Confessions. JoAnn Ross

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      Chapter Four

      The medical examiner’s office was in the basement of the town’s eighty-year-old redbrick courthouse. Since the ancient elevator tended to be iffy, Trace decided to skip it.

      As Mariah accompanied him down first the narrow flight of stairs and then the long, poorly lit hallway, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that none of it was real, that she was plotting out a script.

      Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is killed in an isolated ranch house during a thunderstorm, she set up the scenario. With the help of the murdered woman’s sister, an award-winning television writer, the crime is solved, the politician husband is arrested and justice wins in the end.

      No, Mariah considered. That plot left the wife still dead. She erased the mental slate in her mind and began again.

      Beautiful wife of charismatic senator is shot and wounded during a thunderstorm. While she lies in a coma, dogged small-town sheriff and glamorous television writer, estranged from her family for years, set out to prove the husband guilty.

      The smoking gun is found. The senator gets a pair of silver bracelets and a ride in the back of a patrol car to jail, where he breaks down and confesses.

      His wife wakes up in the hospital, seemingly no worse for her harrowing experience and requests a cup of herbal tea and a divorce. The sisters embrace. The music swells.

      “Whatever would I have done without you?” the older sister asks tearfully.

      The younger one shrugs. She is not only glamorous and famous, but modest as well. “Hey,” she says, “that’s what sisters are for.”

      So, in sixty minutes, minus commercials and a network newsbreak, justice is served, a family is reunited, and the story ends on a happy, upbeat note.

      It was a nice scenario, Mariah considered with an inward sigh. Too bad things didn’t work that way in real life.

      Unfortunately, there was one thing that was exactly like it appeared on television. And that was the morgue.

      Trace flipped the switch beside the door. The rows of fluorescent tubes flickered to life, casting a bright, but complexion-draining light over the scene. Cool air was blowing from the vent above the loading dock door of the windowless room. “The doc’s probably out getting breakfast.”

      “I’m amazed he could eat.”

      Trace’s only response was a shrug. Taking a new cop out for a Denny’s Grand Slam after he’d watched his first autopsy had long been viewed as a rite of passage.

      A metal table stood in the center of the linoleum floor. Beside the table was a scale, like that used in supermarkets to weigh apples and oranges. Although a camera was fixed to the ceiling overhead, allowing photographs of record to be taken, the room lacked the overhead microphone that would allow the forensic pathologist to record his findings for later transcription. Instead, metal clipboards hung from hooks on the bilious green wall.

      Between the clipboards and the old-fashioned black wall phone was a cork bulletin board covered with official memoranda, some of which, Mariah noted absently, were years old. Against the opposite wall, rather than the tidy steel compartments she routinely wrote into her scripts, was a walk-in freezer.

      Trace gave her a judicious look. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

      “I’m sure.”

      Watching her wrap her arms around herself, Trace suspected that it was not the cold she’d find inside the freezer Mariah Swann was trying to ward off, but the iciness that had taken hold of her heart.

      She took a deep breath. “Let’s get it over with.”

      Mariah had witnessed death before. She had even, on one memorable occasion, in the name of research, sat in on an autopsy. She had to leave the room to throw up when the pathologist popped the top of the skull with a tool that resembled a crowbar, but so had the detective assigned to the case.

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