CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Thirty minutes later, Starr and Minkle rattled through the pitted back lot of Dexter Springs’ tiny hospital. A placard, the “E” missing, was affixed to an exterior wall near a plain gray door with a keypad. MORGU, it said.

Minkle was tense beside her and seemed eager to fulfill whatever nebulous duties he’d been assigned as a loaned officer. “Call me Minkey,” he’d said to fill the silence. “No one calls me Minkle except when I’m late for dinner.” He laughed nervously at his own joke.

Starr didn’t have a plan, except to camp out in the medical examiner’s office in the hope that her presence would make the autopsy go faster. Then she would send Minkey back where he’d come from. She didn’t need Dexter Springs’ mayor to send over a fresh recruit, even one on loan, until she made a new hire. Out of bounds, she thought, a phrase her father used to say. He was with her all the time here, a new wrinkle she didn’t have time to even consider.

Starr punched in the passcode she’d received in a text. Nothing happened. She looked at the text again, this time keying in each digit with a long, hard press. There was a slow, ancient-sounding click, and she pulled on the door until its tired hydraulics mustered an opening wide enough for her and Minkey to slip through. The medical examiner’s office probably used the bay more often, she thought, eyeing the coroner van behind the overhead door to their right.

They entered a long, sporadically lit corridor, the bank of fluorescents issuing a high-pitched whine. Minkey looked like a feral cat in a live trap, his wide eyes roving for escape.

“You ever seen one of these?” she asked.

“Me? Oh yeah. At the academy we toured—”

“No, not the morgue. A body. An autopsy.”

“Oh…” He trailed off.

Starr pushed through a swinging double door. There was a woman at a counter, her lab coat a crisp white, who turned and extended a pleasant greeting.

“Marshal Starr?” She was wearing disposable shoe covers and a thin blue surgical cap. She had a clear face shield propped up onto her forehead like a welder’s helmet.

Seeing Starr’s nod, she directed them through another door, then down a corridor that was shorter than the first one they’d been in, and finally into an autopsy room.

“Doctor Tess Moore,” she said, stopping near the door they’d just entered through. “I was working on the details of your report right as you walked in. Perfect timing.” Her voice was so measured she might have been meeting Starr and Minkey at a cocktail party.

Dr. Moore stretched a pair of blue latex gloves, and then pulled them precisely over each slim finger. She handed a pair to Starr and she did the same, although with less grace. When Dr. Moore offered a pair to Minkey, he looked to Starr for approval and she shrugged, then caught Dr. Moore’s gaze. Starr liked her already.

Minkey plastered an attentive look on his face and stood well behind them as they approached the body on the steel table. When he caught sight of the body, he gasped and took a few steps backward.

“You gonna be okay?” Starr said, and shared another look with Dr. Moore.

“Me? Yes, yes,” Minkey stuttered. “Fine.”

“Usually this takes longer,” Dr. Moore said, “but I put a rush on it.”

Starr nodded. She knew the medical examiner had done her a favor, and was grateful. By the time Dr. Moore’s forensic photographer had reached the remote site earlier that day, Starr had marked all the potential evidence. She’d sent Chak to the main road to watch for the photographer’s vehicle and signal where to turn. She had to admit, he’d been a trouper.

“I’ll skim the things you already know. Female. Young, probably about twenty, maybe twenty-two. No evidence of sexual assault. No defensive wounds. No broken nails to indicate a fight. Nothing under the nails at all, really.”

Even with the damage brought on by the young woman’s recent death, Starr knew she had been pretty. Starr wondered about her, this woman on the table, and thought of the movie posters on Chenoa’s bedroom wall, the life she must have outgrown. What had this woman desired that had died with her? And Quinn, what future had she dreamed of? What parts of her adolescence would she have left behind for adulthood? Her room, always such a mess. Emptying her closet onto the floor only to find an outfit she was never quite satisfied with. Or the endless stacks of cereal bowls on her bedside table, the Lucky Charms bloating and beginning to decay. Who would Quinn have become? A shot of pain, physical as anything Starr had ever felt, pulsed through her chest.

