Karin Slaughter - Faithless

Sara was silent. She had seen too many secrets revealed during an autopsy to make a snap judgment about the girl. There could be any number of circumstances that had brought her to that dark place in the woods.

“We put out a wire,” Jeffrey said. “Statewide.”

“You think she was transported?” Sara asked, surprised. For some reason, she had assumed the girl was local.

“It’s a public forest,” he said. “We get all kinds of people in and out of here.”

“That spot, though…” Sara let her voice trail off, wondering if there was a night last week when she had looked out her window, darkness obscuring the girl and her abductor as he buried her alive across the lake.

“He would want to check on her,” Jeffrey said, echoing Sara’s earlier thoughts about the girl’s abductor. “We’re asking neighbors if they’ve seen anybody in or out recently who looked like they didn’t belong.”

“I jog through there all the time,” Sara told him. “I’ve never seen anyone. We wouldn’t have even known she was there if you hadn’t tripped.”

“Brad’s trying to get fingerprints off the pipe.”

“Maybe you should dust for prints,” she said. “Or I will.”

“Brad knows what he’s doing.”

“No,” she said. “You cut your hand. Your blood is on that pipe.”

Jeffrey paused a second. “He’s wearing gloves.”

“Goggles, too?” she asked, feeling like a hall monitor but knowing she had to raise the issue. Jeffrey did not respond, so she spelled it out for him. “I don’t want to be a pain about this, but we should be careful until we find out. You would never forgive yourself if…” She stopped, deciding to let him fill in the rest. When he still did not respond, she asked, “Jeffrey?”

“I’ll send it back with Carlos,” he said, but she could tell he was irritated.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, though she was not sure why.

He was quiet again, and she could hear the crackling from his cell phone as he changed position, probably wanting to get away from the scene.

He asked, “How do you think she died?”

Sara let out a sigh before answering. She hated speculating. “From the way we found her, I would guess she ran out of air.”

“But what about the pipe?”

“Maybe it was too restrictive. Maybe she panicked.” Sara paused. “This is why I don’t like giving an opinion without all the facts. There could be an underlying cause, something to do with her heart. She could be diabetic. She could be anything. I just won’t know until I get her on the table- and then I might not know for certain until all the tests are back, and I might not even know then.”

Jeffrey seemed to be considering the options. “You think she panicked?”

“I know I would.”

“She had the flashlight,” he pointed out. “The batteries were working.”

“That’s a small consolation.”

“I want to get a good photo of her to send out once she’s cleaned up. There has to be someone looking for her.”

“She had provisions. I can’t imagine whoever put her in there was planning on leaving her indefinitely.”

“I called Nick,” he said, referring to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s local field agent. “He’s going into the office to see if he can pull up any matches on the computer. This could be some kind of kidnapping for ransom.”

For some reason, this made Sara feel better than thinking the girl had been snatched from her home for more sadistic purposes.

He said, “ Lena should be at the morgue within the hour.”

“You want me to call you when she gets here?”

“No,” he said. “We’re losing daylight. I’ll head over as soon as we secure the scene.” He hesitated, like there was more he wanted to say.

“What is it?” Sara asked.

“She’s just a kid.”

“I know.”

He cleared his throat. “Someone’s looking for her, Sara. We need to find out who she is.”

“We will.”

He paused again before saying, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She gently placed the receiver back in the cradle, Jeffrey’s words echoing in her mind. A little over a year ago, he had been forced to shoot a young girl in the line of duty. Sara had been there, had watched the scene play out like a nightmare, and she knew that Jeffrey had not had a choice, just like she knew that he would never forgive himself for his part in the girl’s death.

Sara walked over to the filing cabinet against the wall, gathering paperwork for the autopsy. Though the cause of death was probably asphyxiation, central blood and urine would have to be collected, labeled and sent to the state lab, where it would languish until the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s overburdened staff could get to it. Tissue would have to be processed and stored in the morgue for at least three years. Trace evidence would have to be collected, dated and sealed into paper bags. Depending on what Sara found, a rape kit might have to be performed: fingernails scraped and clipped, vagina, anus and mouth swabbed, DNA collected for processing. Organs would be weighed, arms and legs measured. Hair color, eye color, birthmarks, age, race, gender, number of teeth, scars, bruises, anatomical abnormalities- all of these would be noted on the appropriate form. In the next few hours, Sara would be able to tell Jeffrey everything there was to know about the girl except for the one thing that really mattered to him: her name.

Sara opened her logbook to assign a case number. To the coroner’s office, she would be #8472. Presently, there were only two cases of unidentified bodies found in Grant County, so the police would refer to her as Jane Doe number three. Sara felt an overwhelming sadness as she wrote this title in the log. Until a family member was found, the victim would simply be a series of numbers.

Sara pulled out another stack of forms, thumbing through them until she found the US Standard Certificate of Death. By law, Sara had forty-eight hours to submit a death certificate for the girl. The process of changing the victim from a person into a numerical sequence would be amplified at each step. After the autopsy, Sara would find the corresponding code that signified mode of death and put it in the correct box on the form. The form would be sent to the National Center for Health Statistics, which would in turn report the death to the World Health Organization. There, the girl would be catalogued and analyzed, given more codes, more numbers, which would be assimilated into other data from around the country, then around the world. The fact that she had a family, friends, perhaps lovers, would never enter into the equation.

Again, Sara thought about the girl lying in the wooden coffin, the terrified look on her face. She was someone’s daughter. When she was born, someone had looked into the infant’s face and given her a name. Someone had loved her.

The ancient gears of the elevator whirred into motion, and Sara set the paperwork aside as she stood from her desk. She waited at the elevator doors, listening to the groaning machinery as the car made its way down the shaft. Carlos was incredibly serious, and one of the few jokes Sara had ever heard him make had to do with plummeting to his death inside the ancient contraption.

The floor indicator over the doors was the old-fashioned kind, a clock with three numbers. The needle hovered between one and zero, barely moving. Sara leaned back against the wall, counting the seconds in her head. She was on thirty-eight and about to call building maintenance when a loud ding echoed in the tiled room and the doors slowly slid open.

Carlos stood behind the gurney, his eyes wide. “I thought it was stuck,” he murmured in his heavily accented English.

“Let me help,” she offered, taking the end of the gurney so that he wouldn’t have to angle it out into the room by himself. The girl’s arm was still stuck up at a shallow angle where she had tried to claw her way out of the box, and Sara had to lift the gurney into a turn so that it would not catch against the door.