Vanish (12 page)

morgue unit. Cobras, tarantulas. One guy had his girlfriend’s name tattooed on . . .” Yoshima

paused. “You wouldn’t get a needle anywhere near
mine.
”

They pulled off the other sleeve and returned the now-nude corpse to its back. Though still a

young man, his flesh had already amassed a record of trauma. The scars, the tattoo. And now

the final insult: the bullet wound in the left cheek.

Abe moved the magnifier over the wound. “I see a sear zone here.” He glanced at Maura.

“They were in close contact?”

“He was leaning over her bed, trying to restrain her when she fired.”

“Can we see those skull X-rays?”

Yoshima pulled films out of an envelope and clipped them onto the light box. There were two

views, an anteroposteral and a lateral. Abe maneuvered his heavy girth around the table to get a

closer view of the spectral shadows cast by cranium and facial bones. For a moment he said

nothing. Then he looked at Maura. “How many shots did you say she fired?” he asked.

“One.”

“You want to take a look at this?”

Maura crossed to the light box. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I was there when it

happened.”

“There are definitely two bullets here.”

“I
know
that gun fired only once.”

Abe crossed back to the table and stared down at the corpse’s head. At the bullet hole, with its

oval halo of blackened sear zone. “There’s only one entrance wound. If the gun fired twice in

rapid succession, that would explain a single wound.”

“That’s not what I heard, Abe.”

“In all the confusion, you might have missed the fact there were two shots.”

Her gaze was still on the X-rays. Gabriel had never seen Maura look so unsure of herself. At

that moment, she was clearly struggling to reconcile what she remembered with the undeniable

evidence now glowing on the light box.

“Describe what happened in that room, Maura,” Gabriel said.

“There were three of us, trying to restrain her,” she said. “I didn’t see her grab the guard’s gun.

I was focused on the wrist restraint, trying to get it tied. I had just reached for the strap when

the gun went off.”

“And the other witness?”

“He was a doctor.”

“What does he remember? One gunshot or two?”

She turned, her gaze meeting Gabriel’s. “The police never spoke to him.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one knows who he was.” For the first time, he heard the note of apprehension in

her voice. “I’m the only one who seems to remember him.”

Yoshima turned toward the phone. “I’ll call Ballistics,” he said. “They’ll know how many

cartridges were left at the scene.”

“Let’s get started,” said Abe, and he picked up a knife from the instrument tray. There was so

little they knew about this victim. Not his real name or his history or how he came to arrive at

the time and place of his death. But when this postmortem was over, they would know him

more intimately than anyone had before.

With the first cut, Abe made his acquaintance.

His blade sliced through skin and muscle, scraping across ribs as he made the Y incision, his

cuts angling from the shoulders to join at the xiphoid notch, followed by a single slice down

the abdomen, with only a blip of a detour around the umbilicus. Unlike Maura’s deft and

elegant dissections, Abe worked with brutal efficiency, his huge hands moving like a butcher’s,

the fingers too fat to be graceful. He peeled back flesh from bone, then reached for the heavyduty garden pruners. With each squeeze, he snapped through a rib. A man could spend years

developing his physique, as this victim surely had, straining against pulleys and barbells. But

all bodies, muscular or not, yield to a knife and a pruner.

Abe cut through the last rib and lifted off the triangle containing the sternum. Deprived of its

bony shield, the heart and lungs now lay exposed to his blade, and he reached in to resect them,

his arm sinking deep into the chest cavity.

“Dr. Bristol?” said Yoshima, hanging up the phone. “I just spoke to Ballistics. They said that

CSU only turned in one cartridge.”

Abe straightened, his gloves streaked with blood. “They didn’t find the second one?”

“That’s all they received in the lab. Just one.”

“That’s what I heard, Abe,” said Maura. “One gunshot.”

Gabriel crossed to the light box. He stared at the films with a growing sense of dismay. One

shot, two bullets, he thought. This may change everything. He turned and looked at Abe. “I

need to look at those bullets.”

“Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”

“I think I know why there are two of them.”

Abe nodded. “Let me finish here first.” Swiftly his blade sliced through vessels and ligaments.

He lifted out the heart and lungs, to be weighed and inspected later, then moved on to the

abdomen. All looked normal. These were the healthy organs of a man whose body would have

served him well for decades to come.

He moved, at last, to the head.

Gabriel watched, unflinching, as Abe sliced through the scalp and peeled it forward, collapsing

the face, exposing cranium.

Yoshima turned on the saw.

Even then, Gabriel remained focused, through the whine of the saw, the grinding of bone,

moving even closer to catch his first glimpse of the cavity. Yoshima pried off the skullcap and

blood trickled out. Abe reached in with the scalpel to free the brain. As he pulled it from the

cranial cavity, Gabriel was right beside him, holding a basin to catch the first bullet that tumbled

out.

He took one glance at it under the magnifying lens, then said: “I need to see the other one.”

“What are you thinking, Agent Dean?”

“Just find the other bullet.” His brusque demand took everyone by surprise, and he saw Abe

and Maura exchange startled glances. He was out of patience; he needed to know.

Abe set the resected brain on the cutting board. Studying the X-rays, he pinpointed the second

bullet’s location, and with the first slice, he found it, buried within a pocket of hemorrhaged

tissue.

“What are you looking for?” Abe asked, as Gabriel rotated the two bullets beneath the

magnifying lens.

“Same caliber. Both about eighty grams . . .”

“They should be the same. They were fired from the same weapon.”

“But these are not identical.”

“What?”

“Look at how the second bullet sits on its base. It’s subtle, but you can see it.”

Abe leaned forward, frowning through the lens. “It’s a little off-kilter.”

“Exactly. It’s at an angle.”

