Sixty-five-year-old Coroner Barry Fishbeck had a large head with fleshy cheeks and a prominent laugh line on one side of his mouth that gave him a permanently skeptical look. This afternoon in the morgue he wore a long-sleeved gown, a blue surgical cap, a splash shield, shoe covers, and a pair of latex gloves. The lighting inside the autopsy suite was harsh and bright. Merciless, really.
“Ready to proceed, folks?”
Natalie and Luke nodded from the other side of the autopsy table.
Barry adjusted his splash shield and studied the corpse. “We have an unknown Jane Doe,” he said into his digital recorder. “Female Caucasian, five foot three and a quarter, weighing approximately a hundred and five pounds. I’m guessing she’s twenty to twenty-five years old. Hair is a reddish brown. Eye color is blue. There’s a fresh-looking tattoo on her upper left arm near the shoulder. It is inflamed and slightly raised. There’s also a prominent red mark on the underside of her chin … which Detective Lockhart has identified as…” He looked up. “What did you call it, Natalie?”
“A violin hickey,” she responded. “My friend Bella used to have one. Also known as fiddler’s neck. It’s a callus that forms where the violin rests against the chin.”
“So we’re looking at a professional violinist then?” Barry inquired.
“I think so. Calluses on the fingertips of the left hand are from depressing the strings of the violin, which would make her right-handed.”
“Very good,” Barry said, studying Jane Doe’s fingertips.
“She might be a performing artist who was hired to play at one of our venues during Halloween,” Luke said. “I’ve asked Mike Anderson to compile a list of seasonal hires for us—any musicians who play the violin … a fiddle player in a band … a member of a string quartet or chamber ensemble. Hopefully we’ll have a name soon.”
“Fingers crossed.” Barry leaned over Jane Doe and pried open her rigored jaw. It unlocked with a crackling sound that made Natalie wince. “In the meantime, let’s see what else we can learn about her.”
Natalie’s hands gripped the edge of the counter as she steadied herself. The sterile countertop held a tray of surgical tools—forceps, scissors, scalpels, bone saw, a dish for weighing organs, a pair of rib cutters, an electric saw. Not very pleasant, these instruments of death.
“She’s had some dental work done,” Barry observed. “A root canal and six veneers—excellent work. Her overall health appears to be good. There’s an appendix scar. Nothing on the radiographs. No broken bones, fractures, or other injuries. No needle or track marks. She isn’t malnourished. No other scars or birthmarks. As to method of death, I’m not finding any overt signs of a struggle, although there are a few contusions on her limbs and abrasions on both knees. You could get those from falling down or from being pushed down. We did a nail scrape earlier, and there’s something under the nails, but it could just be grease from the dumpster. Either she was thrown in, or she climbed in, or she tried to crawl out, I don’t know … we should know more once we get the lab reports back.”
Jane Doe’s ash-gray hands were sealed inside two plastic bags, and they looked almost sculptural, like art pieces on display.
“What kind of Wiccan symbol is that on her arm?” Luke inquired.
“The tattoo?” Barry said.
“It looks like a witch’s sigil,” Natalie said, swiping through images on her phone. “It’s a personalized occult symbol you can create yourself in order to change certain aspects of your life,” she explained. She showed Luke and Barry the Google results on her screen. “It’s like making a wish while blowing the candles out on your birthday cake.”
“Only it’s more permanent,” Luke added.
“Right.”
“Did you take the print cards yet?” Luke asked Barry, who nodded.
“I gave them to Officer Keegan twenty minutes ago.”
“Which means Lenny should have them,” Luke told Natalie.
“Hopefully we’ll get a match,” she said.
Detective Lenny Labruzzo was in charge of processing all trace evidence at the crime scene, but the victim’s fingerprints took priority. Natalie knew he’d call them the instant he got a hit off the DMV database. In the meantime, Detective Augie Vickers was in charge of searching through the dumpster at the police impound lot, and they’d Express-Mailed the used condom to the state lab for DNA testing, since that was the one thing the unit wasn’t equipped to handle. Natalie secretly wanted to be involved in every aspect of the investigation, but like her father used to say, “Ride the horse with loose reins, as long as it knows where it’s going.” These experienced detectives all knew where they were going.
