Dark Secrets Read online

  “Nate,” he corrected her automatically.

  “Then, call me Grace,” she returned and nodded at him, as they came to an understanding.

  She was saying there was enough here that his M.E. and the entire office might be gone before her family could mount the lawsuit. He couldn’t wait to hear what else she had to say.

  Chapter Five

  Grace took a deep breath. “Look, Jimmy actually wanted to be cremated, against my parents’ wishes. But that was his plan. So, Kevin had the right of it. He’s just not allowed to make it legal; that’s the problem.”

  “Tell me about these bigger problems…” he prompted her, and Grace felt her stomach roll for probably the fifteenth time that day. For someone used to staring decomposed bodies in the face and not having her stomach turn, this was not a good feeling.

  “Well, look here.” She pushed two photocopied reports across the table at him. “The crematorium picked him up before Grunholdt signed off on it. So any possibility of Grunholdt correcting anything that was wrong couldn’t have even happened. At the very least his body should have stayed there until that signature—” she pointed, “was collected.”

  Nate should know that much from the forensics classes all detectives took. Half of it was basic forensic skills, what to touch, what to leave for an expert like her. But the other half was legal. She could see from the look on his face that he understood some serious corners had been cut. He frowned and asked, “It gets worse?”

  She nodded. “Look at the picture of Jimmy’s body on the table.”

  That was clearly the last thing Nate wanted to do, but there was something she wanted him to see. Otherwise, why would she be showing him her brother’s nude, dead form laid out in the morgue? She watched his expression change as she said the words. “You said he had a needle in his arm on scene.”

  He nodded. “And this is the arrival picture. No one should have removed that needle. Not before these pictures. So, someone specifically pulled it out. But why?”

  Grace knew, and she didn’t like it. “The way someone set this up, each report make sense on its own. Your report of the crime scene matches every report there. The autopsy now makes sense. Even the lack of specific checks for heroin. There’s no tourniquet—which you saw on his arm—and no needle…” She pulled the picture back toward her and scrutinized it closely. “I can’t claim enough to win my bet, but I don’t see any new track marks….But that’s the problem. If he’s found with a needle in his arm, there should be up close pictures of that mark. Look…” she shuffled through the pile. “No close ups. You got everything in the M.E.’s file?”

  “I got everything.” He nodded as he said it, but he looked like he wanted to bang his head on the table. He probably had the same questions she had: Had this been going on a long time? Was it just carelessness? Or was there something more sinister in Jimmy Lee’s death? Grace strongly suspected the last one.

  “So, no close ups. No pictures of the skin between his toes either.” She pointed out but didn’t state what Nate would already know—that many junkies shot up in that particular spot to hide the tracks. That should have been included in Jimmy’s report, had any needle marks been visible.

  Nate stated the most pressing problem. “And by cremating him, they took away your chance to get more pictures and to order toxicology reports. You can’t get anything from the ash, can you?”

  “We can get some things, but not this.” She shook her head, sad and angry all the same. Jimmy was gone, and she wasn’t processing it. She was dealing with it by trying to figure out why he’d been murdered. If she was lucky, Nate Ryder could figure out by whom. But she wasn’t processing the emotions tied to the fact that Jimmy had gotten himself together and finally been happy, and now he was gone. Her little brother, the only one like her in the whole world…gone.

  “Grace?” Nate prompted her, seeming to understand that she wasn’t fully herself.

  She nodded—all she could manage right then—and pulled herself together. “There’s nothing in Jimmy’s ashes that will tell us what we need. But there’s one more problem…why was Jimmy’s autopsy bumped to the front of the line? There were twenty-eight bodies in there. Dark Falls—even if y’all service the entire center of the state—should not amass twenty-eight bodies waiting for autopsy in three days. Which means some of them…actually, probably a lot of them were there before Jimmy was. So why was he bumped to the front of the line, given a crappy autopsy, had that same autopsy manipulated to remove some of the evidence, and then cremated? All this not only before I could sign off on it as the next of kin, but before the M.E. even got his signature on the form?”

