Early as it was, the traffic was already heavy as I drove in to the mortuary. Ward had asked me to go in again this morning before I resumed searching with the cadaver dog team. She wanted me to examine the skeletonized remains of Darren Crossly and the woman they believed was Maria de Souza, whose identity had still to be formally confirmed. This was the ‘other problem’ she’d mentioned. For all his posturing, it seemed Mears hadn’t bothered to let Ward — or anyone else — see his findings.
‘Christ knows what he’s been doing. He’s been promising to submit his report for days, but there’s always been some reason why it’s not turned up,’ she’d told me. ‘We sent him the de Souza woman’s dental records as well, so he could compare her chart with the teeth from the body, but he didn’t get around to that either. Or if he did, he didn’t tell anyone about it.’
‘Can’t BioGen access his files?’ I’d asked.
‘Not the ones that matter. For some reason he didn’t upload them on to the company system, and his laptop and cloud storage are password protected. Until he regains consciousness there’s no way of getting at them.’
Mears had grumbled in the pub that Ward wasn’t giving him the chance to finish one job before springing another on him. I’d guessed he was struggling with something, but I thought there’d be more to it than this. He’d already identified Crossly’s body, and comparing the female victim’s teeth with Maria de Souza’s dental chart should have been relatively straightforward.
Yet something had still derailed him again.
I’d been wanting to examine the two interred bodies ever since I’d first glimpsed them in the sealed room. There had been no time for more than a cursory look when I’d gone to help Mears, and ordinarily I’d have been keen for the opportunity to find out more. But not like this.
The road outside the mortuary was still cordoned off by police tape. I’d parked a few streets away, and as I walked towards it I felt a tightness in my gut. There was little sign of the previous evening’s carnage. The overnight rain had washed the tarmac clean of blood, and even the van hit by the car had been towed away. Except for the shards of plastic from its broken wing mirror and the fluttering strips of tape, I might have imagined the whole thing. People walked past the street without giving it a second glance. Someone had died but the world went on turning.
As it always did.
With the road closed, I used the mortuary’s side door. It wasn’t until I was inside that it occurred to me Oduya’s body might be there, lying in the dark of a storage locker. The sense of unreality grew stronger when I went to sign in and saw Mears’s name scrawled on the line above mine from the night before. Seeing it brought it home again. Not only what had happened, but how easily it could have been very different if the order of those names on the page had been reversed.
I signed in and went to change.
The lights of the examination room stuttered into brightness. Going to one of the cold-storage lockers, I took out the box containing the cleaned bones of the female victim. Mears had packed away both victims’ remains before he’d left, and he’d been as scrupulous about that as he’d been in laying them out.
Unpacking the woman’s disarticulated skeleton from the box, I began to carefully reassemble it, placing each individual bone on the table in its correct anatomical position. I had to concede it wasn’t as neat as when Mears had done it, but it didn’t need to be. This was about information, not aesthetics.
The yellow-brown burns on the bones looked like small smudges. Mears had already cut sections of them for examination under a microscope, and I was itching to take a closer look myself. But first things first.
Before anything else I needed to find out if this was Maria de Souza.
It was the same procedure I’d carried out for Christine Gorski. Once I’d reassembled the woman’s skeleton, I carried out an inventory of her teeth, noting any cavities or defects as well as detailing the positions of fillings, crowns and other dental work. That done, I turned to Maria de Souza’s dental records. Ward had told me they’d finally had some good luck, finding the missing woman’s dentist on the second attempt. As I went through the records my sense of puzzlement increased. When I’d asked Mears about the identification when I’d seen him in the pub — it seemed impossible that had been only the day before — he’d bitten my head off. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me see why. The comparison was even more straightforward than the one I’d carried out on Christine Gorski. The dead woman’s teeth were in a better condition than the young drug addict’s, suggesting that, whether she’d been dealing drugs or not, she hadn’t been in the grip of such a severe addiction. More to the point, every filling and crown in the cleaned jawbones was consistent with those shown in the dental records of Maria de Souza.
It was as easy an identification as anyone in my profession could hope to make. Mears must have seen that too. So why had he been dragging his feet?
I looked at the dead woman’s teeth again. The only new feature I’d found not shown in her records was that several of the molars were cracked. The damage was on both sides, upper and lower teeth, but there was no chipping or loosening to suggest it had been caused by any sort of blow to the face. The cracks looked more like the sort of damage caused by pressure, as though she’d clenched her teeth hard enough to crack them.
She was tortured and walled up inside a derelict hospital, strapped down and left to die in the dark. You’d grit your teeth as well.
But something was beginning to nudge at me. I thought about the lesions I’d seen on both victims, where they’d torn their flesh against the straps. Presumably struggling to escape, regardless of the damage and pain they were inflicting on themselves. As terrified as they must have been, it was probably a natural response, although…
I stopped. A natural response…
I picked up one of the woman’s ribs which showed one of the burn marks. It was the same dirty yellow as nicotine on a smoker’s fingers. Small, too, and unusually localized for a burn. My heart had started to beat more quickly as an idea began to form. Jesus, could that be it? Is that what this is?
Putting the rib down, I stripped off my gloves and pulled on a fresh pair from the dispenser. Going to another storage locker, I lifted out the box containing Darren Crossly’s deconstructed skeleton. Mears had packed away the bones with his customary care, and what I was looking for was close to the top. Taking out the skull and mandible, I carried them over to a desktop magnifying lens and switched on its lamp.
Crossly’s teeth were cracked as well.
The knock on the door startled me. I turned towards it, but before I had a chance to speak it had already opened.
It was Ainsley.
‘Morning, Dr Hunter. Mind if I come in?’
Since he already had, there was no point answering. The commander looked fresh and fit, wearing a navy-blue suit with a crisp white shirt and pale tie rather than a uniform. The jacket was cut to flatter his trim physique. Stopping short of where I was working, he raised his hands.
‘I know, I haven’t changed but I won’t touch anything. And I’m not staying.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘There’s been no more crises, if that’s what you mean. I just wanted to stop by and see how you were getting on.’
Even from where he was standing, his aftershave was potent enough to mask the examination suite’s other chemical smells.