Sight Unseen(17)
No, it would be sex and nothing but the sex.
Maybe.
“Go ahead, close your eyes,” he coaxed.
His voice was deep and velvet smooth, and his smile was lighting his face and softening the hardness. Charisma and manipulation, but maybe there was something more complicated beneath it. At any rate, she didn’t mind accepting being soothed and comforted just now. She felt raw and hurting, and the faces of those victims were still there before her. She had been grateful to feel Lynch beside her in that room filled with horrible memories.
She might even be grateful now that he was demanding nothing from her but that she let him exert that protectiveness he claimed was his DNA.
Not that she would ever admit it to him.
“I am tired.” She closed her eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”
San Diego County
Medical Examiner’s Office
Kearny Mesa
THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, like the FBI field office, was a seven-day-a-week operation, but both places were obviously operating with slim Sunday skeleton crews. Kendra and Lynch had to wait two full minutes until their door buzzer was finally answered by an assistant, who escorted them upstairs to the labs. Five minutes after that, Dr. Christian Ross appeared, wearing his green scrubs. Ross was a bearded, chunky man in his sixties. Kendra had always thought he was one of the best medical examiners in the business, thorough and methodical. He also possessed the rare ability to adjust his medical explanations to the medical/scientific knowledge of whomever he was speaking with.
He grinned as he recognized them. “Ah, Kendra Michaels and Adam Lynch. Be warned, I’m a bit bleary at the moment. I’ve been working sixteen hours straight. This case of yours has taken on a new urgency in the last day or so.” He gestured for them to join him in the hallway. “I would invite you up to my office, but the place is a damned mess. What can I do for you?”
“We won’t keep you long,” Kendra said. “I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Gary Decker and Corrine Harvey. More specifically, their clothing.”
The doctor looked at her in surprise. “Their clothing?”
Kendra nodded. “They were the victims in the BMW, Doctor. Did you get any indication that they may have been put into those clothes after they were killed?”
Lynch was gazing at her thoughtfully but said nothing.
Dr. Ross paused for a long moment. “What makes you think that?”
“Yes or no?”
He finally nodded. “Yes, as a matter of fact. But I didn’t think anyone outside of this office knew it yet. I was planning to include it in an amended report later this morning. Is there a leak in this office I need to be concerned about? Because if there is—”
“There’s no leak.”
“Then how—”
“You first. How did you arrive at your conclusion?”
Dr. Ross shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult. The murderer made sure we wouldn’t miss his handiwork. The assistant who prepped the body for autopsy noticed it right away, but the information didn’t reach me until hours later.”
“What information?”
“The male victim’s shirt was too small. So the back was split and pinned to the coat for presentation. It’s an old mortician’s trick. Funeral homes are often given clothing for the public viewing that has actually become too small. So they split the back open to give it room. The killer wasn’t taking chances on our powers of observation. He made sure there was no way this could be mistaken for anything else.”
“Like the accident scene as a whole,” Lynch said. “None of this was ultimately meant to fool anyone. This was all for your benefit, Kendra.”
Dr. Ross leaned toward her. “Your turn. How did you know?”
“The other night, I noticed that both victims’ fingernails had snagged fine threads from the clothing they were wearing.”
“You didn’t mention that before,” Lynch said.
“I wasn’t sure if it meant anything. But it’s a bit unusual when it’s the fingers on both hands of both victims.”
“I noticed that,” Dr. Ross said. “But I’m embarrassed to say that it didn’t lead me to the answer that you found. So you think that the clothing on both corpses was changed?”
Kendra nodded. “When we put on shirts and jackets, we move our fingers in the sleeves to navigate past the fabric. The dead, of course, can’t do that. Their fingers get caught at every twist and turn, and their nails snag at the threads. This couple was killed, then their clothes were changed.”
Lynch grimaced. “Who the hell would do something like that?”