  She paused for a minute. “If that’s a series of careless mistakes, then y’all have the crappiest M.E. in the history of the country and he and his assistants deserve to be stripped of their medical licenses.”

  She watched as Nate sat back and absorbed what she said. She also noticed that he asked her questions rather than telling her she was right. So far, he’d taken her to the M.E.’s office and photocopied the files for her. But he hadn’t agreed to anything…

  Chapter Six

  Nate sat in his desk chair, finally having dropped Grace back at the station where they’d left her rental car. He would have bounced his ideas off Mari, but the relatively newly minted Detective was away from her desk. She was probably following up on the cases Nate had dumped on her. All all Nate could do was swivel in his chair and throw his stress ball into the air, catching it over and over. Someone had given his stress ball a woman’s name… he couldn’t even remember the stupid name right now. His mind churned.

  Grace was suggesting that the M.E.’s office was corrupt and either doing this kind of shoddy work a lot—which would mean Jimmy’s death could be an overdose and they’d just half-assed it—or they’d messed up his autopsy and paperwork specifically to cover something done to Jimmy.

  Unfortunately, the second option seemed more likely. Especially since Grace had said several things about the scene looked more like Jimmy’s body had been staged. Maybe OD’d and staged? Or poisoned and staged?

  Neither option was good. It meant that someone had gotten rid of Jimmy Lee for a reason. Someone wanted to be certain Jimmy was written off as an OD then wiped aside and forgotten. The other problem with that was that the morgue was in on it. So unless the M.E. assistant who had done Jimmy’s autopsy was also the murderer, there was a conspiracy in Dark Falls.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Just then Mari came back into the bullpen and spotted Nate. She was a little more fierce than she needed to be some days, but Nate liked that about her. At first, he’d been concerned when he’d been told that Detective Zaragosa was his new partner, emphasis on “new,” but she knew her stuff and didn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done. He’d quickly found he could count on her and was now concerned they’d assign her to someone else. Sliding a chair up, she asked Nate point blank. “What did you get into with the sister this morning?”

  “I need coffee,” Nate announced, abruptly standing up. Only this time he didn’t go to the coffee shop. Though Mari didn’t follow him, he worked his way through what to say even as he poured what was left in the pot into a mug. Nate felt the words pouring out before he even made it back to his seat. Still, he wanted to get as much caffeine into his system as possible, hoping to counteract the bad case of the jitters he was developing. He did not like this one bit. So he told Zaragosa everything, just so someone else would know and it would be harder to wipe him and a murder off the map.

  Marisol leaned back in her chair, waiting until Nate took his seat again. They bounced the stress ball back and forth between them as they worked through the information he and Grace had found.

  “Where is that autopsy file?” Mari looked around Nate’s desk, as though she would just grab it and read it.

  He wished she could. “Grace has it.”

  “Grace? You call her ‘Grace’ after one morning? And you gave her the whole f
ile?” Mari’s eyebrows went so high they disappeared. “I heard you had trouble with drooling when she walked in. Did you forget that we don’t hand out files to civilians? On top of us not catching the missing toxicology report… That is not good, Nate.”

  Nate shook his head. “She’s not a civilian. She’s with GBI. She’s law enforcement and that’s completely on the up and up. And I told her to call me ‘Nate’ after we looked at pictures of her dead brother’s naked body over sandwiches.” He stopped there, not addressing the drool comment at all. It wasn’t worthy of a response. And if it was, well, he didn’t have a decent one on hand.

  “So,” Mari leaned forward, seeming to accept what he’d said at face value. She plucked the stress ball from his desk, having picked up his habit the first time she’d seen him do it. “Let’s play this out.” She tossed the ball into to the air and caught it. “They kill Jimmy, why?” She chucked the ball to Nate, who snatched it from its flight and answered.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe he saw something, knew something. Skip that. They kill Jimmy…” Nate tossed the ball up, giving his hands something to do while his brain churned. “They cover it up. Using the ME’s office to do so. Why? Why not let the OD stand?”

