Jill didn’t know if she was awake or dreaming. It looked as though there was light coming through the window of her room, but she couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t be sure of anything. She could vaguely understand she was being drugged, and that a man she thought she knew kept coming into the room, whispering crazy stories in her ear while he held her. She felt his voice inside her head constantly, saw glimmers of his face, hovering, concerned. Was she sick? In a hospital? She had a momentary vision of her parents: her mother crying, her father pacing. Were they worried about her? Was the baby okay?
Her thoughts drifted away again, and she felt herself slip into the darkness. The hallucinations were becoming more complex each time the drugs were injected into her arm. Jill felt herself walking on clouds, skimming over the earth, flying through the sky. She felt the wind in her hair and it brought her joy. She knew she had died, that she was flying to heaven. She was excited, thrilled, but a little frightened. What would God be like?
She drifted higher and higher. She started passing what she knew were angels. One looked at her, a blindingly beautiful girl with flowing blond hair. Jill saw she was crying, and frowned. Angels aren’t supposed to cry. She heard the weeping then, multitudes of whimpering, sadness all around. The blond angel turned to her and reached out a hand, and Jill felt the touch in her soul. A word breezed through the air; she couldn’t make it out. She strained, but the wind took the word and cast it aside before she could grasp its meaning.
She had stopped flying and was walking on the clouds. There were thousands of lights around her, celestial fireflies flitting through her. As they surrounded her, the voices became louder and louder, and she became frightened but was unable to stop, to turn back. She realized she was entering some sort of room, and the voices quieted. There was no sound; even the wind whipping through her hair was silent. The lights became people, men and women, all shimmery and gossamer thin. The people’s mouths were moving, but no sound came out. She was terribly confused. She didn’t know heaven was going to be a silent place.
55
Sam returned to her office after finishing the autopsies of the two burn victims, popped open a Halloween-size box of Milk Duds and tossed them in her mouth. She was exhausted; there had been so much happening in the past few days that her entire schedule had been disrupted. She was thankful she had four other medical examiners on the staff; they had been dividing up the normal duties between them to keep Sam free for Taylor’s ever-growing list of bodies.
Though the sensational string of killings was getting all the media attention, there were still other people dying whom the medical examiner’s office had to process. There were death certificates to be signed, meetings to attend, and piles of paperwork to be dug through. All the regular day-to-day aspects of working in an office had been languishing from Sam’s lack of attention. Full of sugar, she reached into her in-box, pulled out the week’s accumulated stack of death certificates, and opened her Montblanc fountain pen.
She’d been working for about an hour and making actual headway when Dr. Thomas Fox, one of her youngest MEs, stuck his head in her office. “Hey, Sam, can you come down into the autopsy suite for a minute?”
Sam wasn’t taken aback; it wasn’t unusual to have requests for a second on posts. But she didn’t have the time, and asked Dr. Fox if he could round up one of the others.
“Actually, everyone is already down there. We have something you need to see on the woman pulled out of Old Hickory this morning.”
Sam felt her heart sink. She followed Dr. Fox through the biovestibule, put on a smock and grabbed gloves and a shield, and joined the group of MEs standing over the body on the table.
The woman was young, probably barely into her twenties. There was a lot of damage to the skin, and she was bloated like a distorted puppet. The standard incisions had been made, she was laid open, her breastplate was set aside, her lungs had been excised, and the typical autopsy procedures had been followed. Sam didn’t see anything obvious that would be enough to drag her away from her work.
“What’s the problem?” she snapped, instantly sorry she sounded so bitchy. No one seemed to notice.
“She didn’t drown,” Dr. Fox volunteered. “She died of ventricular fibrillation.”
“So she was dead before she went into the water. C’mon, Fox, dazzle me! You dragged me all the way down here for that?”
“Look at her liver, Sam.”
Sam looked at him long and hard. Oh shit was the only thing running through her mind. She leaned in and looked carefully at the woman’s liver, then hastily examined the rest of the organs. When she looked up, her face was ashen.
Dr. Fox explained his reasoning, though he could tell Sam had just confirmed what all of the other MEs had been speculating. “I went back and looked at the pictures and slides from the Blake and Kincaid autopsies. The organ composition and liver necrosis match. I think this woman was given aconite prior to her plunge into Old Hickory Lake.”