The Hidden

Once they were gone, Meg turned to Scarlet. “Okay, so what have we got?”


“Reams of records, though I’m not sure how many of them will be pertinent. I have a favor to ask first, though,” Scarlet said.

“Sure, what?” Meg asked her.

“Help me get Nathan Kendall back down here. I really don’t like having him in the apartment.”

“The mannequin?” Meg asked.

“Of course the mannequin,” Scarlet said. “What else?”

Meg smiled. “Well, his spirit might be wandering around here, you know. And if so, you don’t want to get rid of him. The mannequin, though—yes, let’s bring it downstairs. I have to admit, he looks pretty strange hanging out by the flat-screen TV.”

*

“The bullets are in the lab, but they’re still being analyzed,” Dr. Robert E. Fuller, the ME, told Diego, Matt and Brett. “But I can tell you the basics. Handmade in a mold for an antique gun. No question about it. Handmade.”

Fuller was in his midthirties and looked as if he would be just as comfortable at a country club as he was in the morgue. Tall, fit and good-looking, he could have been an actor playing a medical examiner on TV.

But he also seemed to be competent and knowledgeable. He went over the results of both autopsies, showing them the tears in Larry Parker’s abdomen. “Looks like he was killed by someone who hunts and knows how to gut his prey,” Fuller said. “The killer didn’t remove any organs, though, just cut him open as if he was going to disembowel him.”

Candace Parker had been shot once in the chest, a fatal wound. Her heart had been nicked, and she’d bled out quickly.

“In case you’re wondering how I can be so sure about the bullets, I do frontier reenactments with some of the people from my club,” Fuller explained.

“And they were both killed with the same gun?” Matt asked. “Sorry if that sounds like a strange question, but we never assume anything. Based on the evidence the police found at the scene, it seems unlikely, but there could have been two killers.”

“No question is too strange. I just answer what I can,” the ME told them. “Same kind of bullet in both cases, and like I said, I know the official forensic analyst has to do a report, but I can tell you right now that both bullets were made from a mold older than the hills and fired from an antique Colt. I have a few in my collection, and I’m betting it was one of the army Colts, pre–Civil War. I’d even go so far as to speculate that it might have been something like an 1849 Colt pocket percussion revolver. A lot of frontiersmen had personal molds. Not only that...” He paused and shrugged. “Sorry for getting carried away. I’m just the medical examiner. You guys are the investigators.”

“We want your thoughts and opinions,” Diego assured him. “You clearly know more than we do about antique weapons, and probably more than the police techs.”

“Okay, well, like I told you, I’m a historical reenactor in my free time. Like everybody else around here, I know about Nathan Kendall. As strange as this may sound, it looks to me like someone killed the Parkers the same way Nathan Kendall and his wife were killed. Nathan was cut up before he was killed— tortured, really—like maybe the killer wanted something from him. And the woman... I think she was just in the way. Same thing with the Parkers.”

Diego had been studying the body of Candace Parker as Fuller talked. She’d been an attractive woman in her early thirties. Now it was difficult to tell exactly where the bullet had penetrated, because the Y incision had been sewn up by the time they arrived. He noticed that her legs seemed to be scratched.

“Are these wounds recent?” Diego asked.

“Those, yes, they’ll be in the report. They look like they happened as she was dragged through scrub or thorn bushes of some kind.”