“All right, all right, then . . .” Heat filled Lauren in on her morning surprise: Rook’s triumphant return to Gotham to celebrate the completion of his assignment—a celebration that he had not included her in—and to add insult to injury, he still hadn’t even called to say he was back.
“Ouch.” Lauren’s brow furrowed. “What do you think that’s about? You don’t think he . . .” She stopped herself and shook her head.
“What?” said Nikki. “Hooked up with someone else? You can say it. Don’t you think I’ve already wondered that?” Nikki cleared away some dark thoughts. “Left long enough, you imagine all sorts of things, Laur. And then a month later you open the newspaper and see them come true.” She came off the wall and stood straight. “Enough. He’s back. We’ll sort it all out.” Her doubt was unspoken but loud. “Happy for you and Ochoa, though.”
That brought Lauren up short. And then she smiled. Of course there was no hiding her romance from Nikki. “Yeah, it’s good with me and Miguel.”
As they both walked to the door, Nikki said, “I could learn to hate you, you know.”
* * *
Two other medical examiners had customers on the first and third tables and, as Nikki entered the autopsy room, she silently repeated the mantra she had learned from Lauren on her rookie visit years ago. “Breathe through your mouth, it’ll trick your brain.” And, as always, Heat thought, almost . . . but not quite.
“A few hard-and-fast findings and then a few anomalies to show you,” said ME Parry as they approached Graf’s body.
“Time of death window turns out to be as thought. Eight to ten. I’d call it closer to the late end of that.”
“TOD could be nine-thirty?”
“Ish.” She curled the page around the top of her clipboard, exposing supine and prone templates of a human body on which she had made notations. “Marks and indicators. Already covered the eyeballs, the neck, here and here.” She indicated each with her pen as she shared with Heat. “Multiple abrasions and contusions. Painful but none fatal. No broken bones. All pretty much consistent with the B and D experience.”
Nikki was starting to think this may have been a session gone wild, after all, but kept her mind open.
“Three little discoveries worth testing for any significance,” said the ME. She led Heat across the room to one of the storage cabinets. She slid the glass door aside and took one of the blue cardboard evidence buckets off the shelf. Nikki remembered how, after his first visit, Rook saw one and said he’d never buy a bucket of chicken again. Lauren took a small plastic vial out of the bucket with “GRAF” on the bar code and gave it to Nikki. “See that speck?”
The detective held it up to the light. In the bottom of the container was a dark spot about the size of a bacon bit. “Found that under a fingernail,” Parry continued. “Under a microscope it looks like a piece of leather, but it doesn’t match the leather on the wrist restraints or the posture collar.” She returned it to the bucket. “Gonna lab that puppy.”
She then walked Nikki down to the dehumidifying closet where they placed victims’ clothes to dry, to preserve DNA for testing. Sheets of brown paper separated bloodstained clothes that hung there from numerous victims. At the nearest end, Heat could see Graf’s black clothing and his white Roman collar. “Funny thing about that collar. There’s a tiny bloody smear on it. Odd, considering that for all the abrasions on him, no skin was broken above his shoulders or on his hands.”
“Right,” said Nikki considering the possibilities. “That could be blood from an assailant, or killer.”