Natalie narrowed her focus on random details—Jane Doe’s unvarnished nails, her pierced ears, the sparkly silver glitter in her hair. The glitter looked deliberate—part of a costume she’d worn last night. The costume was still missing. Natalie couldn’t help but think—we care so much about how we look, making thoughtful decisions, but then death takes all control away from us.
“No external signs of penetration, anal or vaginal,” Barry said into his recorder. “No apparent trauma, abrasions, or contusions to the area. No semen stains showing up in the black light.” He peeled off his gloves. “There’s no overt evidence of rape, but I won’t know definitively until we’ve done a complete rape kit and get the swabs back from the lab. I’d say that overall, these minor lacerations and contusions could’ve happened at any point last night, due to rambunctious partying, but it could also be due to physical assault. I haven’t found any evidence to declare this a homicide yet. No broken hyoid bone or other evidence of strangulation. No blunt trauma to the head, no penetrating wounds, no deep bruising to the neck or abdomen. There was a bit of vomitus in her mouth. It’s possible she died from a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning, but we’ll have to see what the tox screen says.” He pulled off his headgear. “During the next phase of the autopsy, I’ll be collecting fluids for the toxicology report—blood, urine, vitreous. I’ll be drawing blood from various parts of the body, including the eyeball, the femoral vein in the leg, and heart blood. I’ll be collecting tissue samples from the liver, brain, lungs, and kidney, plus any stomach contents. We should know more once we get the toxicology results back.”
“How long will that take?” Luke asked impatiently.
“Two or three weeks is standard, but since time is of the essence, I’m putting a priority rush on it. There’s usually a backlog, but the mayor called this morning to inform me of the significance of the case … we can’t have healthy young women dying on our watch during our biggest tourist season, now can we? That would be a disaster for the whole town.”
“How extensive a tox screen are you talking about?” Natalie asked.
“Given the nature of the festivities … we’ll be testing for opiates, amphetamines, sedatives, marijuana, alcohol, barbiturates, party drugs—in short, everything under the sun,” Barry assured her. “Legal or illegal substances. We’ll also be looking for any drug interactions that could’ve depressed her heart rate and breathing. It’s the same kind of extensive drug-testing an emergency room might perform for a patient showing signs of an overdose. We’ll be asking for a thorough clinical toxicology.” Barry picked up a scalpel and made a deep Y incision across Jane Doe’s chest. Then he picked up a pair of rib cutters and said, “This next phase is going to take a while.”
Luke and Natalie exchanged a look. Neither one wanted to stick around for the procedure. Barry would spend the next couple of hours performing the rape kit and an internal exam, cutting through the viscera with a pair of scissors and weighing each organ before placing everything into a plastic bag for its return to the body. When that was done, he would sew everything back inside, then store Jane Doe in a refrigerated room until the investigation was over and the funeral home could collect the body for burial.
“Keep us posted,” Luke told Barry, then motioned Natalie outside.
They found the exit door and stood on the cement steps, where they had a good view of the eastern end of downtown. Crews were still picking up garbage. The city was paying for the entire cleanup effort out of its annual budget. No one complained about the extra expense, since all those tourist dollars were a welcome boost to the town coffers. But today, the stores were shuttered and traffic was thin. Burning Lake was in recovery mode, with plenty of merchants sleeping in. Despite Rainie’s concerns, most people preferred a few days off after four frantic weeks of rampant consumerism.
“We need to identify her as quickly as possible,” Luke said. “Find out if any local venues are missing a violinist. Also, we should talk to all the local tattoo parlors…”
“You remember Bella Striver, don’t you?” Natalie asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Luke said with a nod. “I was a teenager when Joey invited me over for spaghetti dinner and Bella was playing the violin in the backyard. You and your sisters were sitting together on the hammock, swinging your legs in perfect symmetry to the music. She was like … what? Six years old?”
