Cold as Hell (Haven’s Rock #3)

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I’m upstairs when Anders arrives to help Dalton with Lynn. I’ll meet them at the clinic. Part of me doesn’t want to. Part of me actually wants to use the excuse that I need to be off my feet. Which would be an excuse. I’m fine, and I can sit at the clinic. I don’t want to go because exhaustion is tripping my mental circuits, and I’m caught in a loop of self-blame.

If only we’d known Lynn was missing sooner.

If only we’d started searching sooner.

Logically, I realized that the first thing wouldn’t have happened because of Grant, and the second wouldn’t have saved her, because she’d been dead before anyone realized she was missing. But, like I said, I’m exhausted, and when I get tired, my brain can revert to old habits.

I screwed up.

I wasn’t good enough.

I need to do better.

So, yep, what I want is to stay home and huddle under the blankets and feel sorry for myself, as shameful as that is to admit. Fortunately, I know April needs me. While Anders can help with the postmortem examination, I’m the one who did the preliminary one, and so she needs to speak to me.

Anders and Dalton carry Lynn through the forest, in hopes they still won’t be spotted. I suppose we really should tell her husband she’s dead, but considering it’s his fault we didn’t search for her in time, I’m in no rush to notify Grant.

I head straight through town to the clinic. A few people are out, mostly shoveling the road, and the distant rumble of the ATV says someone is already clearing snow. Someone does head my way, but apparently, my gait says I am on a mission, and since the pregnant chick is beelining for the medical clinic, no one is going to stop her.

I enter through the front. April is with someone, her muffled voice audible through the closed door. A moment later, the door opens and Grant steps out. Seeing me, he stops short. I brace for him to ask about Lynn. I won’t lie to him. That crosses a line. But he only lifts a bandaged hand and says, “Ax slipped.” Then he starts to pass me before stopping and turning.

“Any sign of my runaway wife?” he says.

My jaw clenches, and I know I should tell the truth, but the flippant way he asks—and the fact that it seems an afterthought—means I can’t bring myself to do it. If I do, I won’t deliver the news with an ounce of compassion, and I’d regret that later.

“We’ll have an update soon,” I say, and brush past him.

“I still think she’s with Thierry,” he calls as the door shuts behind me.

I walk into the exam room and take a deep breath. April is putting away a gauze roll and doesn’t turn as she says, “He will be filing an accident report. I suspect he wants a few days off work. Do not give it to him. It is a minor cut, and he did not even bother to seek medical attention until now, when he seems to have realized it could earn him time off.”

I open the door to check the waiting room.

“He’s gone, Casey,” April says. “I would not have said anything until I heard the door shut.”

“It’s not that.” I head past her to unlock the rear door as I hear a boot on the back steps. “We found Lynn.”

She jerks up. “She’s injured? Why didn’t you radio—?”

“Because she isn’t injured, April. She’s dead.” I steel myself. “Hypothermia.”

I’m braced for comment, because that voice of recrimination in my head doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s from our parents, particularly my father, and… it’s also from my sister.

It’s easy to blame the autism. She doesn’t realize when she’s being painfully honest. But when it comes to how children treat younger siblings, they pick up cues from their parents, and the autism only kept April from realizing that it wasn’t her job to teach me by forcing my nose into my mistakes.

Yet part of that damaged relationship lies on my shoulders, too, especially when I struggle to acknowledge that she’s no longer the girl she had been. So I’m braced for her to say we should have been searching for Lynn sooner, and she only says, “I’m sorry.”

I nod, and my eyes dampen. I shake it off and open the back door just as Anders reaches for the knob on the other side. He meets my eyes and gives a tight nod, acknowledging what we found and understanding how I’ll feel about it. No, understanding how Dalton and I will both feel about it, because Dalton might be quieter in his self-blame, but he’s asking himself the same questions.

What did we do wrong?

How can we do better?

I back up, and the two men bring Lynn in. She’s wrapped in a sheet, and April makes a noise of obvious disapproval.

“I wrapped her once we knew it wasn’t murder,” I say. “I wasn’t concerned about fibers.”

“I believe,” she says, struggling to keep her tone gentle, “that making the determination regarding murder is my job.”

“Agreed, but I still made the call on the sheet. There was a chance someone would see the guys carrying her, and given her state, I didn’t want that.”

April frowns. “Because she’s dead?”

“That and…” I motion as Dalton unwraps the sheet.

“You undressed her?” April says.

“No, we found her like that. We first found a few pieces of her clothing.” I explain our theory of paradoxical undressing.

“Oh,” she says. “I have heard of that. The science is sound, I suppose.”

