Shadows Fall (20 page)

This time it was young Brandon Meyers on the slab. The guy was close to Titus’s age with the same black hair and blue eyes, and he looked just enough like Titus for it to give Charlie the serious creeps. The eyes weren’t as startling against the guy’s pale skin as they were with Titus’s golden complexion, but Brandon still reminded Charlie of his lover. He was sure he only made the connection because he cared about Titus, and though it was ridiculous, it made his skin crawl nonetheless.

Karen was speaking into her recorder, documenting the findings of her initial visual exam. They were the same as with the last four victims—no signs of struggle, no defensive wounds, no goddamn evidence whatsoever. All they had was the fucking mark on his neck, which meant exactly shit if they couldn’t interpret it.

“Victim has a deep lateral laceration on the inside of each wrist which would have likely led to an arterial bleed along with several superficial lacerations on the forearms…” Karen said. “Probable cause of death was exsanguination, will confirm through dissection.”

She looked up from what she was doing and stared at Charlie over her sterile face mask. “What was the blood volume like at the scene?”

“Minimal.”

“Like the previous victims in the case, blood was possibly collected by the assailant… hey, this is interesting.”

Charlie’s head snapped up. “What?”

Karen winced and gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry, Charlie. I meant interesting to a doctor, not a cop. His lymph nodes feel swollen. The inflammatory process could have been triggered by some kind of infection, but given his wounds, it’s unlikely that it contributed to his death…”

Charlie tuned her out. He’d heard all of it before, minus the infection part, which Karen obviously thought had no bearing on his case. What he needed was some new information. He stared over to where David was writing something down on a clipboard, but he wasn’t really paying attention.

Eventually, David put down his paperwork and started suiting up to assist with the internal exam.

“Oh, hey David, before you scrub, can you take a look at my computer for me? It’s fucked again, and I’m expecting lab results from the Talika Ross samples anytime now.”

David rolled his eyes at her back, but his smile was fond. “Sure thing, Doc. Maybe one of these days, I’ll get to dissect something besides your hardware.”

They shared a laugh like it was an old joke, but Charlie didn’t care enough to ask about it. He just watched David sit down at the computer and begin fiddling with it, while Karen finished up the external. She lifted Meyers’ leg and squinted at it. “Some sort of rash here, possibly secondary to the infection…” She moved down to look at the foot. “Some corruption of the nail beds, fungal maybe. Various infections could be the result of an auto-immune disorder or some other immune-compromising process. Charlie, you may want to dig up this one’s medical records as well. Might be something useful there.”

He’d do it, but he was starting to believe they’d never catch a break with this case. He dashed off a quick text to Sonny, hoping to get a jump on the records.

David stood up from Karen’s desk and went over to the sink to scrub. “You’re all set,” he said without turning around.

“Thanks, doll,” she said while starting her ‘Y’ incision. She flicked her eyes back up to Charlie. “David’s a computer whiz.”

Feigning interest, Charlie smiled at David as he took his place beside Karen. “Why’d you choose pathology then?”

David’s eyes lit up, or maybe his whole face did, but all Charlie could see were those dark eyes.

“I’ve always been interested in medicine and biology. Plus, the human body is really just a computer made out of organic material. It’s fascinating, and it allows me to basically combine my interests.”

“Cool,” Charlie replied lamely, and some of the light went out of the kid. He regretted possibly hurting David’s feelings, but Charlie never could understand what would drive a person to want to work with dead bodies all the time. He already knew Karen was bat-shit crazy, so she didn’t count.

Turning away from the gruesome business of removing the ribcage and extracting fluid samples, Charlie checked his phone again. When he saw a text from Titus about their date later, he smiled.

Karen, with her fucking eagle eyes and Jedi senses, caught it. She raised both eyebrows. “Girlfriend, Detective?”

Charlie gave her a half smile and stepped off a cliff. “Nah. Boyfriend.”

He had no idea what had possessed him to just blurt it out like that. Part of him just wanted to say it out loud, and the other part knew that Karen wouldn’t give him shit… any more than usual. David surely would’ve heard, but Charlie didn’t really care what he thought.

They’d all frozen in place. Karen stared and blinked, scalpel poised over the prone body. David’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, and Charlie thought he could fuck right off. Charlie had to force himself not to fidget as he waited for some kind of response.

“Well, okay,” Karen said and went back to work.

“Cool.” David said it in a way that made Charlie think it wasn’t cool at all. It was more like a pointed reflection of Charlie’s lack of interest in his fucking life story.

“Huh…” Karen’s mind was already back on Brandon Meyers, and she’d obviously found something.

“What is it?” Charlie asked, stepping closer to the exam table.

“His lungs—pneumonia. It’s also usually caused by infection. Shit,” she said suddenly. “David stop. Just hang on a second, I have a hunch.” Karen covered up the body and took off her gloves and mask. She handed David one of the vials of blood they’d taken. “Run this down to the lab and tell them to rush a PCR on this.”

David’s eyes widened, but he nodded and took off.

“PCR?” Charlie asked.

Karen didn’t answer. She took a syringe she’d used to extract the blood and placed a single drop on a slide. Using another slide, she scraped across the blood until it was a smear across the glass. She used a tiny portable hairdryer to dry the blood, and then set it in a jar of blue liquid.

“Karen, what’s going on?”

“Just hang on a sec, I need to look at this.”

So he waited. After a few minutes and three different jars of colored liquid, Karen placed the dried slide on the microscope. Then she spent a few
more
minutes studying it. Finally, she looked up.

“I think this kid was HIV positive.”

“Really? How can you tell?”

Karen beckoned Charlie to the microscope, and he looked into the eyepieces. “What am I looking at?”

