Karin Slaughter - Fractured

Still, Faith had managed to persuade Olivia McFaden to put her in touch with Ruth Donner's mother. The woman had given Faith an earful about Kayla Alexander, then volunteered her daughter's cell phone number. Ruth was a student at Colorado State. She was studying early childhood education. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.

"I couldn't believe it was Kayla," Ruth said. "It's been all over the news here."

"Anything you could think of would help," Faith said, raising her voice over the whir of a bone saw. She went up the stairs to the next landing, but she could still hear the motor. "Have you seen her since you left school?"

"No. Truthfully, I haven't had much contact with anybody since I left."

Faith tried, "Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt her?"

"Well, I mean…" Her voice trailed off. "Not to be cruel about it, but she wasn't very well liked."

Faith bit back the "no shit" that wanted to come, asking instead, "Did you know her friend Emma?"

"Not really. I saw her with Kayla, but she never said anything to me." She remembered, "Well, sometimes she would stare at me, but you know how it is. If your best friend hates somebody, then you have to hate them, too." She seemed to realize how childish that sounded. "God, it was all so desperate when I was in the middle of it, but now I look back and wonder why the heck any of it mattered, you know?"

"Yeah," Faith agreed, feeling in her gut that this was a dead end. She had checked flight manifests going in and out of Atlanta for the last week. Ruth Donner's name had not shown up on any airline manifests. "You have my number. Will you call me if you remember anything?"

"Of course," Ruth agreed. "Will you let me know if you find her?"

"Yes," Faith promised, though updating Ruth Donner wasn't high on her list of priorities. "Thank you."

Faith ended the call and tucked her phone into her pants pocket. She went back down the stairs, the scent of burned bone wafting up to meet her. Despite her earlier bravado with Will Trent, she hated being in the morgue. The dead bodies didn't bother her so much as the atmosphere, the industrial processing of death. The cold marble tile that wrapped floor to ceiling to deflect stains. The drains on the floor every three feet so that blood and matter could be washed away. The stainless steel gurneys with their big rubber wheels and plastic mattresses.

Summer was the medical examiner's peak period, a particularly brutal time of year. Often, you would find ten or twelve bodies stacked in the freezer. They lay there like pieces of meat waiting to be butchered for clues. The very thought brought an almost unbearable sadness.

Pete Hanson was holding up a pile of bloody, wet intestines when Faith walked in. He smiled brightly, giving her his usual greeting. "The prettiest detective in the building!"

She willed her stomach not to heave as he dropped the intestines onto a large scale. Despite being underground, the room was always disgustingly warm in the summer months, the compressor on the freezer pushing heat into the confined space faster than the air-conditioning could keep up with it.

"This one was full as a tick," Pete mumbled, writing down the number from the scale.

Faith had never met a coroner who wasn't eccentric in one way or another, but Pete Hanson was a special kind of freaky. She understood why he'd been divorced three times. The perplexing question was how he had found three women out there in the world who had agreed to marry him in the first place.

He motioned her over. "I take it there are no breaks if you're gracing me with your presence?"

"Nothing yet," she told him, glancing around the morgue. Snoopy, an elderly black man who had assisted Pete for as long as Faith had worked homicide, but whose real name she had still never learned, gave her a nod as he rolled Adam Humphrey's face back along his skull, pressing the skin into the crevices. His bony fingers worked meticulously, and Faith was reminded of the time her mother had made her a Halloween costume, her firm hands smoothing pieces of material onto the Butterick pattern.

Faith made herself look away, thinking that between this and the heat, there was no way she was going to leave this room without tasting something awful in the back of her throat. "What about you?"

"Same bad luck, I'm afraid." He took off his gloves and put on a fresh pair. "Snoopy's covering it up, but I found a pretty bad smack to the right side of Humphrey's head."

"Fatal?"

"No, more of a glancing blow. The scalp remained intact, but it would've made him see stars."

He walked over to a large soup pan with a ladle sticking out of it. She had arrived at the worst part of the autopsy. Stomach contents. The smell was vicious, the sort of scent that ate into the lining of your nose and back of your mouth, so that the next day you woke up thinking you had a sore throat.

"Now, this," Pete said, using a long set of tweezers to hold up what looked like a large crystal of salt. "This is obviously gristle, common to most fast-food hamburgers."

"Obviously," Faith echoed, trying not to be sick.

"Think of that the next time you go to McDonald's."

Faith was fairly certain she was never going to eat again.

"I would guess the young man had some type of fast food at least thirty minutes prior to death. The girl had French fries but seems to have passed on the burger."

She said, "We didn't find any fast-food bags in the trashcans or the house."

"Then perhaps they ate on the run. Worst possible thing for digestion, by the way. There's a reason why there is an obesity epidemic in this country."

Faith wondered if the man had looked in a mirror lately. His gut was so large and round that he looked pregnant under the billows of his surgical gown.

Pete asked, "How's Will doing?"

"Trent?" she asked. "I didn't realize you knew him."

He took off his gloves, motioning for Faith to follow him. "Excellent detective. It must be a nice change working with someone who is, shall we say, more cerebral than your usual bunch."

"Hm," she said, unwilling to pay Will a compliment, even though Pete was right. There were only three women in Atlanta Homicide Division. There had been four when Faith first got there, but Claire Dunkel, a thirty-year veteran, had taken retirement the first week Faith had been on the squad. Her parting advice was, "Wear a skirt every once in a while or you'll start to grow testicles."

Maybe that's why Faith was having such a hard time gelling with Will Trent. For all his faults, he actually seemed to respect her.

He hadn't once drawn a ludicrous connection between Faith's hair color and her mental abilities, nor had he scratched himself repeatedly or spat on the floor-all things Leo Donnelly usually did before his second cup of coffee.

Pete untied his surgical gown, revealing a shirt that was of the loud Hawaiian variety. Faith was glad to see that he was wearing shorts. Beneath the gown, the sight of his hairless legs, bare but for the black socks he'd pulled up to his knees, had been alarming.

"Horrible situation with your mother," Pete said. Faith watched him punch the soap dispenser and lather up his hands. "It's one of those cases where ‘just doing my job' seems like a lame excuse, isn't it?"

"Yes," she agreed.

"Though I've been in this building for many years, and I've seen a lot of things happening that shouldn't. I certainly wouldn't volunteer any information, but if someone asked me directly, I would feel compelled to tell them the truth." He smiled at her over his shoulder. "I suppose that would make me what you guys call a ‘rat.' "

She shrugged.

"Will is a good man who had to do a dirty job. I can relate to that." He pulled a handful of paper towels off the stack and dried his hands as he walked to his office.