Over Her Head (3 page)

To group: Budz

From: JohnnysGrrl

5-0 found her. Shut up.

T
he thing Nick
liked most about the folks who worked in the county coroner’s office was their sense of humor. He supposed that it was a
defense mechanism more than anything—you had to find a way to regain your emotional balance when you were faced with the sometimes
grisly end result of simply being human.

As he was about to do today.

He paused at the door and pulled a pair of blue paper booties out of the receptacle next to it. He snapped the fragile protection
over his shoes and then donned a white apron. He looked like the guy behind the meat counter at the local grocery—if you didn’t
count the uniform and the radio clipped to his shoulder.

Lisa Nguyen looked up when he pushed open the door. Her white overalls were still spotless, which meant he was on time and
she wouldn’t threaten him with her rose loppers for being late to the autopsy.

He had a healthy respect for a woman who had a pair of rose loppers and wasn’t afraid to use them.

“I could have done without this today.” She waited for him to snap on a pair of latex gloves and take his place at the end
of the table on which the girl’s body lay. “She can’t be much older than my Jessica. Makes me think about things I usually
manage to block.”

“She was fourteen.” He schooled himself to impassivity as he looked down at the girl. Her eyes were closed, all expression
wiped away by the finality of death. Her smooth oval face had a chin he could imagine might get pretty stubborn, but her mouth,
which had been outlined in some dark lipstick, now worn away, held a heartbreaking innocence. “Some days the thought of being
a parent scares me.”

“It should.” As gently as if the girl had merely been sleeping, Lisa touched her cheek. “You risk your heart every single
day. I hope I never have to face what this poor child’s mother is facing right now.” She glanced up at him. “If we get too
cavalier about death in this job, it’s time to find another one.”

On the basis of the school ID in a folder in her back pocket, the coroner himself had gone out to notify her next of kin.
The girl’s clothes and any jewelry she’d worn had already been processed by the technician, and were bagged and waiting in
the property closet for her family to pick up.

There were bags in that closet that had been there for years. Maybe the families had never been able to face that final duty.
Or maybe there were no families to come. But there they sat, those sad plastic bags holding the last things in which a human
being had seen value.

Nick thought of the coroner going out to find one of these families. He supposed he should be thankful for small mercies.
His experience in informing parents that their kid had been picked up for reckless driving wasn’t quite the same as the coroner’s
having to tell them their child would never come home.

As the deputy first at the scene, though, it was his job to watch the autopsy and hear the preliminary findings. He glanced
around the antiseptic room with its three autopsy bays, racks of tools, white linoleum, and bright, no-nonsense lighting.

Aha. There it was.

A metal bucket sat under a workbench about three feet away. Just in case. He stood a little straighter. As a point of pride
he’d make sure he didn’t use it, but still, he felt better knowing it was there.

Lisa made notes in a spiral notebook as she worked, but directed comments over her shoulder to him. “There’s a lot of lividity
in the thighs and chest, and grains of sand everywhere in her clothing. Was she found lying on her stomach?”

“Yes. On a sandbar in the middle of the river.” The contents of his initial report remained vivid in his mind. “Her feet were
bare when she was found. She might have been abducted from her bedroom, though she was fully dressed.”

“Impact with the water and any time in the current could have forced her shoes and socks off,” Lisa said. “It’s not likely
she was an abductee—she was wearing a jacket and a scarf was knotted around her neck. Her clothes weren’t damaged much. Given
the riverbed and the brush along the banks, I could speculate that whatever happened to her happened fairly close to where
she was discovered.”

“Maybe she fell or jumped off the bridge.”

“Now
that
I should be able to tell you pretty shortly. But in my experience, jumpers take off their coats before they go in. Heaven
knows why.”

“Any ideas about time of death?”

“Uh, last night?”

“Very funny.”

“Nick, you know this isn’t
CSI
. We can’t pinpoint it to the hour. Not to mention that the temperature of the water makes my thermometer readings meaningless.”

“Ballpark?”

