Chapter Three

The county justice center was busy with the typical Sunday traffic—detectives dropping off evidence, girlfriends bailing out boyfriends, and bleary-eyed deputies heading home after a long night of traffic stops. After waiting in line to get a visitor’s badge, Nicole took the elevator down and navigated through the windowless labyrinth where the medical examiner worked.

“You looking for David?”

Nicole turned around to see Cynthia bustling toward her. The clerk had a clipboard in one hand and a giant coffee mug in the other.

“Is he in yet?”

“Honey, he’s been in. I don’t think he went home.” She stopped at the big metal desk and set her mug on a stack of files. “Y’all got a case today?”

“Drug OD,” Nicole told her. “It came in last night.”

“Whew. We got flooded last night.” She set her clipboard on the desk and ran a glittery purple fingernail down the list. “Must be the full moon. People actin’ crazy. You’re with Lost Beach PD, right?”

“Right.”

She flipped a page. “Scheduled for seven a.m. but... I think he just finished.”

“He did?”

“I saw him in the hallway a minute ago.”

Nicole muttered a curse and headed for the autopsy suite.

“Upstairs,” Cynthia told her. “He was on his way to the lab.”

“Thanks.”

Nicole retraced her steps to the elevator bank. How had David finished already? He would have had to start at five. Had he actually spent the night? That seemed extreme, even for a workaholic triathlete who operated on very little sleep.

She hit the elevator button. Irritation roiled inside her as she waited. She and David still hadn’t had a live conversation. After reading his text message last night, she’d let his calls go to voicemail. Maybe she should just get over it. He was obviously buried with work. He had a high-pressure job.

But she did, too, and that didn’t stop her from communicating with people and showing basic common courtesy. She hadn’t heard from him until eight last night, a full hour after he was supposed to meet her. And it had been a text message. Just thinking about it pissed her off, and she jabbed the call button again.

The doors slid open, and David stepped out.

Nicole froze.

“Hi.” He frowned. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for the post.”

He wore blue scrubs that matched his eyes and well-worn running shoes. He rested his hands on his hips and stared down at her with an intense look.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

“No biggie.”

His frown deepened, as though he knew she was lying.

“I caught a double traffic fatality right as I was walking out the door,” he said.

“I know. I read your text.”

He glanced around, then touched her elbow and guided her toward an alcove with a pair of water fountains. She shook off his hand.

“I’m really sorry, Nicole. There was nothing I could do.”

She tipped her head to the side. “Well, that’s not completely true. You could have called me.”

“I tried. You didn’t pick up.”

“I mean before I waited around at the restaurant feeling like an idiot.”

“I’m sorry. By the time I got free—”

She held up her hand. “You know what? Forget it.”

“No. Listen. By the time I got a minute to call you—”

“I said forget it.” Her cheeks flushed, and she pictured Cynthia down the hall, eavesdropping on every word.

“Nicole.” He took her hand in his. “I sincerely apologize.”

He gazed down at her with those serious blue eyes, looking genuinely sorry.

The thing was, she knew that he was sorry. Their first date together, they’d spent the whole night bonding over their mutual frustration with their crazy work schedules and lack of time for a personal life. He’d told her he’d had this whole epiphany about it on his forty-third birthday, and he’d resolved to change things.

“Will you let me make it up to you?”

She rolled her eyes. He’d said that last time.

“Please?”

“I’ll think about it.” She tugged her hand away. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about this. I’m here about a case.”

His remorseful look vanished, replaced by cool professionalism.

“The benzodiazepine overdose.”

Nicole didn’t know the clinical term for it. “She had a bottle of pills spilled all over her car. Did you finish the postmortem?”

“Yes.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, was it Xanax? Brady wants a rush on the tox report. If there was fentanyl in her system, we need to know sooner rather than later.”

He gazed at her for a long moment. “Come with me.”

“Why?”

“I need to show you something.”

He walked away, and Nicole’s stomach filled with dread as she followed him down the cinder-block hallway. They passed Cynthia’s desk—which was empty, thankfully—and he led her around the corner into a long corridor with garish fluorescent lighting. The temperature dropped noticeably as they turned another corner and neared the autopsy suite.

He stopped beside a door and entered a passcode.

Nicole’s stomach flip-flopped. “I thought you were finished?”

“I am. I want to show you something.”

