Chapter 2 Cold Case Thawing? #4
“Thank you.” She hadn’t put much thought into where she would be staying, and now she wouldn’t have to.
“Our pleasure.” He strode toward the door. “Call me when you’re ready for me to take you back to your car, and thanks again for doing this. It’s really great seeing you again.”
His words warmed her heart. “It’s good to be back,” she admitted. “I’m glad you reached out to me.” She was a living, breathing example of a rolling stone, but Heart Lake was the closest thing she’d ever had to a home.
After he left the morgue, she walked around the bones, observing them from multiple angles.
She ignored the canine teeth marks since they looked fresh.
The cause of death more likely had something to do with the much older skull and vertebral fractures.
The femur and foot bones were fractured, as well.
“What happened to you?” She snapped a few dozen photos of the partial skeleton.
“If I had to venture a guess, I’d say you suffered a terrible fall.
” It was possible that the woman had tumbled down a set of stairs.
With no bruising to study on the long-gone epidermis layer, it would take longer to determine if the injuries sustained had been accidental or the result of foul play.
April spent the rest of the afternoon extracting DNA samples, a task that required careful precision while handling the delicate bones.
Evening arrived long before she was ready to quit.
As usual, she was tempted to keep working, but she knew she would be more productive after a good night’s sleep.
It was with great reluctance that she switched off her headlamp, stored the samples she’d extracted, and cleaned her tools.
Tomorrow, she would begin the painstaking process of comparing the DNA markers between the bones and the strands of Tiana Dakota’s hair.
She awoke the next morning and started her day with a cup of coffee on the balcony.
The top floor of the Heart Lake Plaza Hotel had an incredible view of the sparkling lake water.
It was as blue as she remembered. Though she couldn’t see the fish from here, she imagined they were swimming just beneath the surface.
Years ago, there’d been a turtle who’d often crawled into her family’s backyard to sun on an outcropping of stone at the water’s edge.
She finished her coffee and dressed for the day, grabbing a quick bite to eat at the continental breakfast buffet on the main level.
Then she headed to her car. A surprise was awaiting her when she arrived at the morgue — a petite, dark-haired woman wearing a Volunteer Services badge, of all things.
“Hi there!” She was in her mid-twenties, typing busily on the computer at the coroner’s desk.
Flipping her ponytail over her shoulder, she bounced to her feet.
“It’s such an honor to meet you, Dr. Chandrakanta.
I’m Kay, and I’ve been told to assist you in any way that you need, coffee runs included. ”
Hmm. April’s thoughts raced. She’d specifically requested to work alone, and Gil had promised her she could.
Second, the young woman standing in front of her bore a striking resemblance to Uri Dakota.
Third, the name Kay was an easy derivative of Uri’s niece, Kaya, a law student who surely understood the ramifications of interfering in a criminal investigation.
Not that April had determined foul play was involved.
In the meantime, “Kay” had simply made an appearance and offered to help. It was a gray area to be sure, but no rules had been broken.
Yet.
The next move was up to April. After a quick inner debate, she decided to see how far Running Bear’s niece intended to take her little ruse.
“Thank you, Kay,” she breezed, getting right to work. She doubted Kaya had much experience working inside a morgue, if any, so April was careful to talk the young law student through each step.
She prepared her tools and snapped on her headlamp. Then, without any warning, she pulled open the morgue drawer.
Kaya jumped back a little, looking sick to her stomach. To her credit, she held her ground, gazing at the bones with a heartrending mixture of horror and sadness.
“Our Jane Doe is Native American, like yourself.” April dropped tidbits of information into her presentation that were most likely to get a reaction from her listener.
Kaya flinched at the news, but she shook back her ponytail again, trying to remain nonchalant. It couldn’t have been easy. She was visibly unnerved.
April gave her a few mental toughness points and waited to see what she would do next.
“How do you know that?” Kaya’s coppery skin had grown several shades paler. She hid her trembling hands by stuffing them into the pockets of her white lab coat. Beneath her coat, she was wearing jeans and hiking boots instead of the scrubs and sneakers favored by medical personnel.
April repeated the same reasons she’d given Gil and Luke the day before, pretending not to notice when the law student’s eyes grew glassy.
“Allergies,” she mumbled, pulling her hands out of her pockets to flutter them at her eyes.
It was another lie, but April left it unchallenged. She kept up a steady stream of small talk as she worked, pressing her self-proclaimed “assistant” for details about herself.
“I’m a grad student at UT,” Kaya confessed a tad sheepishly. She didn’t mention her program of study, an omission that felt deliberate.