Lisa sighed. “Ballpark—last night. No earlier.” She hovered over the girl’s head and touched her cheek, this time to indicate
the injuries rather than mourn. “Bruising here, too, consistent with a blow. A slap, maybe. Uh-oh.” Her fingers, gloved in
thin latex, moved through the girl’s hair. “This is nasty. Skull fracture. A deep one. I’ll know more when I examine her brain.”

Nick glanced at the bucket, then away.

He hung on to his cool as Lisa completed the external exam and moved on to the part with the rose loppers. “This is interesting.”
After thirty minutes of careful work, Lisa’s white overalls were covered in stains. “Water in the lungs. Means she was breathing
when she went in. We have a couple of ounces here. I’ll tell you in a couple of minutes whether the skull fracture happened
before, after, or during.”

Nick concentrated on the bucket for the next few minutes, until Lisa spoke again.

“You okay, Deputy?”

He nodded.

“You sure? ’Cause I can give you all the details in my report.”

“Thanks, but I need the preliminary findings today. We had a report of a disturbance on the Susquanny Bridge last night, and
I think it might have been connected to our girl here.”

“Is Forrest on it?”

“As we speak.” In their county, the coroner’s investigators processed the crime scene, not the cops. They had specialized
training—and an eye for minuscule detail that often meant the difference between securing or losing a conviction. “Depending
on what he finds up there, we might have a homicide on our hands, not just an accident.”

“Well, from the look of the marks on her face, and what seems to be finger-shaped bruising on her chest, I’d say the chances
are pretty good.”

Nick winced as the whine of the Stryker saw drowned out her voice. Lisa made a series of notes, then glanced at him again.
“Water in the cranial cavity, too. So the blow to the head happened before she went in. And it’s a funny shape.”

“Yeah?” He risked a look.

She opened her thumb and forefinger into an L, then pointed. “See this? A right angle. Blunt trauma, like from the corner
of a brick, only bigger.”

He thought for a second. “Have you ever been up on that bridge? Maybe when you were a kid and wanted to try diving in?”

She gave him the kind of look big sisters have given clueless little brothers for millennia, and shook her head. “Do I look
like I have a death wish? Besides, I didn’t grow up here. My folks moved out to the San Joaquin Valley in California when
they left Vietnam. Not a lot of bridges you’d want to jump off out there.”

“It’s like a rite of passage around here. Anyway, what I was getting at is that the undercarriage of the bridge is made of
these big wood beams.” He made a square in the air with his hands. “Twelve by twelve at least. Would this”—he indicated the
angle-shaped depression—“be consistent with one of those beams?”

Lisa nodded. “I’d say yes. Look at this.” She indicated a discolored area on the brain where the dura mater had been pierced
and shredded. “Subdural hematoma. Lots of blood. Whatever hit her, it rendered her unconscious immediately. I’d say Forrest
ought to know soon, if he hasn’t examined the area already.”

“I’ll drive out there myself as soon as we’re done.”

“For your purposes, we are.” Lisa pulled her mask down over her chin, so that it hung around her neck. “My preliminary findings
are that the cause of death is drowning, precipitated by blunt trauma to the head, sometime in the last twelve hours. That
good enough for you?”

“As my grandma says, it’s good enough to be going on with. Thanks, Lisa.”

“No problem. It surprises me to get a case like this. Mostly all we get are indigents and traffic fatalities. This is a little
uglier.”

“If we’re talking homicide, it’s going to get a lot uglier.”

“Job security,” Lisa quipped and turned back to the body. “Come on, darling,” she said softly. “Let’s finish up, take our
organ samples, and put you back together for your family, okay?”

Nick left her to it. He passed the bucket without giving it a look, removed the apron and booties, and tossed them in the
HazMat bin. Then he walked with measured steps out the back doors and into the coroner’s gated parking lot behind the building.

And that’s where he lost this morning’s bagel and peanut butter, one orange, and four cups of coffee.

T
he unmarked SUV
belonging to the coroner’s investigator was already parked on the bridge when Nick pulled up twenty minutes later. He waved
to the guy pulling traffic duty on the afternoon shift. The bridge was down to one lane around the cones and crime-scene tape,
and the deputy guided people past.

