Faith asked, ‘Could it have been a trunk?’
‘I don’t got, like, radar ears, bitch. It was just lots of things slamming shut on a car.’ She looked exasperated. She didn’t like Faith asking questions. ‘Anyway, then there’s this whoosh! like I don’t know what. Big whoosh. And I look up at the windows—now the windows are blacked out, right, but I see these flames shooting up like a Viking funeral. Just . . .’ She waved her arm around. ‘All over the place.’ She dropped her hand. ‘That’s it. The car pulled away.’
Amanda asked, ‘Did you see anyone else?’
‘Nah, that’s the truth. Just the bitch and the chick and the fire.’
‘No children?’
‘What the hell would a kid be doing there? It was the middle of the night. Should be tucked up in bed.’
Amanda asked, ‘You didn’t go upstairs to see what the first woman did up there?’
Jane licked her lips. ‘Well, I might’a. Just out of curiosity.’
Amanda rolled her hand, indicating she could continue.
‘There was a dude up there. Not dead, but just as good as. The light was better on account of the windows are right across from the balcony.’
‘And?’
‘Bastard was a fucking whale. Sleeping real sound, but like I said—not dead. But close. You could tell. Or at least I could. I seen some people die in my time. Pissed himself already. Had a doorknob in his neck. Like that guy from TV. You remember that show?’ She snapped her fingers twice, like in The Addams Family.
Will provided, ‘Lurch, but I think you mean Frankenstein.’
‘That’s right.’ She winked at him. ‘I knew you were the smart one, honey.’
Amanda said, ‘I’m waiting to hear where the coke came in.’
‘Dead guy’s jacket pocket.’ She patted her chest. ‘If I squatted down, stretched my arm real far, I could take it without getting blood all over me. Two fucking grams. I ain’t seen that much blow since I was a kid.’
‘So you went across the street because . . .’
‘I couldn’t stay in there with that guy dying. That’s just weird. And who knew if the bitch would come back? God damm, she already left and came back once.’ Jane started breaking off pieces of Styrofoam from the cup. ‘So I moseyed back across the street, partied until the sun came up. Then the cops rolled in, so I was like, shit, I better cheese it up the stairs. Once I started climbing, I couldn’t stop until I got to the top. That blow was fucking pure, man. One hundred percent.’
Will saw Faith roll her eyes. Every dealer said his blow was pure.
Amanda asked, ‘Is that it? You’re not leaving anything out?’
‘Hell, it don’t seem like it, but you never know, right?’
Amanda typed on her BlackBerry. ‘I’m going to have another agent take your statement. He’ll bring a sketch artist who will talk you through the night, try to jog your memory.’
‘That seems like a lot of trouble to go through.’
‘Consider it part of your get-out-of-jail-free card.’ Amanda motioned for Will and Faith to follow her out of the room. She walked a few feet down from Jane’s room, stopping in front of the nurses’ station.
Faith asked, ‘Do we believe her?’
Amanda said, ‘Charlie found a bloodstain on the lower level. He thought it came from a nosebleed.’
Will said, ‘Angie could know how to stage a crime scene.’
‘I’m trying to wrap my head around this.’ Faith tried to talk it out. ‘Somehow Jo bled out in the room upstairs, then she made her way to the bottom floor, where she collapsed. Angie leaves for some reason. She comes back for some reason. She drags Jo to her Monte Carlo, blows up Dale’s Kia, then drives off again?’ She added, ‘And leaves her own daughter marinating in her trunk for six hours?’
Will stifled his impulse to say that Angie wouldn’t do something like that.
Amanda said, ‘I’m getting a lot of pushback on that warrant for Figaroa’s telephone. We got the street surveillance approved, but just barely. No one has left the Figaroa house except Laslo. He was sent to McDonald’s for breakfast. He bought three cups of coffee and three breakfast platters.’
‘Three, not four, which means that they didn’t get anything for Anthony.’ Faith said, ‘Let me get my notes. I need to talk this out again.’
Will didn’t want to listen to another recap.
He looked past Faith’s shoulder, pretending that he was listening. He watched the nurse typing something onto a tablet computer. All of the patient files at Grady were digitized. The whiteboard behind the nurses’ station was still low-tech. They hand-wrote patient names and updated their status so that they could keep track of the ward. As Will watched, the nurse went to the board and erased Jane Doe 1. She wrote in a new name with a red marker. All caps, which was easier for him to read. And it helped that he had seen the name several times before.
He said, ‘Delilah Palmer.’
Amanda asked, ‘What about her?’
He pointed to the board.
The nurse had overheard him. She explained, ‘Domestic abuse. They can’t find the boyfriend. She walked into the ER with a knife sticking out of her chest.’
‘When?’ Faith asked.
‘Early Monday, right before my shift.’
Will said, ‘I thought we checked the hospitals for stabbing victims.’
‘We didn’t.’ Faith sounded furious. She told the nurse, ‘Olivia, the patient’s been Jane Doe One since I was here last night. What changed?’
‘The orderly checked her clothes before he took them down to the incinerator. He found her driver’s license.’ Olivia capped the marker. ‘She’s still in an induced coma, so you can’t interview her. Anyway, I thought this was being handled by the APD.’
Amanda asked, ‘Who caught the case?’
‘I can look it up here.’ Olivia referenced the tablet computer. Her face broke into a smile. ‘Oh, it was Denny. Denny Collier.’
TWELVE
‘Subarachnoid hemorrhage,’ Gary Quintana said. ‘That sounds like spiders.’
‘It’s a spidery area,’ Sara told him. ‘But basically it means she had bleeding in that part of the brain.’
‘Oh, wow. Weird.’ Gary continued reading Josephine Figaroa’s preliminary autopsy report. Whatever Amanda had said to the young man yesterday morning had clearly left a mark. His shirtsleeves were rolled down. He wore a knit tie in place of his heavy gold necklace. Even his ponytail had been neutered. Instead of jutting proudly from the back of his head, the hair had been gathered into a neat bun.
She was sad to see the ponytail go.
‘Okay.’ Gary read aloud from the conclusion. ‘Cause of death is an epidural hemorrhage. What’s that?’
‘It’s another type of intracranial bleed.’ Sara could tell he wanted to know more. ‘She experienced an external trauma to her head. The skull fractured, tearing her middle meningeal artery, which branches off the external carotid and helps supply blood to the brain. Blood filled the space between the dura mater and the skull. The skull holds a fixed volume, meaning it can’t expand. All of that extra blood put too much pressure on her brain.’
‘What happens when that happens?’
‘In general, the patient loses consciousness transiently. At the time of injury, they’re typically knocked out for a few minutes. Then they wake up and exhibit a normal level of consciousness. That’s why these bleeds are so dangerous. There’s a severe headache, but they’re lucid until the bleed progresses enough to shut down the brain. Left untreated, they slip into a coma and die.’
‘Wow.’ He looked at the gurney that held Figaroa’s body. They were standing in the hallway outside the APD morgue, which was located in the sub-basement of Grady Hospital. The gurney was pushed up against the wall, awaiting transport. Thanks to a batch of bad meth, the medical examiner had a full house.
Gary said, ‘She sure went through some hell.’
‘She did.’
He returned to the report. ‘What about “fracture of the cervical vertebrae?” That’s the neck, right? That sounds really bad, too.’
‘It is. She would’ve likely been paralyzed.’