Save Her Child by CJ Lyons (best historical biographies txt) 📗

It was Harper’s first bit of luck on Lily’s case. The volunteer was young, bored, eager to chat, and oblivious to patient confidentiality statutes. Yes, she remembered Lily—one of their success stories. And did Harper know, Lily had only come to rehab because she’d almost died of an OD and her best friend had brought her and promised to go through the program with her? It was so sad that Lily ended up clean and sober, finishing her program, while the friend had been kicked out after trading sex for drugs with another patient.

“Do you remember the friend’s name?”

“Sure. Macy. Like the Thanksgiving parade with all the balloons.”

“I’m trying to contact Lily’s family,” Harper said. “To inform them of what’s happened. I can send you a court order to release the information, but that will take a little time. Could you—”

“Let me look.” Harper could hear her keyboard clicking, and she waited patiently for a few moments. “No, sorry. Lily listed Macy as her emergency contact and Macy listed Lily. Guess they only had each other as family. Better than a lot of folks we see, though. I don’t understand how so many people can find themselves so alone, with no one.”

Harper did, but she didn’t say anything to jade the volunteer’s hopeful outlook on life. The girl was still young; she’d learn in time. “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.”

“I’m sorry about Lily.”

Harper ended the call and turned her attention back to the autopsy. Tierney finished going over Maggie’s notes and the timeline she’d constructed using the firefighters’ data, comparing the garage’s carbon monoxide levels to what was in Standish’s blood. “Maggie’s right,” he said after checking a few calculations. “This man did not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. His blood levels are much too low.”

“If it wasn’t the carbon monoxide that killed him, could it have been something related to his cancer?” she asked.

“Cancer?”

“Yes. The wife said he’d been treated in the past, but it had come back.”

Tierney tutted over the blood work, shaking his head. “There is nothing abnormal here except his cholesterol is a bit high. What kind of cancer?”

“Wife didn’t say.”

“Hmmm… Well, let’s let the body tell the story. The body never lies.” It was the kind of pompous pronouncement that Luka found irritating, but Harper felt strangely reassured by the prospect of answers and a concrete way to find them that didn’t rely on unreliable witnesses.

It took almost two hours of slicing and dicing before Tierney had finished his dissection of the body, leaving only Spencer’s head still intact. “I don’t think this man ever had cancer,” he finally said, his voice crackling through the speaker in the observation room, getting Harper’s full attention.

“Never? As in he doesn’t have it now—”

“Never as in, there’s no sign of past disease, but what is even more suspicious is there is no evidence of any treatment. And he certainly does not have cancer now.”

“His wife acted as if his cancer was terminal. If he didn’t have cancer, then why kill himself?” She was musing out loud, puzzling through the facts and assumptions. Just because the scene looked like a suicide, didn’t mean it was a suicide.

“I can’t speak to that as I haven’t found the cause of death yet.” He turned to his assistant, Joel. Tierney was constantly snapping at him, expecting him to somehow read his mind and know what he needed next. Harper could tell that he would have preferred if Maggie never got a day off work. “Did you find the films yet?”

Usually Maggie would take full body X-rays in any suspicious death case and have them ready for Tierney to examine before he started working with the body. But there’d been some screw-up somewhere and today Tierney was forced to examine the body while waiting for his X-rays.

“Yes, sir.” Joel snapped to attention and flicked a large computer screen on. “Here they are.” He moved to prepare the head and neck for dissection, cleaning and covering the rest of the body, while Tierney reviewed the films.

“Well, now. Harper, look at this.” He tapped the computer and an enlarged view of the skull films appeared on Harper’s screen in the observation area. “See this?”

Harper sent a silent prayer of thanks to Maggie. In the spring, when she’d first been assigned to Luka’s squad and had been lost in a sea of forensic knowledge that she’d never had to use out on the street, Maggie had given her informal tutorials. Tierney traced a thin black line that threaded the otherwise white bones of Spencer’s upper neck.

“A fracture?” Harper hazarded a guess and was rewarded with a nod from Tierney. She touched her own neck in the same area, immediately below the base of her skull. “Cervical spine—that’s bad, right?”

“For this gentleman, worse than bad. Fatal. Both odontoid processes, extending into the body of the second cervical vertebrae.”

“Is that what killed him?” Harper asked. A broken neck—she hadn’t been expecting that. Neither had Luka—although he had suspected that Spencer hadn’t killed himself, she remembered.

“Unless I find another injury, yes.” He whirled back to the cadaver and grabbed a scalpel. “Let’s see if I’m right.” As he slid the knife around the face, prepping to reflect the skin back over the scalp to reveal the skull, Harper averted her gaze—she hated this part.

“With his neck broken like that, would he have been paralyzed right away? Or might he have lived long enough to make it to his car, turn it on?” Because someone had started the car—the question was, could it have been Spencer himself? Perhaps this was all an accident, only Spencer had succumbed to his injuries before he could leave the garage? But if so, why did he have his suicide note and confession with him?

Unless someone else had placed them there. The widow would be a good bet, given that the confession exonerated her. Who else stood to profit from Spencer taking the fall