that she loved them, that she was afraid that if she touched them, she’d taint their souls with the rot permeating hers. She saw it in their eyes-the forgiveness, the patience. They would heal her, if she’d let them. For their sakes, she had to come to grips with this.

When she began to bleed yesterday, that’s when the rails came off the train again. It was her first period since the miscarriage, and such an open acknowledgement that her life was inextricably altered. She was empty again. No child growing, no soreness in her breasts, no morning sickness. When the child was cut from her, so were the symptoms, with such suddenness that she wondered if it were all a dream.

A nightmare, more likely.

She realized she was standing with both hands on her stomach, her left holding the skin down flat, her right poised at the ready, a scalpel between her fingers, pointed toward her own flesh.