“You lie. This number all bullshit. I need to go inside and see him now,” he said.
I could see the four cops stationed along the breezeway that runs from the rear exit of the Hall of Justice past the ME’s office and out to the street. Could they see me?
I told the Asian man again that I was sorry and to please call the central number I had given him, but he was radiating fury, cursing me in his own language. I thought he was going to take a swing at me.
I was prepared to throw him to the ground and cuff him if he got physical, when Inspector Monty McAllister broke from the breezeway detail and came toward me. He was big. Very fit.
“You need assistance, Sergeant?” he asked as he let me pass through the cordon.
“Thanks, McAllister.”
“No problem.”
Three more men got out of the BMW and came toward us.
I kept walking. Claire was waiting for me at the ambulance bay. As I reached her, I heard shouts at my back: McAllister’s crew threatening to put the Asian men under arrest.
Claire reached out her arms to me and brought me inside. We held on to each other.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “And I never want to see anything like this again.”
CHAPTER 28
IT WAS ABOUT 6 p.m. when I followed my best friend into the morgue and saw the double row of sheet-covered gurneys lining the stainless steel–clad room.
“I’ve got sixteen decedents here, all crash victims,” Claire said. “We’re officially full up, but we took on some overflow. Got six people in there,” she said, lifting her chin toward the autopsy suite.
“How are you holding up?”
“OK, considering that this is the most exhausting night of my life. Most of these victims don’t have ID. I’ve got a three-year-old with no name. Hope I can tag him tonight.”
Dr. Germaniuk, the seasoned on-call pathologist and Claire’s backup doc, was sliding a body into a drawer and three sweaty techs were cleaning up, setting up a body for her next autopsy.
Claire called out, “Dr. G. I’m gonna take a fifteen-minute break, OK?”
“Take twenty,” he said.
I followed Claire along the hallway to her office and she shut the door behind us. She took her desk chair and I dropped down hard into the seat across from her. Claire had made this room as homey as possible, meaning only passably.
A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on her desk, a few finger paintings were under the glass desktop, and framed photos hung on the wall behind Claire: her friends in the Women’s Murder Club and snapshots of her family. Her husband, Edmund. Her two grown-up sons. Her little girl, Rosie.
My eyes got stuck on the baby.
Claire’s eyes were on me. “Talk to me,” she said.
“Richie and I were tasked with escorting kids off school buses today,” I said. “The buses came up to a side entrance to Mills-Peninsula Medical. The parents were behind police lines and crazy with fear. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do, you know? They wanted to rush the buses.
“We had to get those tiny terrified, traumatized kids into the building, make sure they didn’t need emergency care. We got their names. Gave them water. Then we tried to match the kids’ names to the list of parents storming the barricades.
“When we had a match, Highway Patrol would call out the name over a megaphone. Rich and I would escort these five-year-olds outside into this freakin’ mob scene of moms and dads screaming at the child, ‘Do you know my daughter? Did you see my little boy?’
“We had all of the one-at-a-time parent-and-child reunions. Oh, my God, Claire. Each and every time a scraped-up little kid with ripped clothes broke away from me and started running toward loving arms, I thought my heart was going to blow through my chest.”
I had to stop speaking. Claire reached across her desk and grabbed my hand.
I said, “I kept thinking about Julie. How can I protect my own daughter when the world is like this?”
There was a long silence as we pondered the imponderable. Then Claire asked me, “Any word from Joe?”
I shook my head.
“What the fuck has happened to him? How could he not call me? He has to have a good reason, right, Claire? I have to trust that he would call me if he could. But what if he’s hurt? Or dead? No one is going to look for my missing husband in the thick of all this.”
Claire murmured comforting words. “He’s OK. He has a reason, sure. He’ll call soon.”
I looked up at my friend through the tears in my eyes. “I have to get home,” I said. “You haven’t said why you called.”
Claire said, “Right.” She opened a file drawer, took out a small sheaf of paper, and put it down on the desk facing me.