“CSU tech found the container in the freezer. Bought it in for us to test.”
“How can you be sure it’s a spleen?”
“I have the plate zipped up in the frig if you want to take a look,” he said. “Wenhoff’s doing the autopsies later today. He’ll make the final determination but I’m pretty sure it’s a spleen.”
“It doesn’t make sense?”
“You mean mixing Dutch and French?”
She rolled her eyes at him. He grinned, pleased with himself.
“Killers have done stranger things,” he told her.
“The scene was chaotic. He improvised. Used electrical cords from a couple of lamps at the scene to tie their hands and feet. I’m guessing he took a knife from their kitchen to slit their throats. Doesn’t seem like the type of guy who’d know where the spleen was let alone expertly extract it.”
“Expertly?”
“I saw the two bodies. Other than slitting their throats he didn’t carve them up. A spleen isn’t something you slice open a body and accidentally pull out. It sits under your rib cage tucked in at the upper left part of the abdomen. And it’s actually toward the back.”
Ganza was staring at her and bobbing his head. “Interesting,” he said.
He pulled off his latex gloves and washed his hands, drying them as he headed for the refrigerator in the corner. For a second she thought he was going to pull out the bagged plate, but thankfully he grabbed a couple cans of Diet Pepsi instead.
He handed one to Maggie and popped the tab of his, guzzling it. It used to freak her out that he kept his lunch and his stash of Diet Pepsis in the same refrigerator that housed the specimens from crime scenes. When he wasn’t looking she wiped down the can. Maybe it did still freak her out a bit.
“Here’s one for you,” Ganza said. “Maybe the spleen doesn’t even belong to either of these two victims.”
“He doesn’t bring rope to tie them up. He uses a knife he finds in their kitchen but he remembers to bring the spleen he cut out of someone else?”
“Again, I remind you – we have seen stranger things.”
Chapter 15
Washington, D.C.
Katie had no answers for them. Instead, she shut down. Gwen saw it coming. Even expected it, but she had needed to ask that question anyway.
In medicine, they called it “the critical hour.” In criminal investigations, they called it “the first 48 hours.” If investigators don't have a lead, a suspect or an arrest within forty-eight hours, their chances of solving the case were cut in half. And with eyewitnesses it was even more important to capture their account while it was still fresh and not manipulated by hearsay or second-guessing.
Cunningham insisted they let Katie rest. She actually looked interested in the chicken noodle soup and her grilled cheese sandwich. A nurse was with her when they left the room.
Cunningham stopped to talk to the uniformed deputy stationed outside the door. He called him by name. She heard the man ask if the girl had told them anything yet. Cunningham shook his head then offered to bring the man something from the hospital cafeteria.
As they got on the elevator Cunningham explained to her that the Warren County sheriff had volunteered his deputies to watch over the girl. The investigation was too complex for the county sheriff’s department handle, but he and his men had insisted they would contribute even if it meant driving to D.C. to sit in the hospital hallway.
It wasn’t the first time Gwen had seen such cooperation. Usually it was the other way around – a battle of jurisdictions.
“You must be exhausted,” he told her when they finally settled in at a table in the corner. The cafeteria was almost empty except for two doctors at the opposite end. It was between breakfast and lunch but Cunningham had convinced the grill cook to scramble some eggs and throw on some bacon. Now he put Gwen’s plate down in front of her and she saw that he had also grabbed a handful of the tiny grape jelly containers for her toast.
Maybe it was simply a coincidence. Maybe grape was all they had but the last time they worked together and had breakfast at Quantico’s cafeteria he had teased her about slathering so much grape jelly on her toast.
Silly of her to even be thinking he’d remembered that.
“You believe she saw something,” Cunningham said. Not a question. He was looking for confirmation of what he already believed.
“How else would she know he fell in the river?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking. So is she blocking it out?”
“Delaney said that she may have spent as many as three days in that storm cellar?”
He nodded.
“The mental shock, the physical toll on her body…she might not remember right away.”
“I hate to press you but how long? Are we talking hours? Days?”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
He nodded, removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.
“Her father was shot in the back,” he told her. “Probably at the river’s edge.”