Next of Kin

Chapter Twelve: 46%

Twelve, 46%

I called the ME the moment I left Tara's. I'd been putting it off for too long, as it was. I expected to get voice mail, telling me it was too late, but to leave a message and she'd get back to me in the morning.

Instead she picked up on the second ring. “Medical Examiner's office, this is Nevaeh.” I recognized the name as the examiner who worked the murder scene.

“I didn't expect you to be in,” I said sleepily.

“I work nights. There's four of us in this office, working different shifts to keep the place staffed at all times. Except Sunday nights. Then we rotate who's on call. Though this is my Friday. If you'd waited until tomorrow, you would have got Isaac, instead.”

“I was hoping to see my brother's body.”

“Autopsy's done. I can walk you through the particulars, though there aren't really any curveballs. But yeah, a positive ID on the body's always welcome. I'm here until six.”

“Yeah,” I said. Even when she said it was her last night to work this week, I had hoped I'd get enough time for some sleep. I'd been running all day long. But no such luck. “I'll come right away.”

I drove to the ME's office using GPS. She met me at the eastern entrance, facing the parking lot. “Building's all sealed up,” she said, as she held the door open for me. “We're the only staff that reliably works this late, so we get the run of the building to ourselves.”

“How does what you do work, exactly?”

“All four of us have specific skillsets. My formal training focuses on blood spatter and other ballistic physics. If it flies through the air, I've spent time modeling it and trying to figure out the physics that get it to land where it does. Makes it fortunate that I was the primary on this investigation, because it fits snugly into my wheelhouse. Each of us has specialties, but we all have generalized forensic and crime scene investigatory training.”

“Like a physician with a general practitioner's license, but who also has a specialization.”

“Exactly. Thanks to lens tech, we can record the 3-dimensional space of a crime scene exactly as it is, then model how each piece of evidence came to be where it lies. The tech has gotten advanced enough that it's more accurate than old-school forensics, with measurements down into the nanometers. It takes a lot of the math and guesswork out of the investigatory process. The computer does a lot of the work, but at the same time, you have to have a tech who knows what they're doing there to tell it, no, I don't think the victim's head snapped off its body, smashed into the wall, and then reattached without any signs of damage; it can make complex simulations of physics, but it frequently has trouble with which situation seems more reasonable and less insane. It's like guiding a hyper-intelligent child through a story problem involving adult relationships, essentially.”

We rounded a corner and suddenly we were in the morgue. The room was lit by low lights, and in them I could see a body, laying on a metal table in the center of the room. I stopped there. I could only see his feet. I tried to make myself remember every time John kicked me, the handful of times he put his foot in my face and told me to smell it. I couldn't make the ID with just a foot from across the room, but I really didn't want to take another step inside.

Nevaeh turned back towards me. “It's this way,” she said. I was thankful for the lack of light, because it hid my paralysis and indecision.

I walked towards her, trying to ignore the corpse I was also moving closer to, focused on her, imagined we were elsewhere, outside, on a picnic, the sun on her skin. But the light was coming from a laboratory lamp, as well as light reflected off a dead body's pallor.