“Oh?” April prodded. “What are you studying?”
“I’m actually wading through my thesis project right now,” Kaya sighed. “You know how it is.”
It was an obvious attempt to make April think they were in the same field of work. April continued to play along. “Is it anything I can help with?”
“No, but thanks for offering.” Kaya swallowed nervously. “Just allowing me to shadow you like this is more than enough.”
I bet it is, you little snoop! “Then observe away.” April positioned two DNA samples beneath the microscope and lowered her head over the ocular lenses. She sensed that patience was the best approach for winning the trust of her uninvited guest.
What she saw beneath the microscope made her heart thud with disbelief and no small amount of disappointment.
The first DNA sample she’d extracted and the hair sample the sheriff had given her were a loose match.
They were close enough to signal a distant relationship, but that was all — further out than a second cousin.
Either that, or the DNA markers were background noise within a close population, which the nearby Comanche reservation contained.
Based on the first sample, April couldn’t state with any confidence that they were looking at Uri Dakota’s sister.
“I wasn’t expecting this,” she murmured more to herself than to her listener. “Onward ho to the next sample!” She put the second one under the microscope.
“Expecting what?” Kaya moved closer, sounding breathless.
“To get a distant match so quickly.”
“What does that mean?” Her words were so faint that April gave her a searching look to make sure she was okay.
“It means there’s a good chance she’s a distant relative of the Dakotas,” she explained. “She was Comanche all right, a member of the local tribe.”
“But not Unc—er…Mr. Dakota’s missing sister, huh?”
“Not likely. How are you hanging in there?” Over the years, April had watched some of the toughest men and women in law enforcement grow weak-kneed over what they had to observe in morgues.
Kaya’s breathing had grown shallow, but she nodded vehemently. “I’m good. I want to learn, and this is the only way to do it.”
“Believe me, the first test didn’t yield the results I was expecting.
” Nor did the second test April soon discovered.
She closed her eyes to absorb a rush of mixed feelings.
She would’ve preferred to have a hand in bringing Uri Dakota’s long-lost sister home.
Goodness knows his family deserved some sort of closure after all this time.
Then again, it wasn’t often that a forensic pathologist hit the jackpot on the first try while dealing with such old bones.
“The first few could be bad tests, though. Tainted specimens. Poor extractions on my part. That’s why we run lots of tests before making definitive claims about identities. ”
The odds of being in the presence of a family member of the deceased while making a positive ID was even slimmer…and infinitely sadder.
“Are you okay, Dr. Chandrakanta?” Kaya’s voice moved away and returned to her side. She pressed something cool and cylindrical into April’s hands.
“Yes. Thank you.” April opened her eyes and uncapped the bottle of water her “assistant” had given her. She took a fortifying sip.
“You seem…disappointed.” Running Bear’s niece whispered the words.
“So do you, my dear. Something tells me you were hoping your aunt was the woman lying on our table.” April infused as much compassion as she could into the words, knowing her announcement might come as a shock in more ways than one.
Kaya’s lips grew bloodless. The expression in her eyes, however, was one of intense distress, not surprise. She opened her lips and closed them again. A painful stretch of silence ensued before she found her voice. “You know who I am.”
“That I do, Kay. Or should I call you Kaya?” April injected a note of severity into her voice to underscore her displeasure with Kaya’s duplicity.
“I prefer Kaya,” the college student admitted shakily. “Is this the part where you report me for being in the morgue under false pretenses?”
On a burst of inspiration, April swung her way to face her fully.
“Not if you take me to your uncle. I think it would be best if Running Bear hears about my findings directly from me.” She gestured at the bones.
“As his sister’s next of kin, he deserves to be the first to know that the bones everyone is so hyped up about do not, in fact, belong to his sister.
” Technically, he would be the third person to find out since his niece had weaseled her way into the morgue.
Kaya pressed both hands to her heart. “Bear.” She panted out a shortened version of her uncle’s tribal name. “He prefers to be called Bear. It’s kind of a new thing. I’m still getting used to it myself.”
“I see.” April didn’t see anything. “Thank you for telling me.”
Kaya nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “I’ll take you to him under one condition. You have to promise me you won’t share his location with the police. He had nothing to do with finding these bones. I happen to know who found them, and it’s not him.”
That would be you, eh?
The law student’s tears overflowed and dripped down her face, but the strength in her expression told April she wouldn’t budge on her terms.
“Deal.” April had no interest in betraying Uri Dakota unless he gave her a reason to. She moved to the coroner’s desk to grab a tissue from the box resting beside the computer. She held it out to the weepy young woman. “I’m ready when you’re ready.”