“…and that’s about it,” Dr. Moore concluded.

Shit, thought Starr. What did I miss? Fucking pay attention.

“What else?” Starr said, rubbing her sternum. “Anything unusual?”

“That’s just it,” Dr. Moore said. “There’s a lot we can’t know after the fact, but the usual things we look for—they’re not there. The interesting thing is the back of her head. Multiple skull fractures, but all along the back. Only on the back of her skull.”

Starr looked at Dr. Moore—someone who seemed to have it all together—more blankly than she wanted to.

“So, when people are struck with a blunt object,” Dr. Moore explained, “or when they have blunt force trauma—particularly to the skull—and the blow is from behind, most people, if they aren’t knocked unconscious, will turn their head toward the attacker behind them. This means any subsequent blows, if there are any, will usually fall along the side of the head.”

Starr was catching on.

“And these blows,” said Starr, “were all in the same place?”

“Exactly. Multiple blows landing sequentially, same location.”

“Then she must have been—”

“Unconscious. Maybe passed out, possibly deceased. We’ll know more when I get the blood work back. Not sleeping. Even in a deep sleep, there would have been head movement after the first blow.”

Minkey was nodding along but looking pointedly at a spot below an old round clock—Starr could hear it ticking like a metronome—and a row of framed credentials on the wall. Looking anywhere but at the body.

“The real problem, though, is that I don’t have any other findings that are very helpful.”

“I see,” Starr said. “Tell me what your experience says about this body.” She could feel the hope she’d had, of getting an easy lead, slide down toward her boots.

“When it comes to fibers, DNA or anything else that might give us some identification of who might be responsible”—Dr. Moore turned from the body and looked directly at Starr—“we don’t have anything notable. Like I mentioned earlier, there is nothing under the nails, nothing around the nail beds. If there were foreign fibers or hairs, the elements she was exposed to may have eliminated them.”

Starr looked at Minkey, who was taking short, shallow breaths and glancing alternately at the victim and at the wall.

“Time of death?”

“Based on rigidity and other factors, I would place it between midnight and six o’clock Thursday morning, but most likely sometime in the early-morning hours.”

“Any luck with an ID?” Starr asked.

“Not yet. There is one thing, though.”

Starr followed Dr. Moore to the end of the table where the girl’s neck was propped on a U-shaped stand to keep her head positioned.

“The soil that had been placed in her mouth was probably put there after death. We’ll take a closer look at it, but it doesn’t seem consistent with the type of soil where she was found.”

Stuffing a victim’s mouth with soil revealed a lot about the crime. Intentionality, for one thing. Could even be a calling card left by a repeat offender. And the soil in the mouth and throat looked different from the soil where the body had been found, so where had it come from? Had the killer brought it with him or her? Taken the time to put it in a baggie and carry it in a pocket? Chosen this woman as a victim? Or had her murder been a crime of opportunity?

The bonfire, discarded beer cans, empty bottles and cigarette stubs were signs of a party. Chak had even confirmed that older kids partied at Turkey Creek. Had the killer been one of them? Waited until the party was breaking up and taken advantage of someone left there alone, vulnerable? Starr would have to wait for the blood tests, but wondered whether the victim had been incapacitated, passed out or drunk or drugged. What other clues or signs did her body hold?

Starr peered more closely, trying to make sense of the girl’s blood-matted hair, which was still full of debris.

“What is this?” Starr asked. “Bark? Wood chips?” She thought of the logs, the firewood. The fire.

“It looks, to me at least, like these blows to the skull came from two different blunt objects. See here? There are two kinds of patterns. One is long and rather narrow, from a thin metal object, like a pipe or maybe a golf club. The other object was wide and left some debris behind. See how the splinters are embedded here?”

Dr. Moore pointed to the thick splinters that had pushed into the mass of bone, skin, flesh and hair. The campfire log Starr had collected from the scene. It was time to call in a favor—if she still could.