Chapter 37
The basement of Adirondack Medical Center smelled the way it always did.
Disinfectant and cold air and the faint metallic undertone that never quite went away no matter how many times the ventilation system cycled.
Noah and Callie stood on opposite sides of the examination table while the medical examiner worked under the overhead lights, her gloves on, her voice steady, her focus absolute.
The body lay between them. The sheet was pulled to the shoulders. The face, what was left of it, was turned slightly to the right.
"So what can you tell us?” Noah asked.
"Still early. But from what I can tell the victim died yesterday.
" Adelaide adjusted the light and continued.
"Internally, there's minimal decomposition.
Core temperature, rigor progression, stomach contents, vitreous potassium levels in the eyes.
All of it points to death within the last twenty-four hours.
" She paused. "The disfigurement wasn't water damage.
It was deliberate. Someone killed this woman, destroyed her face and hands to prevent identification, and dumped her in the lake. Recently."
She pulled the sheet down to the collarbone and angled the overhead light lower.
"Cause of death is asphyxia due to manual strangulation.
Not a ligature. Hands." She pointed to the throat without touching it.
"You can see faint contusion marks here and here on the anterior neck.
Easy to miss with the skin in this condition, but once I opened her up it was clear.
There's hemorrhaging in the strap muscles, which are these thin muscles running along the front of the throat.
They bleed when compressed. Water doesn't wash that away.
The hyoid bone is fractured." She looked at them.
"That's the small bone above the larynx.
It takes sustained pressure to break it.
This wasn't a grab. This was someone who held on until it was over. "
"What about the face?" Noah asked.
"Post-mortem. All of it. The facial trauma, the damage to the hands.
There's no vital response in any of the injuries.
No bleeding into the tissue. No inflammatory reaction.
Her heart had already stopped when someone did that to her.
" Adelaide straightened up. "Someone killed this woman by strangulation, then deliberately destroyed her face and fingertips to prevent identification, and put her in the water. "
“How old is she?”
“I’m unsure about the age, so I'll have to get back to you on that."
"So no prints. What about dental?"
"I'm working on it."
The room hummed. The fluorescent lights above them cast the same shadowless glare they always did.
Noah had stood in this room more times than he cared to count and it never got easier and it never got harder.
It just was. The dead were the dead and the work was the work and the questions were always the same.
Callie was standing at the side of the table while Adelaide made notes on her clipboard.
She wasn't looking at the face anymore. She'd trained herself not to, not because it bothered her but because it told her nothing in its current state.
She was looking at the hands. The damage there.
The deliberateness of it. And then her eyes moved down to the wrist.
Something was there. Underneath the sleeve of the shirt, where the fabric had bunched and tightened from the water. A thin band of plastic, warped and discolored, pressed flat against the skin. Partially covered by sloughed tissue.
"Noah."
He came over. Callie pushed the sodden sleeve up carefully, exposing the wrist. The plastic band was still clipped in place, its surface clouded and buckled from the water, the printed text faded to near nothing.
"What does that look like to you?" Callie said.
He squinted. "A plastic band."
Noah pulled on a pair of latex gloves and leaned in closer, using a pair of forceps to try to separate the band from the skin beneath it.
Adelaide brought the overhead light down so it angled directly across the wrist. The plastic caught the light and for a second the faded text sharpened just enough to make out fragments. Letters. Numbers. A partial date.
"I hadn't gotten around to removing all the clothing yet," Adelaide said.
"Maybe that's why our killer didn't see it," Noah said.
He turned the band gently with his thumb, trying to find the clearest section of print. Adelaide was already beside him, reading over his shoulder.
"It's a hospital admittance band," she said. "I see enough of them on a daily basis here."
"The date," Noah said. "When was Hailey Benton admitted?"
"About a week ago," Callie said. Her voice was steady but her jaw had tightened.
Noah studied the band. The numbers were warped, bleeding into the plastic, but the shapes were there.
The date could have matched the window when Hailey had been at Adirondack Medical Center, but it was so degraded that certainty was impossible from looking alone. He looked at Callie. She looked back.
"I'll pull her dental records," Adelaide said quietly. "Give me a few hours.”
The Daily Grind was half full with the late-morning crowd. A woman in running clothes typing on a laptop. Two men in construction vests eating muffins at the counter. Lacey was behind the register, her ponytail swinging as she moved between the espresso machine and the till.
Noah and Callie took a booth by the window.
Noah nursed the coffee in front of him, looking out across the parking lot as the small town went about its business, oblivious to the body on the table ten miles away.
Callie sat across from him with her hands wrapped around her mug, not drinking, just holding.
"Finch and Hollis are both locked up," Callie said. "Samuel is dead. Hollis couldn't have done it if she died yesterday."
"The victim was strangled. All the other girls have been stabbed. It's not the same."
"How many victims do you think had a hospital admittance band on their wrist and went missing?"
"We don't know yet if that's Hailey. We couldn't read the name."
"Come on, Noah."
He took a sip of his coffee and set it down. Outside, a woman walked her dog past the window. A truck pulled into the hardware store across the street. The world kept turning at its regular speed while the two of them sat in a booth trying to make the pieces fit.