Biting back a curse, she followed him into a narrow room with a row of stainless steel sinks on one side. He took a surgical mask from a box by the door and handed it to her before grabbing one for himself.

Nicole followed his lead and put on the mask, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“Here.” He turned and dabbed gel on her mask. Vicks. It was supposed to combat the smell, but instead it brought back memories of the last time she’d been here, and her stomach started to churn.

He held the door for her and ushered her into the exam room. The back of her neck began to sweat, despite the refrigerator-like temperature.

The room smelled of death and disinfectant. Two long metal tables stood in the center of the space. The far table was empty, but on the closest table was an ominous lump covered by a gray sheet.

Nicole looked at the room next door, separated by a big glass window. A couple of people in scrubs were hunched over an exam table under a bright white light. They had a radio on, and the faint sound of pop music carried through the wall.

Nicole turned her attention back to David as he approached the table. Bile rose in the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down. The mound on the table looked so flat, hardly big enough to be a full-grown woman.

“You okay?”

She glanced up and nodded.

He reached for the top of the sheet, and she looked away.

Skip breakfast. Maybe you won’t puke.

She had skipped breakfast, but now her skin felt clammy, and the contents of her stomach were about to come up.

“Shit,” she muttered.

“I know you hate this.”

She clenched her teeth and eased closer as David adjusted the covering around the body, exposing only a slender white arm.

Nicole examined the inert limb, trying not to think about how it was attached to a dead body. A dead person who had recently been cut open, and dissected, and stitched back up again.

“Nicole?”

Her gaze snapped to David’s. His eyes bored into hers.

“You see it?”

She looked down at the arm again and tried to block out everything—the cold, the stench, the obscenely upbeat music coming from next door.

Aubrey Lambert had a delicate green vine winding around her right forearm. The tattoo ended just below her elbow with a monarch butterfly that looked like it was tangled in the leaves.

David traced his gloved finger over the back of her arm, below the shoulder. “See?” He twisted the arm, and Nicole’s stomach jolted.

“What am I looking at?”

“The contusion. See it?” He tapped a pale reddish blotch no bigger than a pencil eraser.

“You mean the bruise? What about it?”

“Here.” He reached behind him and grabbed a magnifying glass off the counter. He handed it to her and then adjusted the overhead light. “Look.”

Intrigued now, Nicole bent closer, studying the waxy white skin through the glass. In the center of the blotch was a dark brown dot.

“Twenty-three-gauge needle.”

“So... she was shooting up when she ODed?”

He glanced at the ceiling, clearly impatient. “Nicole, look.”

She looked again, taking note of the awkward way he’d positioned her arm.

“That’s a weird angle for an injection.”

His eyes brightened. “Exactly.”

A cold feeling swept over her.

“Most people are right-handed,” she said. “But even if she wasn’t, this would be a nearly impossible angle for a self-injection. She’d have to be a contortionist.”

“Right.”

“Which means someone else injected her.”

She watched David’s eyes over the mask as he carefully tucked the arm beside the body and re-covered it.

“In my professional opinion, yes, that’s precisely what happened.”

“So, you’re telling me—”

“I’m telling you what I’m putting in my report,” he said. “The manner of death is homicide.”

Emmet walked into the bullpen and went straight for the break room. He had a monster headache today. He fed some money into the vending machine, and a Red Bull thunked down.

“You’re late.”

He turned around to see Denise in the doorway. She wore her Sunday earrings, which looked like little silver hubcaps.

“How was church?” he asked, grabbing his drink.

“Why don’t you come sometime and find out?”

“I will.”

Denise taught Sunday school at Lost Beach Unitarian, where her husband was the assistant pastor.

Emmet popped the top on his drink and took a long swig.

“You’d better get in there,” Denise said. “They started ten minutes ago.”

“What, the staff meeting? What’s the big deal?”

Her eyebrows tipped up. “You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“The death at Lighthouse Point. The ME said it’s a homicide.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded.

Fuck.

Emmet pulled out his phone and checked it. Why hadn’t someone told him? Specifically Nicole. The autopsy was hours ago, and she should have called him by now if there were any surprises. They made a point of keeping each other in the loop.

He drained the drink and pitched the can. Then he grabbed a notepad off his desk and entered the conference room, where he found the chief and every other detective seated around the table. Even Adam McDeere was there, and he hadn’t even officially made detective yet.