“The impact could have deformed it.”

“No, it was manufactured this way. At a nine-degree cant, to send it in a slightly different

trajectory from the first. Two missiles, designed for controlled dispersion.”

“There was only one cartridge.”

“And only one entrance wound.”

Maura was frowning at the skull X-rays hanging on the light box. At the two bullets, glowing

brightly against the fainter glow of cranium. “A duplex round,” she said.

“That’s why you only heard one shot fired,” said Gabriel. “Because there
was
only one shot.”

Maura was silent for a moment, her gaze on the skull films. Dramatic as they were, the X-rays

did not reveal the track of devastation those two bullets had left in soft tissue. Ruptured vessels,

mangled gray matter. A lifetime’s worth of memories atomized.

“Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage,” she said.

“That’s their selling point.”

“Why would a security guard arm himself with bullets like these?”

“I think we’ve already established this man was not a hospital employee. He walked in with a

fake uniform, a fake name tag, armed with bullets designed not just to maim, but to kill. There’s

only one good explanation I can come up with.”

Maura said, softly: “The woman was meant to die.”

For a moment no one spoke.

It was the voice of Maura’s secretary that suddenly broke the silence. “Dr. Isles?” she said,

over the intercom.

“Yes, Louise?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you and Agent Dean should know . . .”

“What is it?”

“Something’s happening across the street.”

They ran outside, into heat so thick that Gabriel felt as though he’d just plunged into a hot bath.

Albany Street was in chaos. The officer manning the police line was shouting, “Stay back! Stay

back!” while reporters pressed forward, a determined amoeba threatening to ooze through the

barriers. Sweating Tactical Ops officers were scrambling to tighten the perimeter, and one of

them glanced back, toward the crowd. Gabriel saw the look of confusion on his face.

That officer doesn’t know what’s going on, either.

He turned to a woman standing a few feet away. “What happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cops just went crazy and started toward the building.”

“Was there gunfire? Did you hear shots?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I was just walking to the clinic when I heard them all start yelling.”

“It’s nuts out here,” said Abe. “No one knows anything.”

Gabriel ran toward the command and control trailer, but a knot of reporters blocked his way. In

frustration, he grabbed a TV cameraman’s arm and pulled him around. “What happened?”

“Hey, man. Ease off.”

“Just tell me what happened!”

“They had a breach. Walked right through their goddamn perimeter.”

“The shooter
escaped
?”

“No. Someone got
in.
”

Gabriel stared at him. “Who?”

“No one knows who he is.”

Half the ME’s staff was gathered in the conference room, watching the TV. The set was tuned

to the local news; on the screen was a blond reporter named Zoe Fossey, standing right in front

of the police barrier. In the background cops milled among parked vehicles and voices were

yelling in confusion. Gabriel glanced out the window at Albany Street, and saw the same scene

they were now watching on TV.

“. . . extraordinary development, clearly something no one expected. The man walked right

through this perimeter behind me, just strolled into that controlled area, completely nonchalant,

as though he belonged there. That may have been what caught the police off guard. Plus, the

man was heavily armed and wearing a black uniform very much like those you see behind me.

It would have been easy to mistake him as one of these Tactical Operations officers . . .”

Abe Bristol gave a
can-you-believe-this?
snort. “Guy walked right in off the street, and they let

him through!”

“. . . we’re told there is also an inner police perimeter. But it’s inside the lobby, which we can’t

see from here. We haven’t heard yet if this man penetrated the second perimeter. But when you

see how easily he walked right through the outer line, you can imagine he must have caught the

police inside the building by surprise as well. I’m sure they were focused on containing the

hostage taker. They probably didn’t expect a gunman to walk
in.
”

“They should have known,” said Gabriel, staring in disbelief at the TV. “They should have

expected this.”

“. . . it’s been twenty minutes now, and the man has not re-emerged. There was initial

speculation that he’s some self-styled Rambo, trying to single-handedly launch a rescue

operation. Needless to say, the consequences could be disastrous. But so far, we’ve heard no

gunfire, and we’ve seen no indication that his entry into the building has touched off any

violence.”

The anchorman cut in: “Zoe, we’re going to run that footage again, so that the viewers who’ve

just joined us can see the startling development. It took place about twenty minutes ago. Our

cameras caught it live as it happened . . .”

Zoe Fossey’s image was replaced by a video clip. It was a long-shot view up Albany Street,

almost the same view they could see out the conference room window. At first, Gabriel did not

even know what he was supposed to focus on. Then an arrow appeared on screen, a helpful

graphic added by the TV station, pointing to a dark figure moving along the lower edge. The

man walked purposefully past police cars, past the command post trailer. None of the cops

standing nearby tried to stop the intruder, though one did glance uncertainly in his direction.

“Here we’ve magnified the image for a better look at this fellow,” the anchorman said. The

view zoomed in and froze, the intruder’s back now filling the screen. “He seems to be carrying

a rifle, as well as some sort of backpack. Those dark clothes do blend in with all the other cops

standing around, which is why our cameraman at the time didn’t realize what he was seeing. At

first glance, you’d assume this is a Tactical Operations uniform he’s wearing. But on closer

inspection, you can see there is no insignia on the back to indicate he’s part of the team.”

The video clip rolled forward a few frames and again froze, this time on the man’s face, as he

turned to glance over his shoulder. He had receding dark hair and a narrow, almost gaunt face.

An unlikely Rambo. That one long-distance frame was the only glimpse the camera caught of

his features. In the next frame, his back was once again to the camera. The video clip continued,

tracking the man’s progress toward the building, until he vanished through the lobby doors.

Zoe Fossey was back onscreen, microphone in hand. “We’ve tried to get some official