"What I don't get," Callie said, "is why go to all the trouble of destroying the face and hands if you're going to leave teeth in place?"
"Maybe he was interrupted. Maybe pulling teeth is too much work. Who knows what this sick bastard's reason is."
"If it is her, it's pretty obvious. Hailey could have identified him. So he takes her out."
"That's risky. It doesn't match his MO. He likes to control where he takes them. That's the point of the rag in the exhaust pipe. He would have had to be watching the hospital, or run into her after she left.”
"Or he lured her out."
"How? She didn't have her phone on her." Noah turned his coffee cup in a slow circle on the table. "Even if it is Hailey Benton, she could have crossed paths with someone else entirely."
Callie sighed and leaned back in the booth. "Look, I know you and Ray want to believe this is all in the bag. But what if it isn't?"
"Ruby's body was found..." Noah began.
Callie cut him off. "On Three Pillar property. Yeah, I get it. And you're going to say that Hollis had the college IDs, the chloroform, and the rags. But he denied it."
Noah chuckled. "They all deny."
"What if he was set up though?" Callie leaned forward.
"I mean, they haven't announced formally that charges have been pressed against Hollis.
They're planning to do that today. Ray told the media that we had a suspect in custody.
That's all." She held his gaze. "So who would have known Hollis was at that property at that time? "
"Tabitha Smith. But she was arrested alongside him. She hasn't made bail yet." Noah paused. "And who knows who Tabitha told."
"You said Seraphine picked him out from a lineup of photos."
"Yeah."
"Suggesting that Derek had been involved in the disappearance of her mother, Jessie Maddox."
"That's right."
"And that person was also the one who pointed Seraphine to the bog. Which she then sketched."
Noah looked at her.
"Who was that person?" Callie asked.
"She couldn't remember."
"We need to get in contact with Seraphine again and find out who that friend of her mother was.
" Callie set her mug down. "Because we checked the security cameras at the hospital after Hailey went missing.
She was seen leaving her room and heading into the staircase that went down to the basement.
Then the cameras aren't working. The ones outside the exit doors were.
She is never seen leaving that hospital.
" She paused. "So how did she get out unless someone took her out of there? "
Noah stared at her. The coffee in front of him had gone cold. Outside the window the parking lot was still and the mountains were still and the morning was doing what mornings do in the Adirondacks, holding itself together with light and silence while underneath it the ground was shifting.
"Let's go," he said.
Seraphine's studio was closed. The sign in the window said so and the lights inside were off and the door didn't move when Noah tried the handle. But through the glass he could see movement in the back, a shadow passing between the canvases stacked against the rear wall.
He knocked. Nothing. Knocked again.
"Seraphine. It's Noah Sutherland. I need a moment."
The shadow stopped moving. A long pause.
Then footsteps, slow and reluctant, crossing the studio floor.
The lock clicked and the door opened six inches.
Seraphine stood in the gap, her hair pulled back, her eyes guarded.
She looked thinner than the last time he'd seen her, though that might have been the light.
"My therapist isn't here," she said.
"I know. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important."
"I've told you everything I can."
"Just a moment of your time. Please."
She studied him through the gap. Whatever she saw in his face was enough to make her step back and open the door the rest of the way, though she didn't invite them in so much as stop blocking the entrance. Noah and Callie stepped inside.
Seraphine retreated toward the back of the studio and leaned against the counter with her arms folded. Not hostile. Just done.
"You told us that you learned about the bog and about Derek Hollis through a friend of your mother's," Noah said. "Is there anything you can tell us about who this person was? What they looked like? Where they lived?"
Seraphine shook her head.
"Were they male or female?"
"Female."
"Do you remember anything about her? How old she was? What she did for work?"
"I was sixteen. I barely remember what she looked like. She came to me. She knew things about my mother that only someone close to her would know. That's all I can tell you." She looked at the floor. "I'm sorry. I wish I could help."
“Would your aunt Tabitha know who this woman was?"
Something dark crossed Seraphine's face. "Tabitha wouldn't tell you the truth if her life depended on it. And besides." She looked at Noah. "She's facing time, isn't she?"
"Yeah," Noah said. "She is."
The studio was quiet. The traffic outside moved at the pace of a town that didn't know what was underneath it. Callie looked at Noah. Noah looked at Seraphine. There was nothing left to ask that hadn't been asked.
"All right," Noah said. "Thank you."
He turned toward the door. Callie followed. They were almost to the threshold when Seraphine's voice came from behind them.
"She was a nurse."
Noah stopped. He turned around. "What?"
"My mother was a nurse. She worked at Adirondack Medical Center. Before the community pulled her in." Seraphine's arms were still folded but something in her expression had shifted. Not quite hope. Not quite desperation. Something between the two. She was handing over the last thing she had.
"Maybe you could ask there," she said.
Noah looked at Callie. Callie looked at him. The air in the studio was still and the bog painting watched them from the far wall and the answer they were looking for had just changed direction.
"Thank you, Seraphine," Noah said.
They walked out into the daylight and the door closed behind them and the lock clicked and they stood on the sidewalk in Saranac Lake with the afternoon stretching ahead of them and one word turning over in both their minds.
Nurse.