“Just asking.”
“Tell me. Go ahead.”
“Well, this all began in my house. The people who did this—they know that. They know where I live. And seeing what they did to this girl scares me. It makes me worry about my family. I have a wife. I have a nine-year-old daughter.”
The detective seemed to ponder this. Then he raised his brows, and when he did his eyes went a little exophthalmic. “My gut tells me they don’t have a whole lot of interest in you or your family. I mean, they might. As you said, some of them have anger management issues. And maybe if they thought you were protecting one of their girls they’d come for you. Maybe if they thought you were a witness to something. But it’s not like you’re hiding one of their girls in your guest room. It’s not like one’s hanging around your sunroom.”
“No. I don’t even have a sunroom.”
“There you go.”
Harry started to pull the sheet back over the corpse, but Richard stopped him. “Everything okay?” the pathologist asked.
“Yeah. It is. I just thought I should see her face a few seconds more. Pay my respects, I guess.” He tried to craft a similar face in his head for her father. Someone who would have wanted to walk her down an aisle and dance with her at her wedding.
“Okay.”
Her eyes were open, more blue than he had remembered. Cornflower blue. Her hair was the same almost alabaster blond. The skin, from so much time in the water, was inhumanly white and looked almost gelatinous. Blubbery, he thought. Blubbery.
“Would you pull the sheet down?” he asked.
“Really?” The pathologist sounded dubious.
“Just to her collarbone. I want…I want to see.”
“No, you don’t.” This was the detective. Richard looked up at him. He was shaking his head ever so slightly.
“I feel an obligation.”
“An obligation?”
“Yeah. I know. It’s crazy. But somewhere she has family. Or, I guess, had family.”
The pathologist glanced at the detective, and the detective shrugged. So Harry pulled the sheet down almost to the woman’s breasts, and Richard’s first thought—perhaps because they had told him how she’d been killed, perhaps because he knew, more or less, what was coming—was wonder that the head had remained attached to the body. He saw only the spinal cord and a single rope of muscle between her collarbone and her jaw. It was like a Halloween skeleton.
“Those are posterior neck muscles,” the pathologist was saying, pointing with two fingers. “They severed the carotid artery and the jugular vein, which is all it would have taken to kill her. But then they cut all the way through the larynx. And then some. There would have been more tissue left, but it washed away.”
“So they killed her the way she killed one of them?”
“Apparently,” the detective said. “But later this morning we’ll do an autopsy and confirm that’s the cause of death. It probably was. No evidence of bullet wounds. But these guys will check. Do a toxicology report. The usual.”
Harry pulled the sheet back over the girl and leaned against a Formica counter.
“What happens to her body after that?” Richard asked.
This time it was the detective who looked at Harry. The pathologist arched his eyebrows and coughed once into his elbow. “Autumn allergies,” he said, apologizing. “No idea why they get to me even in here.” Then: “We’ll keep her on ice for a bit. Just in case.”
“In case you actually find a family member?”
“That’s right.”
“But we won’t,” the detective added. “Hart Island. That’s where we bury the anonymous. It’s in the Bronx. A couple of inmates from Rikers will handle it.”
“Any news on the other girl?” Richard asked.
“The other girl from your party?”
“Wasn’t my party,” he said, correcting the detective. He hoped he hadn’t sounded as defensive in reality as he had in his head.
“Sorry. The party at your house,” the detective agreed. “We haven’t found her yet. With any luck, her body will wash up, too.”
From the moment Richard had confirmed that the girl on the slab was Sonja, he had failed to consider that Alexandra might be dead, too. In his relief, the notion had been vanquished from his mind. When he had asked about Alexandra just now, he had meant, Any news on her whereabouts? Any leads where she might be hiding? And so the possibility—so likely in the detective’s opinion—that her body was decomposing in the East River hit Richard like a slap. Of course. Of course, it was in the East River. They’d most certainly killed her, too. For the second time since he had walked into the morgue, he thought he might be sick. The world went fuzzy. He gulped a little burbling acid back down his throat.
“You need some water?”
It was Harry. Richard blinked and breathed. He saw the pathologist’s hand on his arm, but he had to look there to feel it.