Tess Gerritsen - Vanish

“That’s not what I heard, Abe.”

“In all the confusion, you might have missed the fact there were two shots.”

Her gaze was still on the X-rays. Gabriel had never seen Maura look so unsure of herself. At that moment, she was clearly struggling to reconcile what she remembered with the undeniable evidence now glowing on the light box.

“Describe what happened in that room, Maura,” Gabriel said.

“There were three of us, trying to restrain her,” she said. “I didn’t see her grab the guard’s gun. I was focused on the wrist restraint, trying to get it tied. I had just reached for the strap when the gun went off.”

“And the other witness?”

“He was a doctor.”

“What does he remember? One gunshot or two?”

She turned, her gaze meeting Gabriel’s. “The police never spoke to him.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one knows who he was.” For the first time, he heard the note of apprehension in her voice. “I’m the only one who seems to remember him.”

Yoshima turned toward the phone. “I’ll call Ballistics,” he said. “They’ll know how many cartridges were left at the scene.”

“Let’s get started,” said Abe, and he picked up a knife from the instrument tray. There was so little they knew about this victim. Not his real name or his history or how he came to arrive at the time and place of his death. But when this postmortem was over, they would know him more intimately than anyone had before.

With the first cut, Abe made his acquaintance.

His blade sliced through skin and muscle, scraping across ribs as he made the Y incision, his cuts angling from the shoulders to join at the xiphoid notch, followed by a single slice down the abdomen, with only a blip of a detour around the umbilicus. Unlike Maura’s deft and elegant dissections, Abe worked with brutal efficiency, his huge hands moving like a butcher’s, the fingers too fat to be graceful. He peeled back flesh from bone, then reached for the heavy-duty garden pruners. With each squeeze, he snapped through a rib. A man could spend years developing his physique, as this victim surely had, straining against pulleys and barbells. But all bodies, muscular or not, yield to a knife and a pruner.

Abe cut through the last rib and lifted off the triangle containing the sternum. Deprived of its bony shield, the heart and lungs now lay exposed to his blade, and he reached in to resect them, his arm sinking deep into the chest cavity.

“Dr. Bristol?” said Yoshima, hanging up the phone. “I just spoke to Ballistics. They said that CSU only turned in one cartridge.”

Abe straightened, his gloves streaked with blood. “They didn’t find the second one?”

“That’s all they received in the lab. Just one.”

“That’s what I heard, Abe,” said Maura. “One gunshot.”

Gabriel crossed to the light box. He stared at the films with a growing sense of dismay. One shot, two bullets, he thought. This may change everything. He turned and looked at Abe. “I need to look at those bullets.”

“Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”

“I think I know why there are two of them.”

Abe nodded. “Let me finish here first.” Swiftly his blade sliced through vessels and ligaments. He lifted out the heart and lungs, to be weighed and inspected later, then moved on to the abdomen. All looked normal. These were the healthy organs of a man whose body would have served him well for decades to come.

He moved, at last, to the head.

Gabriel watched, unflinching, as Abe sliced through the scalp and peeled it forward, collapsing the face, exposing cranium.

Yoshima turned on the saw.

Even then, Gabriel remained focused, through the whine of the saw, the grinding of bone, moving even closer to catch his first glimpse of the cavity. Yoshima pried off the skullcap and blood trickled out. Abe reached in with the scalpel to free the brain. As he pulled it from the cranial cavity, Gabriel was right beside him, holding a basin to catch the first bullet that tumbled out.

He took one glance at it under the magnifying lens, then said: “I need to see the other one.”

“What are you thinking, Agent Dean?”

“Just find the other bullet.” His brusque demand took everyone by surprise, and he saw Abe and Maura exchange startled glances. He was out of patience; he needed to know.

Abe set the resected brain on the cutting board. Studying the X-rays, he pinpointed the second bullet’s location, and with the first slice, he found it, buried within a pocket of hemorrhaged tissue.

“What are you looking for?” Abe asked, as Gabriel rotated the two bullets beneath the magnifying lens.

“Same caliber. Both about eighty grams…”

“They should be the same. They were fired from the same weapon.”

“But these are not identical.”

“What?”

“Look at how the second bullet sits on its base. It’s subtle, but you can see it.”

Abe leaned forward, frowning through the lens. “It’s a little off-kilter.”

“Exactly. It’s at an angle.”

“The impact could have deformed it.”

“No, it was manufactured this way. At a nine-degree cant, to send it in a slightly different trajectory from the first. Two missiles, designed for controlled dispersion.”

“There was only one cartridge.”

“And only one entrance wound.”

Maura was frowning at the skull X-rays hanging on the light box. At the two bullets, glowing brightly against the fainter glow of cranium. “A duplex round,” she said.

“That’s why you only heard one shot fired,” said Gabriel. “Because there was only one shot.”

Maura was silent for a moment, her gaze on the skull films. Dramatic as they were, the X-rays did not reveal the track of devastation those two bullets had left in soft tissue. Ruptured vessels, mangled gray matter. A lifetime’s worth of memories atomized.

“Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage,” she said.

“That’s their selling point.”

“Why would a security guard arm himself with bullets like these?”

“I think we’ve already established this man was not a hospital employee. He walked in with a fake uniform, a fake name tag, armed with bullets designed not just to maim, but to kill. There’s only one good explanation I can come up with.”

Maura said, softly: “The woman was meant to die.”

For a moment no one spoke.

It was the voice of Maura’s secretary that suddenly broke the silence. “Dr. Isles?” she said, over the intercom.

“Yes, Louise?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you and Agent Dean should know…”

“What is it?”

“Something’s happening across the street.”

They ran outside, into heat so thick that Gabriel felt as though he’d just plunged into a hot bath. Albany Street was in chaos. The officer manning the police line was shouting, “Stay back! Stay back!” while reporters pressed forward, a determined amoeba threatening to ooze through the barriers. Sweating Tactical Ops officers were scrambling to tighten the perimeter, and one of them glanced back, toward the crowd. Gabriel saw the look of confusion on his face.

That officer doesn’t know what’s going on, either.

He turned to a woman standing a few feet away. “What happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cops just went crazy and started toward the building.”

“Was there gunfire? Did you hear shots?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I was just walking to the clinic when I heard them all start yelling.”

“It’s nuts out here,” said Abe. “No one knows anything.”

Gabriel ran toward the command and control trailer, but a knot of reporters blocked his way. In frustration, he grabbed a TV cameraman’s arm and pulled him around. “What happened?”