Natalie smiled. Bella was a pixieish beauty with sparkly eyes and a bouncy smile who used to spend three or four hours a day practicing her violin. The Striver family legend was that when Bella was a toddler, she picked up her father’s violin and knew exactly what to do without being told. A natural. A child prodigy. Her father—a former wunderkind himself—was a strict disciplinarian who used to prompt Bella to show off her skills. “Play the Vivaldi for them, and then Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee.’” He was obsessively attentive and extremely harsh in his criticisms. Over the years, he lost sight of who Bella really was—a normal girl—and, in Natalie’s opinion, that was what eventually drove her away from him.
“My violin is practically my lover,” Bella once complained when they were hanging out as teenagers. “It’s so stupid! Dad has big plans for me, but I just want to be a girl and do girlie things, like makeup and dating. Instead, I have no social life, because he wants me to be the next Hilary Hahn or Sarah Chang.” Bella was hurt, more hurt than anyone Natalie knew, and that pain was in her music.
At their high school graduation ceremony, Bella played Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor to wild applause. The Brilliant Misfits, five best friends, celebrated that night by meeting in the woods. They got drunk and stoned in Funland’s old derailed train, slid down the infamous Tongue, and ended up perched on the edge of the Bridge to the Future, predicting where they’d all be ten years from now.
Bella’s big dream was to become a pop star and travel around the world. Nobody really knew her, she complained that night—not the real Bella. Instead, all of the adults in her life projected their own hopes and dreams on to her. Her shyness and reticence created a blank canvas on which they splashed their own delusions—they told her she was a gifted prodigy, a future superstar, a blazing comet. “But I’m not who they think I am,” Bella said bitterly that night on the bridge, one hand clutching the neck of her violin case. “I’m not this whimsical little sprite—this magical elfin genius. I’m a lazy slob. I’m a greedy monster. I want to conquer the fucking world. I want to lie in bed for a thousand years.”
Bobby lit a joint and Max passed around a bottle of his parents’ tequila, and the five of them got stoned and drunk together, laughing and reminiscing. Eventually Natalie and Bobby wandered off to make out, and at some point, Natalie could hear Bella playing Debussy in the woods, but she assumed that Bella was hanging out with Max and Adam. Then the playing stopped, and Natalie lost her virginity.
All hell broke loose when Bella went missing shortly after midnight. Natalie’s father, Joey, became involved in the extensive search for the missing girl, and at one point Mr. Striver came under suspicion. But the prime suspect was Nesbitt Rose, Hunter Rose’s younger brother, who’d had cognitive problems since birth and was by his own admission the last person to have seen Bella alive.
Hounded by the media, with the town in an uproar—three weeks after Bella’s disappearance, on a drizzly rainy night—Nesbitt sucked on the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and put an end to his misery. Three months later, Bella’s father started receiving letters containing Polaroids that proved that his “missing” daughter was still alive. She was fine, she said. She just had to get away and be her own person. Natalie also received a few letters from Bella, explaining why she ran away. Mostly she blamed it on her ambitious, overbearing father. She said she didn’t want to be a violin soloist anymore. As a consequence, the police labeled her a runaway, and the missing persons case was closed.
Eventually, the notes and snapshots from Bella stopped arriving, and no one ever saw or heard from her again. Natalie still missed her. There was a hole in her life where Bella belonged.
“Why do you bring that up?” Luke asked now. “Do you think it’s related?”
“No. Maybe. It’s too early to say. I just remember the pressure Bella was under to perform. To achieve. How hard her father pushed her, until he finally pushed her away permanently.”
“Her father was a suspect, wasn’t he?”
Natalie nodded. “Along with Nesbitt Rose. But they were proven innocent after the letters started to arrive.”
Her phone rang. It was Augie.
“We hit pay dirt,” he told her. “The victim’s wallet and clothing were farther down in the dumpster.”
“We’ll be right over,” she told him and hung up.