The Cold Room. J.T. Ellison

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СКАЧАТЬ arrived at Sam’s office well before the piece ended. She sat in the car for a few minutes, letting it play out. Assuming it was the killer’s music, why had he chosen the New World Symphony? Perhaps that was a message, too. If this was the same man who had committed the murders in Italy and England, why was he here in Tennessee? Did he think of it as the new world? It was such a leap, a serial killer crossing the Atlantic to start killing in her backyard with a slightly different M.O. That seemed so highly unlikely, yet Baldwin was struck by the pictures of the scene. The similarities were unmistakable. She groaned aloud when the next thought crossed her mind. Was it a copycat?

      Like she needed another one of those.

      ViCAP, ViCAP, ViCAP. That was the first thing she’d do when she left the postmortem. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to come. Damn Julia Page and her prescient comments.

      Abandoning the nano and her thoughts, Taylor entered the building on Gass Street. She couldn’t help but sigh. The scents were so familiar she sometimes didn’t smell them, but today she felt like she’d walked into her high school biology lab. The pervasive, artificial smell of formalin, the reek of death. It was too much to bear. She wondered how Sam did it sometimes, how she could cross the threshold of this place, day after day, and work. She left the twins at home with a nanny and became another person for ten hours a day.

      Taylor wished she could do that as well. Just morph, become someone else, someone who didn’t have to think about death all the time. She knew that would never happen. She wouldn’t trade the idea of working with the police for anything. It was important to her to actually be who she said she was, to be the person she’d set out to be in the beginning. Four deaths on her conscience, cold-blooded murders, yet all justified. She was a cop. It was her job. These were the things that she had to do to survive, and to make the people around her, the strangers she loved, safe.

      The desk was manned by Kris, a smiley girl with butter-yellow hair and too-big implants. She’d gotten them recently and they hadn’t dropped yet; they stood out on her chest like overfull water balloons. She waved at Taylor and the breasts bobbled joyfully. Taylor waved back and moved to the door that led to the biovestibule that separated the administrative offices from the gut work. She swiped her card and the lock disengaged.

      The locker room was empty. She covered her clothes with surgical scrubs, slipped on blue plastic clogs, then went through the smaller air lock into the autopsy suite. Renn McKenzie was sitting on a stool, gazing anywhere but at the action. Sunlight from the skylights shone down on his hair, making the blond strands at his temples glint silver.

      Sam was washing the body of a teenager. She was reverent and slow; Taylor could feel her intensity, aching with the need to make it right for this young man. It was heartbreaking, watching her brush the hair back from his forehead, a thick shock of brunette shot through with lighter streaks of caramel, like he’d been in the sun for days on end. Closer inspection showed Taylor that his head was lying flat against the plastic tray. No, that wasn’t right. It was just his face, straight on the table. There was nothing to the back of his head, he was practically two-dimensional.

      “What happened to him?”

      Sam started, looked at Taylor guiltily. Caught in the act of caring for her subject. When she realized it was just Taylor, she relaxed and went back to stroking the boy’s hair. Only then did Taylor see she was actually using a fine-tooth comb to gather particles.

      “Do you remember Alex, from sophomore year? My French tutor?” Sam asked.

      Taylor remembered. How could she ever forget? “Yes, I do.”

      “Our boy here took a shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He did this to himself. The dummy. Just like Alex did.”

      Sam’s voice was thick with emotion. Alex had been a bit more than her tutor. Sam had nursed a horrid crush on him for ages. Alex hadn’t ever reciprocated her puppy love. He was a sad boy. Dark black hair and matching eyes, hidden scars inside the irises.

      When they were in tenth grade, Alex could stand the torture of life no longer. He wrote a long note, explaining his actions, loaded his father’s shotgun, slipped it between his lips, and shot himself. He had pulled the trigger with his toes.

      It was inconceivable to them, at the time. They sat around in friends’ houses, numb, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, pondering. What could have been so bad in a fifteen-year-old’s life? How had Alex’s world been destroyed to the point he felt the need to take his own life? His note explained his rationale, his father’s coldness, the inability to please. Taylor always suspected it was more than that, but never had the proof.

      Sadness overwhelmed her. She looked at the young man on the table, wondered what drove him to despair.

      “Do you know why?” Taylor asked. “What might have pushed him to this? Was there a note?”

      “No, there wasn’t. But there was a lot of anal tearing. It was pretty apparent that he was being abused, for a prolonged period of time. I’m not sure exactly what his story is, but he doesn’t have biological parents in the state. He was a part of the foster system.”

      Taylor felt the fury bubble up from within her soul. “So we have foster kids being raped who kill themselves with shotguns now. Jesus, Sam.”

      McKenzie spun on his stool and faced them. “I had a friend kill herself. It was awful.” He spun away and Taylor met Sam’s eyes. That sentiment they understood all too well.

      Sam signaled to one of her assistants. “Could you finish this for me? I’ll be back to post him next.”

      She walked two tables over to the prepped body of the victim from last night, stripped off her gloves and replaced them with a fresh set.

      McKenzie followed them reluctantly. “The prints are back. Her name’s Allegra Johnson.”

      Taylor looked at the girl, so insubstantial. The steel table dwarfed her, like it would a child. The wound tract from the knife that had been buried in the girl’s chest glared under the lights, an angry slit.

      “She was in the system?”

      “Yeah. Solicitation. Shocking. Skinny girl like this—drugs and prostitution were my first guess,” he answered.

      Sam and Taylor’s eyes met again. Taylor took a deep breath. “McKenzie, kill the sarcasm. You can never assume, or guess, when it comes to a victim. You end up planting ideas in your head about them, and then you try to make the crime fit your preconceived notion of what makes sense to you. There could be other explanations for her physical appearance. She could very well be ill, or homeless, unable to feed herself. This could have been a crime of opportunity. We don’t know yet why she was chosen. We won’t know until we do a thorough victimology, okay?”

      McKenzie’s brows furrowed for a moment while he thought it out. What she said must have made sense, because his forehead smoothed and he nodded. “Okay,” he said. Maybe training him wasn’t going to be as hard as she expected.

      Sam cleared her throat, and another tech, a quiet man named Stuart Charisse with incongruously lighthearted curly hair, appeared to help her. He started taking pictures while Sam turned on the microphone attached to her face shield, and started the case rundown. Taylor listened with half an ear as Sam gave the details—date, time, who was present, all the minutiae that was necessary to the formal autopsy process. McKenzie stood next to her, bopping his head up and down in an internal rhythm to Sam’s dispassionate recitation.

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