Nick made a turn in the parking lot of the Stop-N-Go and pulled up behind the gray 4x4. There was no sign of Forrest, but
a security line was tied to a strut, and it was taut where it ran over the rail.

He leaned over. “Hey down there! It’s Nick.”

Ten or twelve feet below, Forrest looked up and sketched a salute with the small knife in his right hand. “Hey.” Tethered
to the rail for safety, he balanced on one of the joists that supported the roadbed, where creosote and decades-old bird droppings
had permeated the wood.

“Lisa told me I’d find you out here. Got anything?”

“You mean besides a bad need for a hot cup of coffee? Man, I am claiming hazard pay for this. The wind comes howling under
here like you wouldn’t believe. I think my butt is frostbit.”

“Quit complaining. It’s good for you to get off the phone and out into the field once in a while.”

“Been lucky, I guess. Not a lot of homicide going on in this county. Not like Pittsburgh. I couldn’t get away from there fast
enough.”

Nick glanced down at the heavy beam that seemed to be the focus of Forrest’s equipment. “Homicide?”

The investigator nodded. “Not conclusive until I talk to Lisa, but definitely suspicious.” Carefully, he loosened a wide sliver
of wood from the end of the beam, and slipped it into an evidence bag. Then he stretched up to hand it to Nick.

The bit of wood was stained with a dark, sticky substance, and even without a magnifier, Nick could see hair embedded in it.

Forrest handed up his heavy-duty digital Canon EOS, then hefted himself up to road level and over the rail before he unsnapped
the security line. “Over there.” He nodded at the plank decking a few feet away that formed the walkway for pedestrians next
to the asphalt, directly over the beam. “Scuff marks and blood. If she’d been a jumper, there would have been footprints on
the rail, nice and clean. But it looks like a scuffle took place.”

Nick glanced at the Stop-N-Go at the far end of the bridge. “I’ll talk to the staff at the store and see if anyone saw anything.”
He leaned over and looked down, past the beam to the water swirling thirty feet below. “So she gets pushed or someone lands
a blow. Hits her head on the beam hard enough to fracture her skull—and lights out. Lands in the water unconscious and drowns.”

Forrest nodded. He finished coiling his line and stripped off his gloves. “Sounds about right, from what we can see here.
What does Lisa say?”

“Cause of death is drowning, precipitated by blunt trauma to the head.”

“Question is, who pushed her, and did they mean to do it?”

“That is the question, all right.”

Shoving his equipment into the back of the SUV, Forrest spoke over his shoulder. “That’s why I didn’t go into police work,
see. It’s my job to find out how. It’s
your
job to find out why and who.”

And he would. The memory of that still face, the long-lashed eyes closed in permanent sleep, was probably going to haunt Nick
long after he found the person responsible for leaving her that way.

T
he elementary school’s
classes ended at 2:45, which meant that if Tim didn’t have band practice, or if he and his buddies didn’t find some piece
of architecture to try their skate-boards on, he hit the front door at home by 3:15. Today, Laurie’s hug had a little more
force behind it than usual, and she took a moment to thank God that her baby was home, alive and well.

“Mom, you’re squishing me.”

She released him and he tossed his backpack onto the floor by the door on his way into the kitchen.

“I’m just glad to see you, that’s all.”

To the ten-year-old mind this was probably just motherly weirdness, since, after all, they saw each other day in and day out.
But Laurie felt better for having said it. In fact, she was going to start saying it a lot more after this.

At four o’clock she glanced at the clock on the microwave. Anna would be home any second, and she needed to make a decision.
Should she ask her if any of her classmates were missing? Should they discuss the girl’s death in a family enclave? Because
of course she had to tell her kids before anyone asked them about it in the hallway at school.

Which, she supposed, was pretty much a decision. She’d bring it up when they’d eaten supper, before they scattered. A quiet
word with Colin beforehand would ensure he didn’t spill the beans before she was ready.

Her next glance at the clock in the living room said it was 4:15. Anna was probably walking home with a gaggle of her friends
and dawdling in front of some boy’s house. Or maybe they’d stopped in at the drugstore to try out makeup.