Jessie got up and glanced through the window, making sure that Grace and her mom were still next door. She walked to the mirror and tried out a few poses that she thought he might find sexy. She lifted up her shirt to expose her midriff. Polar bears were darker. She turned around and stuck her butt at the mirror. God, no, Jess. Your ass is the size of a tractor.
Maybe she should just send him a picture like the one he sent her. Totally naked. She picked up her phone and hit the camera app, feeling that naughty sensation, daring herself to go for it…
The front door slammed. Terrified, Jessie froze. Footsteps drummed up the stairs. Jessie threw herself onto the bed. A second later Grace opened her door and bounded into the room. “Jess, guess what?”
Jess hit the encrypt key. The Sugardaddies website disappeared and was replaced by her fake home screen. She looked up, bored beyond measure, even as her heart was exploding. “What now?”
“Mom said we might get a dog.”
“Oh.”
“Wouldn’t that be incredible? I mean, we’ve wanted one for so long. A dog!”
Jessie looked back at her laptop. “Yeah,” she said. “Awesome.”
24
It was nine p.m. when Tank Potter arrived at the office of the Travis County medical examiner. The doors were locked. A single bulb burned at the end of the corridor. Tank rapped his knuckles against the glass and did his best to stand up straight. He’d kept himself on a tight leash all afternoon. One snort from his backstop an hour, strictly for medicinal purposes. By tomorrow the shakes would be a thing of the past.
A thin, dark-haired man in a lab coat rounded the corner and hurried down the corridor. Tank raised his hand in the Longhorn salute-pinkie and index finger extended, his other fingers curled into a fist. “Hook ’em, Horns.”
“Hook ’em, Horns,” replied Carlos Cantu, raising his own hand in salute as he opened the door. “Hey, buddy. We’re closing up shop. I can give you five minutes.”
“That ought to do.” Tank stepped inside the building and followed Cantu down the hall to the “icebox,” the room where the corpses were stored. The medical examiner shared space with the city morgue and handled autopsies for Travis and five surrounding counties, a geographic footprint that included Dripping Springs. Cantu wasn’t the ME or even the forensic investigator. He was just a morgue assistant whom Tank had known since his playing days, when he’d been a star and Cantu a student trainer who’d wrapped his ankle, laundered his uniforms, and folded his towels. Tank had kept in touch over the years, if only for this purpose.
“Thought you were covering politics these days,” said Cantu.
“I’m back in the saddle,” said Tank, dodging the question. “Wouldn’t miss this one for the world.”
“Something’s up with this guy. No question.”
“Really?”
The morgue looked no different from when he’d last visited, three years ago. Low ceiling, fluorescent lights, white tile floor and walls, and the inescapable, eye-watering scent of ammonia. Cantu pulled a holding tray out of the wall. The informant lay inside a pale green body bag. “We had the FBI in here all day, asking lots of questions.”
“One of ’em Don Bennett?”
“Who’s he?”
“SAC in the Austin office. Bald, mustache, looks like he has a rake up his ass.”
“He was here. But he wasn’t the one in charge.”
“Who was?”
“Short, gray-haired guy. New Yorker. All business.”
“Name?”
Cantu shook his head. “Ted? Or Ed? All I know is that he was the one ordering Doc Donat around and telling him what to do with the bodies.”
“What do you mean? The ME’s required by law to do an autopsy.”
“That’s just it. They’re sending the bodies to D.C. for the postmortems. I’m supposed to have them ready for transshipment by tomorrow at noon.”
“Both?”
“The guy with half a head and the FBI dude.”
Tank took this in. He was fairly certain that sending a body out of state for autopsy was not standard operating procedure. Postmortems of homicide victims were conducted by the nearest medical examiner. It was a question of cost, convenience, and timeliness. Decomposition began the moment a heart stopped beating and accelerated as time went on.
Carlos Cantu had one hand on the zipper. “Didn’t have a bean-and-cheese burrito for dinner, did you?”
Tank said he had not.
“Fair warning.” Cantu unzipped the body bag. Tank looked, then looked away, sucking down a gulp of air to steady himself. Timidly he returned his gaze to “the guy with half a head.” One eye remained, the lower half of a nose, lips, and a chin. The rest of the skull and brain was gone as cleanly as if a shovel had sheared it away.
The FBI’s press release stated that Special Agent Joseph Grant had been mortally wounded in the course of debriefing an informant but had managed to kill said informant prior to expiring himself. Tank had seen plenty of dead bodies. His time on the murder beat had given him a lesson in the fine art of gunshot wounds, from.22s that looked like little more than cigarette burns to.44 Magnums that went in big and came out bigger. No handgun was capable of this kind of damage. Tank’s childhood of hunting deer and javelinas told him that only a high-caliber rifle was capable of shearing off that much of a man’s head with a single shot.
“Can I look at the other guy? The Fibbie?”
Cantu dug his hands into his lab coat. “I’m pushing it as it is, Tank. I have to be out of here by nine-fifteen.”
Tank peeled off a twenty and put it in Cantu’s hand. “Would have bought us a case of Heini’s back in the day.”
“I’m good with a sixer of Shiner Bock.” Cantu pocketed the bill, marched down the row, and pulled out the tray bearing Joseph Grant’s corpse. He unzipped the bag and pulled it over the corpse’s shoulders, revealing the mortal wound. It was apparent that the body had come straight from the hospital. There was still tape around the mouth and dried blood all over the chest and torso. Grant had been shot a single time in the chest. The entry wound was the size of Tank’s middle finger, a round black hole.
“Can you lift him up?”
Cantu hoisted the corpse, exposing an exit wound the size and appearance of a crushed grapefruit. Tank had two impressions. First, no handgun did that kind of damage. Second, the diameter of the entry wound was too big to come from a pistol. They added up to a single, undeniable fact: Don Bennett was lying.
It was evident why the FBI wanted to get the bodies into friendly hands and away from prying eyes. Away from reporters like Tank.
“Can I put him down now?” grunted Cantu.
“Sure thing.” Tank walked back to the informant. He was already growing accustomed to the gruesome corpse-getting his sea legs back, so to speak. “No name on this guy?”
“John Doe.”
“Where’s his wallet?”
“All his valuables had been removed.”
“You lift his prints, dental records?”
“What for? The feds knew who he was.”
“Let me see his papers.”
“In the ME’s office with the valuables. Locked.”
Tank looked closely at the body. He tagged him early forties, five-nine or so, arms and legs like pins, soft belly, no tats, nice fingernails. He lifted one of the hands. Not a callus, scratch, or scar. A man who’d never done a day’s labor in his life. White-collar all the way. He noted that the ring finger on the left hand was creased but was not paler than the rest of the finger. He inferred that the informant had separated from his wife or divorced in the past ninety days. Someone would be missing him soon.