“You see the cells? They’ve been stained, so they appear reddish-purple.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“You see how some of them are broken, or in halves?”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s from a condition called Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura, or TTP. It’s fairly common in patients with HIV. I suspected some kind of underlying infection with all of the inflammatory symptoms he’s exhibited, so I thought I’d check. We’ll need the PCR results to confirm, but we should operate under the assumption that this victim has some sort of blood-borne immunodeficiency, quite probably HIV.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“It means that if you’re going to be present for this autopsy, you’re going to have to suit up, buddy boy.”

“How about if I just stand over there in the corner?”

Karen shrugged her blue-paper-covered shoulders and cocked her head. “Suit yourself. Transference of blood from that far away is highly unlikely, but not impossible. Consider yourself warned.”

“Duly noted,” Charlie said, settling himself against the counter. He watched as Karen double-gloved and donned a plastic face shield over her surgical mask. Crossing his arms over his chest, he let out a huff of frustration.

“So we have a perfectly healthy young woman, a perfectly healthy child, and a reasonably healthy middle-aged woman… and we have a hermaphroditic teenager in liver failure, and now a young man with HIV and multiple secondary infections. A man. God
damn
it! The
only
verifiable unifying characteristic was that all the victims were female—Dallas Wade notwithstanding. Not only are we not finding any new information, we’re
losing
what little we had.”

Wisely, Karen ignored Charlie, allowing him to get his rant out of his system. He was distracted by a text from Sonny. “Brandon Meyers’ parents are going to release his medical records. Sonny is on his way to the hospital now.”

Karen nodded, then glanced over when David returned to the room.

“The lab is fast-tracking the PCR. They said it will take about eight hours to run,” David said.

The Charlotte police department was lucky enough to have an in-house, state-of-the-art crime lab, so they had a quicker turn-around time than those who had to send off their samples. There was still the backlog of cases to deal with, but high-profile crimes sometimes took precedent over the others. Charlie had never been more grateful for that fact than he was with this case.

The rest of the autopsy was routine and unremarkable. As with the others, Karen determined the cause of death to be hypovolemia due to exsanguination. She posited that the carvings on Brandon Meyers’ neck were likely made by the same type of instrument as the other victims. No new useful information was found.

Charlie barely restrained himself from punching the wall. He had to get out of the fucking morgue; he felt like the sterile walls and the gaping void of information were collapsing in on him, suffocating him. Tugging on the collar of his button down, he pushed off from the counter.

“I’m taking off for a little while. Call me as soon as you have tox results for Talika Ross, or any goddamn other information that will help me do my job.”

Karen narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t comment on his attitude. He knew she was probably just as frustrated, so she understood.

“Will do, detective. Be careful out there.”

Chapter Fourteen

It was early evening when Charlie arrived at Uptown Java, feeling disillusioned and rather worn out. The shop was crowded with weekenders refreshing their caffeine stores for a night out in Center City—the cluster of higher-end restaurants, nightclubs, and trendy stores that kept late hours.

Titus had what seemed to be a full staff behind the counter, including the girl with the psycho boyfriend—Charlie couldn’t remember her name. With her was another young woman and two guys who looked to be in their twenties, and Riot was making drinks in the back.

Charlie looked around until he spotted Titus sitting at a table with Hester. He shuddered as the involuntary memory of Hester catching them in bed surged to the forefront of his mind. Thank God they had only been sleeping. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on who you asked—Charlie was too damn tired to be embarrassed anymore.

He couldn’t remember ever having felt quite so world-weary before. Being surrounded by death made him feel like he was dead himself. Until he laid eyes on Titus. Charlie knew Titus had issues, but the man himself was just so brimming with energy, with life, that he practically glowed. Hell, maybe he
really
did, a little.

Charlie swiped a hand over his face, scratching at his stubbly, emerging beard. Nuts… he was losing his goddamn mind over this case. He really needed to pull himself together. Like a moth to a flame, he drifted toward Titus, hoping the man could help him do just that.

“Hey,” he said when he reached the table. His voice sounded aged even to his own ears.

Titus looked up as if startled, by either the sound or the quality of Charlie’s voice. When he made eye contact, his face became an instant mask of concern.

“Granny, I gotta go,” he said, addressing Hester but not taking his eyes off of Charlie. “Charlie and I had plans.”

Hester was sipping at a large coffee cup like it was her job. She waved them off, barely sparing a glance for either of them. Titus shepherded Charlie through the busy café with a hand at the small of his back. Charlie wasn’t sure how he felt about being led around, but he couldn’t drum up the energy to care.

A glance over his shoulder told him that Hester remained at her table and was joined by Riot. His wry smile had Titus turning around to follow his line of sight.

“Oh, hell,” Titus said with a deep, put-upon sigh. “Fuck it, they’re both adults. They can either get along or scratch each other’s eyes out.”

On that note, he darted around Charlie so that he could open the glass front door for him. “Thanks,” Charlie said, blushing.

Once they were outside on the sidewalk, an awkward silence settled around them. Titus had no way of knowing what was going through Charlie’s head, but he seemed to sense that something was off, so he waited. Charlie felt off-kilter, lost, and he knew Titus could offer him comfort, for which he didn’t know how to ask.

When a quick glance around the immediate area revealed no other cops—who were really the only ones Charlie worried about coming out to—he stepped into Titus’s space. He ran his hands over Titus’s shoulders and around to his back. Those big, odd blue eyes stared up at Charlie in question, but not without welcome.

Decision made, Charlie closed his lips over Titus’s, wishing immediately that they were alone, that he could pour all of his turmoil and uncertainty into the kiss until it bled out of him, and nothing was left but pleasure.