Harper watches Mike peel back the girl’s skin to explore her innards. A familiar gaminess rises from the opened cadaver; the smell of dead, lifeless meat exposed to the air is not something you get used to. But it is something you can grow to stomach, ignoring it so you don’t vomit.
She looks at the captain—he’s aged in a matter of days. His eyelids hang loose, face drawn in, body sagging with exhaustion. Some of it, she knows, due in no small part to the stress of those files. Of putting his trust in her hands and hoping she does the right thing with what she finds. “Have you slept, sir?”
He smiles. It’s weak and there’s nothing in it, a truly empty gesture. “Not much.”
Mike examines the girl’s cold heart and Harper thinks: I won’t tonight.
“Can I have a word in private?” she asks, opening the door to the corridor outside. Morelli follows her out. “Sorry, I didn’t want Mike and Kara to hear.”
“Spit it out, Detective.”
“It’s the files, sir. There’s no way of protecting the men who have covered this up all these years. Stu and myself will be presenting our findings and recommending prosecution,” Harper tells him. “This could reflect badly on you, too. I thought you should know that.”
Morelli runs a hand over his face. “When bodies started showing up again, I brought you into the fold, did I not?”
“Yes sir. But if you’d presented your evidence earlier, the deaths of those two young women might’ve been avoided.”
Morelli rubs at the tired corners of his eyes. “What do you want me to say, Detective? You think I don’t know all that?”
“Sir . . .”
Morelli shakes his head. “Another time. Right now, we have a killer to apprehend. After, when the dust has settled, we can start pointing fingers at the men who have protected this town for three decades, okay? It’s easy playing the righteous card when your hands are nice and clean. Well, mine were dirty before I had a chance to start, so spare me your condemnation,” he says, storming off.
The captain’s car peels out of the parking lot. Albie and Harper let him go on ahead, not wanting to tail him the whole way. Albie starts the engine. “Doesn’t always get me like that,” he says defensively.
“Everyone gets a bit queasy now and then,” Harper says. She hasn’t felt ill at the sight of a dead body since her first corpse back when she was a newbie. Even then, she got through the experience without spewing her guts up. Albie still looks green around the gills. “You realize you’ve gotta find a way of soldiering through it, though, right?”
“I know. I find fresh air helps,” he says.
“Of course,” she says, still replaying her conversation with Morelli.
Albie backs the car out. “It’s not the smell or anything. It’s just . . . I find it hard to watch.”
“I hear you,” Harper says. “I’ve got to admit it’s never bothered me. I know the smell is there, and it’s god-awful, but I just block it out.”
It’s not just the smell . . . it’s the dehumanizing of the process. Watching another human being rendered down and filleted, little more than meat. Watching an autopsy makes you confront all the sick reality beneath the surface. An elderly woman, her wrinkled skin peeled back, the coroner’s scalpel slicing down to the bone. A young boy, so full of life and potential, stripped down to parts.
“Lucky.”
Yeah, till later, when I can’t stop thinking about them.
They head back to the station, the last of the daylight sitting out on the edges of the world, hanging in a reddish haze behind the trees. On the East Coast, the dusk is royal blue, like mist rolling out on a lake at night.
“When we get back, I’ve got something for you. CSU found a phone on her. It’s got water damage. I want you to try and get in there, see what you can pull from it.”
He cocks an eyebrow. “Not sure if I’ll be able to get anything.”
“Just give it a shot, okay? Don’t make me have to go to the asshole phone company and request their data,” Harper says.
“I can try, boss,” Albie says. He checks the mirror, changes lanes. Flexes his hands on the wheel. “You drove down to Chalmer, didn’t you?” he asks.
Harper shifts in the passenger seat. “Dead end,” she says, dismissing it. “Waste of the gas driving there.”
Albie shakes his head. “Ain’t that the way, huh?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve had luck tracking sales of DXM.”
“Not when every Tom, Dick, and Harry can go online and order it. It’s not like ketamine, which we can trace, to an extent. This crap is everywhere.”
“And readily available . . . any luck following up on Alma’s friends?” Harper asks.
“Nope. They were all pretty normal. No boyfriends that anyone knows of.”
Harper sighs. “Damn.”
“Hopefully we turn up a name for girl number three,” Albie says.
Harper thinks: girl eleven.
“Yeah. It’d be real nice to catch whoever’s behind this and put this case to bed,” Harper says. “Trouble is, I don’t think we’ll be that lucky.”
Harper walks into Captain Morelli’s office to find John Dudley sitting there.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s you.”
The corner of Dudley’s mouth lifts in what could be classified as a smile. “Last time I checked.”
She takes a seat. “Morelli running late? We were just following him from the ME’s office.”
Dudley shrugs. “Not my turn to babysit.”
They wait, the silence between them stretching out. Harper can’t stand it any longer and says something—anything—just to break it. “Hey, John? I know we don’t always see eye to eye. But you’ve been a big help on this case. Getting hold of those white supremacists.”
“Thanks. I suppose we clash sometimes. It happens. I don’t take it personally.”
It’s one of several occasions on which Dudley has surprised her. She always considered him a dick. Now she’s not so sure.
Maybe I was just a bitch for thinking it without giving the guy a chance.
“That’s good to hear,” she says.
Harper looks at the clock on the wall, ticking away, and when she turns back to him, he has a smile on his face. It should look cute, perhaps. But there’s something about it that doesn’t fit with the rest of him, as if smiling doesn’t come naturally to a man like John Dudley.
Shortly after she transferred to Hope’s Peak, Dudley made a play for Harper. They were in a car, heading to rendezvous with Stu at a crime scene. He asked her what she did outside of work. When Harper said she didn’t get out too much, he asked her if she wanted to go for a drink sometime, and before she could answer, he had his hand on her knee. Harper froze for a moment as she wrestled with what to do next. She gently lifted his hand from her leg and, in the politest terms, told Dudley she was not interested. Thank you anyway.
He didn’t take it very well—and the atmosphere between them has been frosty ever since, particularly since he caught wind that she and Stu were “seeing” each other . . .
Morelli and Stu walk in. The captain goes straight to his desk, oblivious to any atmosphere lurking between the two detectives. Stu senses it right away. He looks at Dudley, then Harper.
She gives him a look: Don’t say anything. Sit your ass down.