Chapter 26 Annie
Annie stared at the faded diamond pattern on the purple carpet beneath her boots.
Were she and Jake really back here? Back in the windowless mortuary with its dry, potted ficus and its watercooler that dripped with maddening regularity?
Yes. They were. Waiting for the results of yet another autopsy.
They had passed the twenty-four-hour mark since finding Jamie’s body in the woods, but it still felt detached from the fabric of reality. Still just a bad dream.
“He’s gotta be close to finishing by now,” Jake said beside her.
Annie nodded, her eyes on the watercooler in the corner. The dripping seemed to be growing louder by the second, and she was going crazy with the tap-tap-tap of it.
Another minute passed, and she reached her limit.
Annie shot to her feet and strode across the room.
She shook the appliance soundly and gave the base a kick with her boot for good measure, but it did nothing to stop the leak, and she returned to her seat defeated, sinking back into her chair with a sigh and resting her hands over her stomach.
Her insides had been in knots since their fateful hike yesterday, and no amount of antacid tablets had put a dent in the nausea.
The minute hand on the clock swung past the four-o’clock hour and the rain came at last, the clouds opening their hatches with gusto. The sound was like applause on the roof and Annie closed her eyes, letting the noise wash over her.
Finally, the sealed door of the morgue opened, and Doc Porter stepped out, his mostly silver curls in frayed tufts at his temples where his glasses pressed into his hair.
“Jake,” he said, beckoning him over with a finger, and Jake’s chair groaned as he rose. “You’re not gonna like this.” The doctor lifted his clipboard and adjusted his glasses.
“There’s nothing about this that I like, Doc, just give it to me straight. Strangulation?”
Doc Porter lowered the clipboard and peered over his glasses at Jake, silver mustache twitching as his mouth worked beneath it. It was a long moment before he spoke, and when he did, it was a single, unexpected word.
“Drowning.”
For a minute, no one in the room spoke, and from her chair, Annie was certain she had misheard the man with the chart, his voice muddled by the sound of raindrops peppering the roof.
“Excuse me?” Jake said finally.
“That’s right,” Doc Porter confirmed with a head bob. “She was drowned sometime between one and three in the morning yesterday. Her lungs were full of water.”
Jake stared mutely at the doctor.
“That’s—that’s not possible,” he stammered. “We found her out back in the woods. I mean way, way back there at the bottom of Lewis Ridge, and she had the exact same bruises on her neck as Hannah Schroeder. How could her cause of death be drowning?”
“Well…” Doc Porter cleared his throat and hesitated, leaning around Jake to give Annie a pointed look, eyebrows raised behind his glasses. “You sure you want to be in here for this, ma’am? It’s rather gruesome.”
Annie opened her mouth to protest, but Jake spoke first.
“She’s been through a lot worse than this since she got to town, Doc, she can handle it.”
Jake waved Annie over then, as though he’d just noticed she wasn’t beside him, and she crossed the room to join the two men.
“All right,” Doc Porter said on a sigh, flipping the top sheet on the clipboard to pull free the polaroid beneath.
“These bruises on her neck are consistent with hands, but she wasn’t strangled.
You’ll notice they’re positioned differently than the ones on Hannah Schroeder’s neck, the thumbprints are around back instead of in front, here at C3.
Now, my best guess is that someone held her head down in the water from behind until she…
well, until her body forced her to breathe and she took all of that water into her lungs. ”
“So… so she was drowned and moved afterward,” Jake said, glancing at Annie. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Annie nodded at the photograph. “Someone wanted it to look like a second Hannah Schroeder. Same area. Same bruises. They wanted it to look as similar as possible because they didn’t know Justin Grimes had already been caught. They wanted to pin it on him.”
Doc Porter’s brows lifted in approval. “I’d say that’s a fair guess.”
Jake looked between them. “So, it had to be someone who knew about what happened to Hannah Schroeder.”
Annie nodded.
“I’d say that limits your suspects to everyone in the whole town, then,” Doc Porter offered with a wry glance between them.
Jake shook his head. “I know it.”
“There’s more.” Doc Porter lifted a small plastic bag.
“Wood shavings. From around the cuff of her shorts. And there was a smudge of something on her thumb. Dark gray. Ash, I’m thinking, but I can’t be sure.
I was able to scrape off a small sample.
I’ll personally drive everything up to the lab in Seattle to be analyzed.
Quicker that way. They’ll get the results back to you as fast as they can.
All I have to say is that it’s a good thing you two found her before the rain came, or all of that would have been washed away. ”
“I just—” Jake closed his eyes, and a pained expression crossed his face. “I can’t understand the drowning thing. It makes no sense.”
“Was she anywhere near water?” Doc Porter asked. “A stream, maybe?”
“She was due east of Lake Lumin,” Annie said, “but at least half a mile, maybe more.”
“It couldn’t be the lake,” Jake interjected.
“There’s that solid wall of briars on the eastern shore.
Sharp as razor wire. It’s impassable. Fifty feet thick at least and closer to a hundred in places.
There’s no way through, not without going all the way down and around the way we hiked, and that’s at least two miles.
No one would carry her that far in the pitch black of night.
She had to be driven there on the ridge road.
It runs just up the hill from where we found her.
And that means she could have been drowned anywhere. A bathtub across town for all we know.”
For a moment, no one spoke, then Annie asked, “Can you tell us anything about the water in her lungs?”
“Not for sure. Lab analysis will show more, but it looked fairly clear to me.” The doctor paused for a moment. “She worked down at the pool, didn’t she?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah, I think she did.”
“That might be worth looking into, then. Or a good place to start asking questions, at least.” Doc Porter cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses again. “But I’m straying into your line of work. Why don’t you head on back to the station and let me take care of getting the samples to the lab?”
Jake nodded. “You tell them I want it expedited. I want every scrap of information they have the second they have it. I’m headed up to Ronnie and Debra’s to give them an update now; you can reach me there if anything else comes up.”
Doc Porter frowned. “You already broke the news to them, I imagine?”
Jake nodded again. “Debra took it pretty hard, but I think Ronnie’s in denial.”
Doc Porter placed a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Tell her folks I sure am sorry. There’s no grief quite like the one they’re facing today.”
“I will.”
With a pat on Jake’s back, the doctor stepped back into the morgue and the door sealed itself shut behind him.
Jake turned to Annie again. He looked older, with dark circles beneath his eyes and unshaved stubble lining his jaw.
“Ronnie’s kind of a loose cannon,” she said. “Want me to come with you?”
“Yes,” he said tiredly. “Thank you.”
Ten minutes later, windshield wipers on full blast, the cruiser made the turn onto Lake Lumin Road and started to climb.
Annie’s stomach churned over the hills. She dreaded what was to come with every ounce of her being as, through the rain, the little blue house with the overgrown front yard appeared on the left.
Ronnie Boyd stood on the front porch behind a veil of water streaming over the broken gutter. His arms rested on the railing and his head was bowed between his shoulders, but at the sound of tires in the driveway, he looked up.
Annie wasn’t sure if he could see them through the rain-streaked windshield, but his eyes tracked the cruiser as it parked. He reached down toward his feet, lifted a mostly empty glass bottle of caramel-colored liquid, and brought it to his lips.
He tilted his chin skyward, and the inch of liquid disappeared down his throat, then he stretched his arm back and let the bottle fly, hurling it out into the driveway where it shattered against the gravel in an explosion of glass just feet from the police car.
Annie’s hands flew to her mouth.
Jake blew out a breath as he reached for his seat belt. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”