Did it feel like Angie?
The numbness inside of Will had never really gone away. He felt nothing looking at this woman. He noticed the things he would notice on any case. Domestic homicide. Battery. Assault. Mouth open. Teeth broken. Lips chapped and swollen like too-ripe fruit. Her eyelids were thick, the consistency of wet bread. Blue veins and red arteries shot through almost translucent skin. Her cheek had been sliced with a very sharp knife or a razor. The skin flapped back, hanging open like a page in a book. He saw tissue, sinew, stark white of bone.
He looked at her hands. They were balled together between her bent knees. The heat had curled her fingers. Decomposition had cracked open the skin. Clear liquid seeped out from the joints of her knuckles. The ring around her finger had broken apart.
Angie’s wedding ring.
Green plastic with a bright yellow sunflower. Will had wasted three quarters on a bubble gum machine before the ring had come out. The dare had been that Angie would marry him if it took less than four quarters. She never backed down from a dare. She had married him. She had lasted ten days before he came home from work and found that all of her clothes were gone.
Will opened his mouth. He breathed in and out.
Amanda asked, ‘Will?’
Will shook his head. This wasn’t right. Someone had planted the ring. He would know instinctively if this was Angie. He stood up. He said, ‘It’s not her.’
Faith asked, ‘What about the ring?’
Will kept shaking his head. More looks were being exchanged. They clearly thought he was in denial, but they were wrong. Maybe when he was outside looking at the bloodied car, hearing Amanda run down the evidence, he had let himself think it might be Angie, but now that he was in the same room with this body, this stranger, he was certain that she was still alive.
It was what Sara said. He did not feel the hollowness. He did not feel an absence of the heart.
Charlie said, ‘I have a mobile fingerprint scanner.’
‘Her finger pads are cracked open. It’ll be hard to get a print.’
‘We can still try, but we’ll have to go upstairs to get a signal.’
‘She’s in full rigor.’
Will looked at the woman’s face again. It was like trying to read a book. He could see pieces but not the whole. The eyelashes were clumped together. The lip was torn apart. The jaw was set, roped like a cable on a suspension bridge. Rigor mortis. The coagulation of muscle proteins. It started in the eyelids, neck, jaw. All the muscles of the body stiffened, fixing the corpse in place.
Faith asked, ‘That means she’s been dead for three to four hours?’
‘Longer,’ Sara said, but she didn’t say how much longer.
Amanda asked, ‘How do we get fingerprints when her hands are curled?’
‘You’ll have to break the fingers.’
‘Would it be easier if she were on her back?’
‘I’ll need help turning her.’
Will walked away from them to the other side of the room. The elderly man was still lying on the gurney. Will tried to figure out the machines. Yellow fluid lurched around inside the canister. An orange tube came out of the bottom. There was some kind of pump working. He heard the motor turning, the shhh of a bellow moving air. One liquid being pushed out. Another liquid being pushed in. He followed the tube to the man’s carotid. The liquid passed through a heavy-gauge needle. There was another tube dropped over the side of the table, resting on the rusted edge of a floor drain.
Snap.
Like a twig being broken.
Snap.
Will kept his back to them. He didn’t want to know who broke open the fingers.
Snap.
‘Okay,’ Charlie said. ‘I think that’s good.’
‘Her fingers are a mess,’ Sara said. ‘I don’t think the scanner will be able to pick up the ridges.’
‘Try,’ Amanda told them.
There was a rustling sound, a click, three rapid beeps. The mobile fingerprint scanner. Biometrics. There was an injection-molded dock with a 30-pin iPhone connector. The dock had a silver pad. The pad scanned the fingerprint. An app on the phone processed the scan into a 256-bit grayscale, 508 dpi image, then transmitted the data to the GBI’s Live Scan servers, where the print was compared against the hundreds of thousands of prints stored in the system.
The only thing required was the dock and a phone with a signal.
Charlie was holding both in his hands as he walked toward the vestibule. He told Will, ‘It’s iffy because of the damage, but we might be able to get a hit.’
Will didn’t know why this information was directed specifically to him. He looked at his watch. Violent crimes tended to peak around ten p.m. The servers would be processing thousands of requests. Even on a slow day, the results could take anywhere from five minutes to twenty-four hours, and then the GBI required that the prints had to be peer-reviewed by a group of human beings who could reach a consensus on whether or not the computer match met the threshold for a legal level of certainty.
Faith said, ‘Sara?’
Something about her tone of voice made Will turn around.
Faith was standing at the foot of the gurney. She was looking down. The dead woman’s feet were raised off the table, frozen by rigor mortis. Her hands between her knees had opened her legs and her open legs gave a clear view of what was between them.
Rape, Will thought. The woman who could not be Angie had not just been strangled and beaten and stabbed. Sara was going to tell him that she had been raped.
‘Will?’ Sara waited for him to look at her. ‘Did Angie ever have a child?’
He couldn’t understand the question.
Sara said, ‘She has an episiotomy scar.’
Will had never heard the word before. ‘From an assault?’
‘From having a baby.’
He shook his head. Angie had been pregnant before, but not by Will. ‘She had an abortion eight years ago.’
Faith said, ‘That’s not how you get the scar.’
Sara said, ‘It’s a surgical incision made in the perineum during a vaginal birth.’
Faith translated, ‘They cut you open down there so the baby can come out.’
Will still didn’t understand. It was like looking at the dead woman’s face. He recognized the words, but not the sense.
Sara asked, ‘Does your chest feel tight?’
Will looked down. He was rubbing his chest again.
Faith said, ‘He wasn’t feeling well before.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Will said. ‘I don’t think it’s her.’
Sara was pushing him backward. The double doors opened. They stuttered closed. They were in the vestibule. Will was sitting at the metal desk. All three of them were hovering over him like in his worst kind of nightmare.
Sara said, ‘Take some deep breaths for me.’
Amanda said, ‘I have some Xanax.’ There was an enamel pill case in her hand. Pink base, roses on the lid. It was the sort of thing an old lady would use for her sniffing salts.
Sara said, ‘Put this under your tongue.’
Will complied without even thinking. The pill tasted bitter. He could feel it melting under his tongue. Saliva filled his mouth. He had to swallow.
‘It’ll take a few minutes.’ Sara started rubbing his back like he was a kid at the hospital. Will didn’t like it. He hated being fussed over.
He leaned over, putting his head between his knees, pretending like he was dizzy. Sara rubbed his back some more. He palmed the pill.
‘Just breathe.’ Sara’s fingers went to his wrist. She was taking his pulse. ‘You’re okay.’
Will sat up.
Sara was watching his every move. Amanda still held the open pill case in her hand. Faith had disappeared.
Sara asked, ‘Okay?’
‘I don’t think it’s her,’ Will repeated, but if anything, saying the words a second time made him question whether or not they were true. ‘She never had a baby.’