  “Easy. Because a real OD would have a toxicology report. Which means—”

  Nate caught on then and whipped the ball back to Mari, who caught it one handed, her face scrunching up in thought. “—That Jimmy didn’t OD on heroin. If the routine tox screen would have caught that, they wouldn’t have had to cover it up. Shit. Grace was right.”

  Mari smirked at the terminology Nate used, as though Grace was already employed here. Even in her absence, he was giving her the status of a coworker rather than that of bereaved sister. Nate raised an eyebrow daring Mari to start that up, and she wisely kept her mouth shut, though it did twitch with a half smile. She tossed the ball and her next question back to Nate. “So is the M.E.’s office in on it, or coerced?”

  Coercion hadn’t really crossed Nate’s mind before. He caught the stress ball and squeezed it while he thought. “Coercion makes more sense. I won’t take them being involved off the table yet, but I can’t make it work very well right now.”

  “So this mysterious ‘they’ pay or threaten and the M.E. and the office makes Jimmy’s murder go away.”

  “Or they managed it until Grace came in, ready to avenge her baby brother. She swears he wasn’t using at the time.” Nate shook his head. She’d been right about everything else, maybe she was right about this, too.

  “They didn’t count on Grace.”

  Then he chucked the ball to Mari, not realizing her attention had turned elsewhere, and the blue squishy ball skittered across the floor, uncaught. Nate repeated the words as a cold chill settled into his bones. “They didn’t count on Grace.”

  Grabbing his coat, he ran out the door.

  Chapter Seven

  Grace’s phone buzzed, and she ignored it. That’s the point of putting it on silent in the first place, she thought.

  She was looking through a small field microscope—not the best quality and not the easiest thing to do—at the blood samples she’d taken from the hotel room. She’d managed to buy time in all eight of the rooms facing the back parking lot and what she’d seen disturbed her. She hadn’t told Nate Ryder about any of it and wondered if the police were already aware of what she’d only now found out.

  Once she’d looked at the other rooms on the same row of the motel, it became a little clearer why the clerk hadn’t really wanted to rent her the room Jimmy had died in. It wasn’t about the recent death in the room, it was about the room itself. The other rooms hadn’t had blood in them. Sure, the black light had showed all kinds of other things that would make a normal stomach turn, but it revealed only the most trace amounts of blood.

  Clearly, room eleven was the room. It must be for meetings or something, because it was definitely different. The clerk wouldn’t have wanted her in there, not because anyone was afraid of what she might find, but because they wanted the room available for whomever might be using it as a meeting place.

  Five samples of blood…so it wasn’t likely a room for snuff films or anything like that. Grace imagined it was probably a meeting place and five times the meeting had turned bloody. She hadn’t found enough of any one sample to be confident a murder had taken place. And the obvious lack of cleaning staff or skills—which allowed her to get the five samples in the first place—probably meant that there hadn’t been other incidents they’d simply cleaned up better. Grace was willing to bet something was a regular happening there.

  Then again, this was not her forte. She needed Ryder’s police style thinking to help sort it out. She was an expert at the way bodies were posed, at digging them up, at determining possible manners of death. Dealings of shady groups of criminals in hotel rooms wasn’t something she should be guessing at.

  The five blood samples yielded four different blood types. Grace sat back and thought. Was she possibly wrong? Normally she’d do this in the field with her little plastic test tubes and small jars of reagents and her small microscope, then she’d go back to the lab and retest. The fieldwork gave her a starting point. But right now, it was all she had. Though she had a list of local laboratories from Brad, they wouldn’t let her simply walk in and use the equipment. She’d have to order tests and pay for each one and wait for results…dealing with whatever their backup time might be. Sometimes it was six weeks or more.