Emmet took one of the few empty chairs and looked at the screen on the wall. He recognized one of Miranda’s photographs from last night. It was a picture of the Subaru taken from the inside passenger side. Emmet had been crouched beside her, shining a flashlight through the windshield when she’d taken the shot.

“So, how do you explain the writing, then?” Owen asked.

Emmet glanced across the table. Owen sounded testy, and he had his arms folded over his chest. Maybe he believed the ME had gotten it wrong.

“Yeah, I thought she wrote ‘Goodbye’ across the inside of the windshield in lipstick,” Adam said, gesturing at the photograph. “You’re saying someone else wrote it?”

“I didn’t say that at all,” Nicole replied, clearly defensive. “I’m just sharing what Dr.Bauhaus told me. Which is that—in his professional opinion—this death is a homicide.” She turned to Adam. “And anyway, it was ChapStick, not lipstick.”

“Same difference,” Owen said. “It reads like a suicide note. You know, ‘Goodbye, world’ or something like that.”

“Well, maybe the message is more like ‘Goodbye, bitch’ instead of ‘Goodbye, world,’?” Nicole countered. “Maybe it was some kind of revenge killing, and the killer wrote it. Or, I don’t know, the scene was staged.”

“But it was a Xanax overdose, correct?” Owen said.

“That’s correct,” Nicole said. “According to the preliminary screening.”

Owen leaned forward now. “Well, Aubrey Lambert’s name is on the prescription bottle. Are you saying this revenge killer staged that, too?”

“I have no idea.” Nicole looked at Brady. “I’m just relaying the pathologist’s conclusion. Which is that we should be treating this as a homicide, not a suicide or an accidental overdose.”

“Based on one tiny needle mark in the back of her arm, which she could have made herself?” Owen asked. “I mean, I’ll grant you, it’s a weird angle. But we’re talking about someone who does yoga, right? Wouldn’t we expect her to be flexible?”

Nicole jutted her chin out and crossed her arms. She didn’t like people putting her on the spot. Or questioning her boyfriend’s judgment.

Emmet scanned the faces around the table. All looked skeptical, including Brady, who typically put a crapload of confidence in Dr.David Bauhaus. Everyone knew the deputy medical examiner was wicked smart.

The mood in the room got tense and quiet. No one wanted this to be a homicide investigation. They were just coming off a major case, and the entire department was running on fumes after spending the last ten weeks helping a multiagency task force close in on a sex-trafficking ring in the Rio Grande Valley. Operation Red Highway had been a major success and resulted in some high-profile arrests. But their understaffed detective squad had been working evenings and weekends, and people were tapped.

Emmet took in everyone’s expression. Owen and Adam looked cranky, Nicole looked pissed off, and Brady looked grim as the ME’s conclusion sank in.

The chief turned to Emmet.

“Glad you could join us.”

He nodded. “Sorry I’m late.”

“You talked to the family this morning? Her parents in Houston?”

Emmet nodded again. “Had a video interview with them at ten. They’re in shock.” He glanced at Nicole. “Said they can’t imagine their daughter taking her own life.”

The chief shifted his attention to the screen where the crime scene photo was displayed.

Crime scene.Emmet was already rethinking everything and wishing he could turn back the clock. He thought about the countless pieces of evidence they had already missed out on by making assumptions.

Never assume.

It was so basic. The mantra had been drilled into him, over and over, by every mentor he’d ever had, including Brady himself.

The chief studied the photo silently. He smoothed a hand over his gray buzz cut. Then he turned to Emmet.

“You’re the lead on this one.”

Emmet gave a crisp nod, despite the dread filling his stomach. “Yes, sir.”

Normally, he would jump at the chance to lead a homicide case. But this one was off to a rough start.

“Breda, you and McDeere go back to the beach,” the chief said. “Take a couple uniforms with you and do a grid search. Then we need to canvass the area. Interview joggers, walkers. All the regulars who frequent that beach.”

“Got it,” Owen said.

Brady turned to Emmet again. “Track down our witness. Take Lawson with you.” He looked at Nicole. “You got her talking yesterday. See what else she knows.”

“Will do,” Nicole said.

“What about the car?” Emmet asked.

The Subaru was a glaring problem. It had spent the night at the impound lot when it should have been at the crime lab.

Brady pushed his chair back. “I’ll handle the car.” He looked at all the faces around the table. “Let’s move quickly, people. This is now a homicide. Every hour matters, and we’re making up for lost time.”