Tess Gerritsen - Vanish

Who might be banging chickies on their boats, thought Gabriel.

“I’m sorry I even mentioned the possibility,” said Skip. “It’s not like people don’t get drunk and fall off boats all the time. Could’ve been any boat, not just one of ours.” He pointed out to Hingham Bay, where a cabin cruiser was gliding across the blindingly bright water. “See all the traffic out there? She could’ve tripped off some motorboat that night. Drifted in on the tide.”

“Nevertheless,” said Moore, “We’ll need a list of all your members.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Yes, Mr. Boynton,” said Moore with quiet but unmistakable authority. “It is.”

Skip gulped down the rest of his vodka. The heat had flushed his scalp bright red, and he swiped away sweat. “This is going to go over real well with the members. Here we do our civic duty and pull a woman out of the water. Now we’re all suspects?”

Gabriel turned his gaze up the shoreline to the boat ramp, where a truck was now backing up to launch a motorboat into the water. Three other vehicles towing boats were lined up in the parking area, waiting their turns. “What’s your nighttime security like, Mr. Boynton?” he asked.

“Security?” Skip shrugged. “We lock the club doors at midnight.”

“And the pier? The boats? There’s no security guard?”

“We haven’t had any break-ins. The boats are all locked. Plus, it’s quiet out here. If you get any closer to the city, you’ll find people hanging around the waterfront all night. This is a special little club. A place to get away from it all.”

A place where you could drive down to the boat ramp at night, thought Gabriel. You could back right down to the water, and no one would see you open your trunk. No one would see you pull out a body and toss it into Hingham Bay. If the tide was right, that body would drift out past the islands just offshore, straight into Massachusetts Bay.

But not if the tide was coming in.

His cell phone rang. He moved away from the others and walked down the pier a few paces before he answered the call.

It was Maura. “I think you might want to get back here,” she said. “We’re about to do the autopsy.”

“Which autopsy?”

“On the hospital security guard.”

“The cause of death is clear, isn’t it?”

“Another question has come up.”

“What?”

“We don’t know who this man is.”

“Can’t someone at the hospital ID him? He was their employee.”

“That’s the problem,” said Maura. “He wasn’t.”

They had not yet undressed the corpse.

Gabriel was no stranger to the horrors of the autopsy room, and the sight of this victim, in the scope of his experience, was not particularly shocking. He saw only a single entry wound that tunneled into the left cheek; otherwise the features were intact. The man was in his thirties, with neatly clipped dark hair and a muscular jaw. His brown eyes, exposed to air by partially open lids, were already clouded. A name tag with PERRIN was clipped to the breast pocket of the uniform. Staring at the table, what disturbed Gabriel most was not the gore or the sightless eyes; it was the knowledge that the same weapon that had ended this man’s life was now threatening Jane’s.

“We waited for you,” said Dr. Abe Bristol. “Maura thought you’d want to watch this from the beginning.”

Gabriel looked at Maura, who was gowned and masked, but standing at the foot of the table, and not at her usual place at the corpse’s right side. Every other time he’d entered this lab, she had been the one in command, the one holding the knife. He was not accustomed to seeing her cede control in the room where she usually reigned. “You’re not doing this postmortem?” he asked.

“I can’t. I’m a witness to this man’s death,” said Maura. “Abe has to do this one.”

“And you still have no idea who he is?”

She shook her head. “There’s no hospital employee with the name Perrin. And the chief of security came to view the body. He didn’t recognize this man.”

“Fingerprints?”

“We’ve sent his prints to AFIS. Nothing’s back on him so far. Or on the shooter’s fingerprints, either.”

“So we’ve got a John Doe and a Jane Doe?” Gabriel stared at the corpse. “Who the hell are these people?”

“Let’s get him undressed,” Abe said to Yoshima.

The two men removed the corpse’s shoes and socks, unbuckled the belt, and peeled off the trousers, laying the items of clothing on a clean sheet. With gloved hands Abe searched the pants pockets but found them empty. No comb, no wallet, no keys. “Not even any loose change,” he noted.

“You’d think there’d be at least a spare dime or two,” said Yoshima.

“These pockets are clean.” Abe looked up. “Brand-new uniform?”

They turned their attention to the shirt. The fabric was now stiff with dried blood, and they had to peel it away from the chest, revealing muscular pectorals and a thick mat of dark hair. And scars. Thick as twisted rope, one scar slanted up beneath the right nipple; the other slashed diagonally from abdomen to left hip bone.

“Those aren’t surgical scars,” said Maura, frowning from her position at the foot of the table.

“I’d say this guy’s been in a pretty nasty fight,” said Abe. “These look like old knife wounds.”

“You want to cut off these sleeves?” said Yoshima.

“No, we can work them off. Let’s just roll him.”

They tipped the corpse onto its left side to pull the sleeve free. Yoshima, facing the corpse’s back, suddenly said: “Whoa. You should see this.”

The tattoo covered the entire left shoulder blade. Maura leaned over to take a look and seemed to recoil from the image, as though it were alive, its venomous stinger poised to strike. The carapace was a brilliant blue. Twin pincers stretched toward the man’s neck. Encircled by the coiled tail was the number 13.

“A scorpion,” said Maura softly.

“That’s a pretty impressive meat tag,” Yoshima said.

Maura frowned at him. “What?”

“It’s what we called them in the army. I saw some real works of art when I was working in the morgue unit. Cobras, tarantulas. One guy had his girlfriend’s name tattooed on…” Yoshima paused. “You wouldn’t get a needle anywhere near mine. ”

They pulled off the other sleeve and returned the now-nude corpse to its back. Though still a young man, his flesh had already amassed a record of trauma. The scars, the tattoo. And now the final insult: the bullet wound in the left cheek.

Abe moved the magnifier over the wound. “I see a sear zone here.” He glanced at Maura. “They were in close contact?”

“He was leaning over her bed, trying to restrain her when she fired.”

“Can we see those skull X-rays?”

Yoshima pulled films out of an envelope and clipped them onto the light box. There were two views, an anteroposteral and a lateral. Abe maneuvered his heavy girth around the table to get a closer view of the spectral shadows cast by cranium and facial bones. For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked at Maura. “How many shots did you say she fired?” he asked.

“One.”

“You want to take a look at this?”

Maura crossed to the light box. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I was there when it happened.”

“There are definitely two bullets here.”

“I know that gun fired only once.”

Abe crossed back to the table and stared down at the corpse’s head. At the bullet hole, with its oval halo of blackened sear zone. “There’s only one entrance wound. If the gun fired twice in rapid succession, that would explain a single wound.”