“So can we stop judging how I chose to transport her and move on to the examination?”

“I apologize.” Her tone is not exactly apologetic, but I’ve learned to live with that. There are many things about my sister I’m learning to live with, because forcing her to act in a way I understand is as wrong as her forcing me to act in a way she understands.

Dalton carries over a stool as I move up to the exam table. I accept it along with his help getting up. Then he melts into the background, and Anders begins preparing April’s implement tray as I explain my findings.

The first thing April does is check those wounds. She repeats the same process I did, pulling apart the edges and peering down. She also uses a light and a magnifier to be sure of what she’s seeing.

“Minor damage to the intestines,” she says. “Consistent with a bite. For such shallow wounds to have caused death, they would have needed to be septic, but the wounds were clearly inflicted postmortem.”

She moves to Lynn’s scalp, the next most likely place for me to have missed something. She takes more time than I did here, but comes away with the same conclusion.

“No evidence of contusions,” she says.

“And if we did find one, it could be related to hypothermia,” I say. “She becomes disoriented, trips and bangs her head.”

“Yes. I will accept that I see no signs of trauma. Concluding hypothermia is difficult. There are signs I would expect to see in an autopsy, but the lack of them doesn’t preclude hypothermia. I presume you will still like the autopsy conducted.”

I nod. “Can you start by checking for Wischnewski spots? If we find them, we have our answer. If not, we’ll need a full autopsy.”

I turn to Dalton. “Are we notifying Grant first?”

“Can he stop us from autopsying her?” Dalton asks.

“He can try, and ethically we might need to listen, but they signed away those rights when they came here. We are allowed to conduct an autopsy, just as we would down south if we had reason to suspect her death wasn’t from hypothermia.”

“Go ahead then. I’ll deal with Grant.”

Wischnewski spots are black dots on the gastric mucosa—a layer of mucous membrane in the stomach. They’re found in many cases of hypothermia… and not often found otherwise. That’s what April starts with, partly because the wolverine damage means Lynn’s abdomen has already been opened.

April finds the spots, and we take turns looking at them.

“Hypothermia, then,” April says. “I do not see any reason to continue the autopsy, unless you have concerns.”

“I don’t,” I say.

Anders clears his throat. I glance over.

“You… might want to look at her left wrist, Case,” he says.

I frown. We all look toward Lynn’s wrist. At first, I see nothing. Then, as I move closer, I pick up what looks like a very faint abrasion on the tender underside.

“Shit,” I say. “I didn’t see that.”

“Neither did I until a moment ago,” Anders says. “I suspect something about the lighting—or maybe the body warming up—made it show up.”

It really is faint. Only a thin line along the underside. It could be nothing more than the cuff of Lynn’s glove chafing the skin, but I quickly move to her other wrist. While I don’t see anything on the underside, when I lift it and use a light, I can make out an abrasion along the bony part where something rubbed enough to scrape the skin.

I hurry to her ankle.

Anders is already there with another light. “I don’t see anything. Take a look.”

I do, with both the light and a magnifying glass. Lynn had shaved her legs recently, and there’s a small cut, but it’s scabbed over.

I check her other ankle and find another faint abrasion.

“Three out of four,” I say. “That’s not tight winter clothing.”

“Signs she was bound?” Dalton says. “With something soft?”

I don’t answer. I keep shining the light. When I pull a fiber from the ankle abrasion, I lift the tweezers.

“Of course, I can’t be sure this came from a binding,” I say. “Since I made the decision to wrap her in a damn sheet.”

Dalton takes tweezers and moves to April’s microscope. After a moment, he says, “It’s pale. The sheet is dark.”

All of our sheets are dark, which helps when you have a black dog and you can’t wash them more than once a week. Out of sight, out of mind.

We check the other abrasions. No fibers at her left wrist, but we pull two from the right, and one is also light.

“But the Wischnewski spots mean hypothermia, right?” Anders says.

April taps her probe as she thinks. “They can also indicate chronic alcoholism, I believe. Lynn showed no signs of that—it would have been on her intake forms. I will check her liver as well. While I cannot say, with certainty, that you wouldn’t find Wischnewski spots in any other situation, they are considered a classic sign of hypothermia.”

“And since she was found outdoors in a storm, naked, hypothermia makes sense,” I say.

“Yes. However, in light of this new evidence, I would suggest a complete autopsy.”

I nod. “Do that, please, along with a tox screen. I’m going to sit in the other room. I need to think about this.”

Dalton glances over. “Think alone? Or would you like a sounding board?”

I manage a faint smile. “I would love a sounding board. Thank you.”