  Sitting back, she rolled her shoulders and did her standard stretching routine. When she was over a microscope, or more often sorting bones over a table, her shoulders could cramp. It was long, tedious work and she’d developed a routine. One that was blown all to hell here in her hotel room—her real room, in a decent hotel. Not one in the run down and questionable motel where Jimmy had died.

  She reached out to Kevin, doing her best, though she wasn’t sure how to approach the man. She’d met Jimmy’s boyfriend when they’d come to Georgia for a visit the year before. By then, they’d already been together for a year, and it was definitely meet-the-family time. Her parents pretended the two men were just good friends; Grace welcomed Kevin with open arms.

  They’d even had a good heart-to-heart over chilled glasses of chardonnay one night. Neither of them would drink in front of Jimmy, even though he insisted he was fine with it. She’d liked that about Kevin. Kevin had liked that she welcomed him not in a “well, at least Jimmy isn’t using” kind of way, but with a straight up “I’m so happy for you.”

  “So many families have to ‘come around’ to accepting their gay kid. Mine, too.” He’d lifted the glass in a small salute before taking a sip. “Thank you for just being happy for us.”

  They’d talked. He told her how Jimmy was doing. She told him childhood stories of her younger brother, some embarrassing. But they hadn’t stayed close friends. Now she wanted to question the grieving man about Jimmy’s death. See if he thought her brother was using and she was off her rocker for insisting he wasn’t. Or maybe he agreed with her.

  Grace’s brain wandered again. She also hadn’t shown Ryder—Nate—her texts from her brother. Something had stopped her. Maybe she wanted him to do some digging on his own, get on the same page she was on before she gave him more.

  At the time, she’d thought Jimmy’s messages were a little odd. She’d texted back, asking what he was doing, but her brother had been coy. Since that wasn’t too strange, and since she liked Kevin and thought the other man helped keep her brother stable, Grace had waited.

  Her heart twisted. Should she have picked up the phone and called Jimmy? Demanded to know what he was up to? Could she have kept him safe? Or would she just have bumped his death by another day?

  She’d never know. She dealt in death all the time in her job. Though she’d developed a lot of rationalization over it, and she was telling herself she’d done a good job loving her brother, the pang of that regret was hard to shake.

  Work seem
ed like the right solution, as though solving the mystery of Jimmy’s death—his murder, she reminded herself—would make any of this easier. Grace looked back at her samples, checking again for blood cells clumping together under the microscope. Some did, some didn’t. That’s what told her the blood type. Four blood types meant at least four different sources of the blood. Maybe five. Those last two would take more testing to sort out. Whether the substance was human blood was one of two things her little field kit could test for. The other was blood type. And that was it. That was all she could do here.

  Frustrated, Grace picked up Jimmy’s file from the ME’s office and started reading through it again. She figured it deserved a second pass. The first time she’d read it, she’d been emotional. The assistant, no matter what else he’d done or skipped, had thoroughly catalogued the physical evidence of Jimmy’s lifetime of addiction. His sinuses were shot from cocaine. His liver was a mess. His lungs damaged from the various things he’d smoked. His arms scarred from years of needles.

  Grace blinked and suddenly sat up straight. Jimmy’s inner forearms were a mess of scars! If he was using, he would have been shooting up between his toes, simply because his history made the veins in his arms no longer usable. Not only did her scenario about him not dying from half a speedball suddenly have some proof, but she also realized that Jimmy couldn’t possibly have died from any needle in his forearm.

  Her phone buzzed again, breaking her thoughts, but she ignored it and pushed them back on track. Some part of her wanted to be wrong. It was simpler if Jimmy had died from his drug use. It was the sadly common end for many addicts. Murder was a different game. Though Grace dabbled in it a lot with the victims she helped process. and later often testified to the facts of the case, a murder in her own family was much worse.