“That’s good,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
“Nothing,” Ainsley said immediately. “I just wanted to thank you. What you did that day… I was too upset to realize it at the time, but what you did was extraordinary.”
My leap into the river, the minor notoriety around the department it caused, my embarrassment… these seemed like events from a year ago.
“I’m just glad Ellie is getting better,” I said.
“She’s on her way,” Ainsley said. “I really believe that she is. Detective Pribek?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“When I tried to call you at your work number, your partner said you were on leave, and then he wouldn’t say why.”
“Well, I am on leave,” I said.
“It wasn’t because of Ellie, was it?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would-”
“What you did was so extreme, I thought maybe you violated procedure and they put you on administrative leave because of it.” Ainsley laughed a little. “At least, that’s what I was afraid of.”
“No, nothing like that,” I said. “This is personal leave, not administrative.”
“Oh, good. Well, I’m glad I got to talk to you. I just felt you should know what happened to Ellie, after what you did for her. You know, to give you a feeling of closure.”
“Thank you,” I said. It was true: on the job you deal with a lot of individuals who aren’t criminals, just people with problems, under pressure they can’t handle. You deliver a lot of people to crisis units for observation, and make referrals to domestic-abuse hotlines and sexual-assault counseling services, and then you never know what happens after that. “A lot of times I don’t get that, you know, closure,” I told her.
After we hung up, I tried to let the good news about Ellie lighten my mood. I felt nothing and instead drifted toward the television, thinking of the evening news, and turned on the TV in the middle of a news story I vaguely remembered from radio broadcasts in the morning.
Early Sunday the highway patrol had been called to investigate a Ford pickup wrapped around a tree outside Blue Earth, the apparent result of an unwitnessed single-vehicle crash. The owner, a man in his sixties, was nowhere to be found and the theory now was that he’d walked away from the wreck disoriented and gone off into the countryside. The story didn’t really merit the time KSTP gave it, being set so far out of the Cities, but the visuals were good: a state police helicopter circling over the skinny trees of autumn, a tracking dog eager on its leash. KSTP showed earlier footage of the truck being towed off. The front-end damage was nasty, but otherwise the truck looked solid and powerful, well maintained in life, its paint still gleaming black where it wasn’t marred by the crash.
KSTP cut to world news and the phone shrilled in the kitchen.
“Is this Sarah Shiloh?” It was a male voice I didn’t recognize, using a name I barely thought of as my own.
“Speaking.”
“This is Frank Rossella, down at the medical examiner’s office? I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you during business hours.”
“What is it?” I said.
“There’s a John Doe down here. We think you should take a look at him.”
On my way out to the car, my little speech to Ainsley Carter came back to me: A lot of times you don’t get closure.
As I slid behind the wheel, ready to drive to the medical examiner’s building, a voice in my mind said, Here’s the closure you wanted, Sarah, here’s your closure, here’s your closure…
I drowned it out with the noise of the Nova’s engine.
chapter 9
Even when they aren’t specifically assigned to Homicide, most cops get more opportunities than they would prefer to go to the morgue. Sometimes I went alone with a photograph in my hand. Other times I went with a relative of a missing person, to walk them through the identification procedure.
But I hadn’t been down in a while, and I hadn’t met forensic assistant Frank Rossella, who was new. The flat a’s in his accent suggested he’d come from Boston or New York.
He was perhaps five-foot-seven and in his thirties, his brown hair in a low pompadour. For a shorter guy, he walked quickly. I had to lengthen my stride to keep pace as we went down a hallway lined with stainless-steel doors, temporary housing for the dead.
I stopped in the doorway of the autopsy room. The tables were empty, but near one of them was a gurney with a corpse on it. The body was exposed from foot up to chin level, with the head draped. This was the opposite of procedure in many IDs, in which the body was tastefully draped except for the face and head when family members came down to see it.
Rossella saw where I was looking. “This guy took a shotgun blast to the face,” he explained. “There’re really no features to work with,” he said. “Otherwise I’d just have had you ID using a Polaroid of the face, you probably know that we do that whenever we can. But that won’t work here, and dental records aren’t going to be of much use, either.”
“Fingerprints?” I asked. I was having a little difficulty getting a whole sentence out.
“Not useful, either. Bad prints. We found this guy in the underbrush near the river, out of town a ways. He’d been out awhile, we don’t know how long. He died a couple of days ago, that’s as close as we can narrow it down.”
Rossella looked at me, waiting. I moved to stand next to the gurney. There was a familiar scent on the body that I thought was the scent of the Mississippi.
I can still smell the river in your hair, I heard Shiloh say.
“Mrs. Shiloh?”
I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes until Rossella said my name and I opened them. “I’m sorry,” I said.
You’re working here, a voice said in my mind, not Shiloh’s now but my own. Do your job. Look at him.
Despite having walked the survivors of murder victims through this, I now found I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was taking an important test and hadn’t studied at all.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Without facial features, I just don’t know what I’m looking for. I mean, I’m not sure I can rule anything out with certainty.”
The body was about Shiloh’s height, but weight was hard to tell. He was clearly Caucasian, and I didn’t think he’d been heavy in life.
“How tall is he?” I asked.
“Seventy-two inches long.”
“Long?” I said with distaste, before I could stop myself.
“Tall,” Rossella said.
“Shiloh was six-foot-two.”
“Sometimes measurements taken after death are imprecise,” he said. “The limbs aren’t usually straight when rigor mortis sets in. It makes measuring tough.” He paused. “In fact, I had to break some of the fingers to get prints.”
“What?” I said. Even though I didn’t want to, my gaze immediately went to the hands, looking for the bent and distorted fingers. I’d heard people crack their knuckles before, and that was loud enough. How much louder, I wondered, was the sound of breaking bone?
I looked up to see Rossella’s eyes on me.
“It happens,” he said, calmly meeting my gaze. “I thought you’d have heard about it before.”
“No,” I said, trying to regain my mental footing. I looked at the hands again. Both were bare.
“He doesn’t have a wedding ring,” I said.
“It could have been taken, if this was part of a robbery,” Rossella suggested. I stepped in closer to the right hand.
“What is it?” Rossella asked.
The right arm was stiff, of course, and resisted my attempts to turn it over. I ended up sitting on my heels instead, holding up the hand a little so I could see it clearly. When I saw the palm, I drew in a deep breath, relieved.