Erin drove her usual route back to the campus, making a wide arc of the town, which took them over a bridge at a bend in the river. She saw Carla looking down into the brackish water. The current was sluggish but with the hint of a stronger undertow. A student had drowned leaping off the bridge during end of year celebrations and the college now stationed security guards during graduation days.
‘Did Lauren jump from here?’
The question, so close to her own train of thought, startled Erin, and the car wobbled as she lost concentration. ‘Jeez, you just come out with it, don’t you? I thought I was blunt, but you take it to a new level.’
‘Sorry. I was voicing my thoughts out loud. The only thing I know about the river is Lauren’s suicide. I mean, I don’t even know its name.’
‘Didn’t do much reading about Jericho before getting here, huh?’
Carla caught Erin’s jokey tone. ‘Guilty as charged. Actually, I looked up the university but, as for the town, I just thought I’d discover it when I arrived.’
‘The river’s called the Alford. No idea where it got its name.’
‘There’s a town in Lincolnshire with the same name.’
‘That figures. Early settlers used names from the home countries. Made life a little easier, I suppose. Anyway, in answer to your other question, no, Lauren didn’t jump from the bridge. It’s a little exposed if you’re intent on taking your own life. Too many passers-by ready to talk you out of it, even at ten p.m. Not every suicide wants to be saved. Lauren went in further downstream. There’s a park next to a church around the next bend. Name of Suncook; it’s an indigenous name. It’s there she slipped in – she left her shoes on the bank, so we’re pretty sure about the location.’
‘Why there though?’
Erin took her eyes off the road and glanced at Carla. ‘Why not?’
The body of the fire victim arrived at the facility at the same time as Erin. She immediately arranged for the woman to be sent for a CT scan. Its advanced state of decomposition meant she might miss the presence of foreign bodies such as a bullet and any fractures in the victim’s bones. After Baros’s scorn at her handling of the murder case of Jessica Sherwood, she was determined to triple-check everything. Fortunately, she had recent experience of autopsying fire victims and would use all her knowledge on this Jane Doe.
Giving the woman a name would be a first step. As a pathologist she wasn’t just there to ascertain the cause of death. She was also a key link in the chain to identifying the victim. If the woman had sported a tattoo, it would now be unrecognisable on the charred flesh. Instead, she’d be relying on dental work and the identification of any burnt pieces of jewellery – a watch that might be recognisable to a member of the victim’s family. Erin, however, wasn’t hopeful. Silent Brook was a place the dispossessed gravitated towards. She wasn’t banking on a local dentist having records for this victim.
‘Did you manage to get any bloods?’ she asked Jenny, who was wheeling out the body towards the imaging unit. The girl’s black hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail.
‘Are you kidding me?’ she shouted over her shoulder.
Erin sighed. Goddamn it. That limited the possibilities for DNA analysis. She would need to rely on hard tissue such as bones and teeth to extract any genetic material and it would be hit and miss if any of it was successful. The woman’s name, she thought to herself, was unlikely to come via the post-mortem. The detectives would have to, well, detect.
Erin sat down at her computer and put the name Silent Brook into the database. Over the last five years, eleven bodies had been found in that scrubland and brought in for autopsy. Six had been overdoses. Heroin, heroin in combination with synthetic opioids, methadone, methamphetamines. Three of the deaths had been from alcohol poisoning and two from hypothermia. Only a male in his twenties had been murdered; knifed in the stomach by a drunk who had soon been apprehended. Erin frowned. Not one of the earlier victims had been female and yet the place had a reputation for being a dangerous place for women. The main highway out of town ran past the land and the town’s sex workers used an underpass to pick up trade. The place’s reputation must be down to other felonies – rapes, assaults, non-fatal narcotic overdoses – rather than actual deaths. The dead woman, currently being scanned over on the other side of the facility, was the first female homicide at Silent Brook in the last five years.
Jenny came back into the room, peeling off her latex gloves. ‘All done. I’ve put her back in the store. Results around ten a.m. tomorrow.’
‘OK. Let’s schedule the autopsy for midday. I’d really like to see those images first.’
If the CT scan failed to show anything, she’d be concentrating on the woman’s lungs. Looking for soot inside the woman’s bronchial tubes to suggest death from smoke inhalation. A quick conclusion as to cause of death would partially redeem her in Baros’s eyes, although, from the look of the pair today, neither was thrilled at being given this death to investigate.
Erin looked at her watch. Time to call it a day. She felt as exhausted as Carla had looked and tomorrow was going to be busy, busy, busy. Carla was an intriguing one. Behind that tiny stature and defensive pose, there must be a formidable brain. People like Albert Kantz didn’t bring people in from the outside – and Carla was definitely an outsider – unless they would add prestige to their department. Still, there was a vulnerability to Carla that brought out Erin’s protective instinct. While she remembered, she fired off an email to Kantz’s secretary, asking her politely to ensure Carla had a clear office by the end of the week. As she pressed send, she heard a clank coming from the corridor, the sound of a door shutting and something else. Footsteps? Erin rose and pulled open the door.
‘Jenny, is that you?’
There was silence, only the sound of the clock above her desk ticking, reminding her that she had a life elsewhere. She’d go home and take a long shower and put on a movie. Ethan was at his dad’s, so she’d have the place to herself. Who knows, she might even find a soap drama where she wasn’t inclined to shout at the TV over their portrayal of medical examiners.