The next morning Jordan was standing in front of the bathroom mirror still trying to scrape the cobwebs from her brain.
Her dreams where back...only this time instead of looking for Woody, he was there with his back turned against her cries for help. She woke up gasping for the stale motel room air hearing a baby's cry. It was still dark when she rolled out of bed and climbed in the shower. That familiar empty ache wasn't going to let her sleep.
Her watch read 7:01 when she heard the knock on the door. .
If anything he was still prompt, she grimaced twilling her hair up in a hasty knot. She took a moment to look at herself. For the first few months after the attack Jordan wore scarves to cover her scar. After the reconstructive surgery she was told she would be able to camouflage it with make up, but by that point she had accepted it as part of her.
She arched her neck studying the fine line there. She self-consciously remembered Woody trying not to do the same thing as they were talking the night before. She reached for a tube of concealer when there was another knock on the door. This time it was followed with Woody asking if she was even awake.
Forgetting the makeup she yelled, "Who can sleep with you pounding on the door like that..."
She yanked the door open was greeted with of the scent of freshly brewed coffee coming from the large paper cup in his hand.
"I'll do just about anything if you tell me that's mine."
Woody just grinned and handed it over. "I'll remember you said that after you look at the bodies. Are you ready?"
Jordan took a long drag off the cup before she nodded and grabbed her bag, locking the motel room behind her. She frowned as the crisp feel of the room's AC quickly dissipated. Even at time early hour the ambient temperature was in the upper eighties with the humidity hovering about the same.
"Is there anyplace to grab some quick sugar on the way in? I'm fighting a road trip hangover."
Woody grabbed a bakery bag from the open passenger side window of his Chevy. "I was hoping to use them bribe you further once you met my partner, but here..."
Jordan looked in the bag and saw two of her favorite kind of danishes. She was almost surprised he remembered.
"Do you think I'm going to need a bribe?" she said biting into the first one.
"Let's just say he's not happy about being pulled out of bed this early."
Woody didn't add that his partner, Manning, didn't appreciate the fact that Woody went out of the department on a pair of deaths that looked like coincidental suicides. Woody was used to the grumbling. Manning had been grumbling since Woody was hired. He didn't except anything less.
He watched her climb into the driver's seat of her vehicle, with a danish in her mouth and a coffee cup in her hand. She looked anxious to get started. God, he missed working with her.
The drive to the station gave Jordan a chance to eat her impromptu breakfast and wake up. Derry was laid out relatively straight forward. She doubted it would be very hard to get lost. As they cruised down the main street of town Jordan noticed roadsigns for a lake and spillway on the southside of town. The bait shop next to the turn into the sheriff's office made Jordan have expected to see Opie Taylor walked down the street with pole in hand. She whistled the theme to the Andy Griffith Show under her breath.
Jordan felt like a minor celebrity when she walked in the door of the station. People poked their heads out of offices and looked her up and down like they expected her to break out in song. The few that came out to meet her were surprisingly welcoming. Either Woody made her sound like the love child of Madame Curie and Sherlock Holmes or the southern charm she's heard so much about was alive an well here in the Harrison County Sheriff's Office.
The urge to whistle again was almost unbearable.
She felt Woody hand on the small of her back as they finish signing her in and getting her a visitor's badge. He guided her past the dispatch switch board and the 911 operators. He seemed to know everybody by name. She wasn't shock. Even when he was with the Boston PD he knew more names then the people who worked in the human resources office.
Woody's partner proved to be as put out as Woody predicted.
He wasn't as much rude as he was confused with Woody's adamancy that they were looking at a set of murders. Reading the police reports, Jordan could almost see his point. Forensically speaking, everything pointed to suicide in every case. Unless the bodies were talking, no matter what the little voice in both their heads was saying...Jordan would have to recommend that they be signed off as suicides.
Fortified with a little more knowledge and some seriously bad police station coffee, Jordan climbed in the driver's seat of a Massachusetts Medical Examiner's vehicle. She flip open the window and called out to Woody.
"Why don't we ride together..."
Woody looked at his car once and pocketed his keys. "Sure," he said climbing in. He quickly fastened his seat belt...and if Jordan wasn't mistaken...said a silent prayer.
"Oh-come-on," Jordan complained. "I'm not that bad of a driver."
Woody simply smiled painfully. Jordan rolled her eyes.
"You wouldn't consider letting me drive," he said.
Jordan let out an annoyed sigh and started the engine. "My ride...my toys...I drive."
Jordan smiled as Woody took his foot off his imaginary brake petal. She had to admit she purposely broke a handful traffic laws along with few noise and behavior ordinances on the way to the hospital.
It was worth watching Woody's face change from pasty pale white to beet red in the time it took her to slip through her first stop sign...and the fourth. She could tell he wasn't very amused by the way he slammed his door.
She missed winding him up. Her little smirk was still firmly in place as they entered the hospital elevator and Woody pressed the button for the basement.
Hospital morgues always seemed to be in the basement. Maybe it could all be chalked up to some subliminal Bella Lugosi memory that made all hospital architects to house the morgue down a bare cinderblock, bare-light lit hallway. Inevitably they're locked behind smelly boilers, leaky plumbing and humming refrigeration units which just added to their gory ambiance.
The Parkview morgue wasn't at the end of a stereotypical dingy hallway, but they did have to pass the boiler room on the way. Woody tucked his stack of files under his arm and held open the door to the combination office-crypt-autopsy suite for her.
Either he was over their little ride or he was in cop mode.
Jordan was introduced to the Harrison County Medical Examiner. Dr. Franks was a thoracic surgeon from Savannah who retired to Derry for the quiet and part time job slicing up bodies. Before he knew it, the medical center was growing and he was spending more and more time in his scrubs, and less and less on his bass boat. He didn't complain, at least to Jordan. He said it kept him sharp...and bought him an all expense trip to the occasional medical examiner's seminar. Jordan found him welcoming, if not slightly amused at her presence.
One by one they wheeled the bodies out. Franks was used to using two beefy assistants. Jordan liked to only ask for help when she needed it. It took a few awkward minutes to find a comfortable working relationship.
The diver had all the apparent injuries of four story fall into a dried creek bed. The crime scene photos showed a set of shoe prints on the trestle's edge. The tox reports that were run after the body was initially access came back positive for a variety of recreational drugs.
A handful of fresh track marks on his belly proved that they were starting to get past the simply "recreational" phase.
With Dr. Frank's permission, Jordan made the first cut. One by one the internal organs are separated and examined.
Even after a year away from a frequent flyer status with the Boston ME's office, Woody was holding his own pretty well.
That was until Jordan clapped off the intestinal track and vacated it. Woody took it as his cue to go check his voice mail.
Jordan chuckled at as the door shut. Dr. Franks looked in the bowl of contents and shrugged. "It looks pretty normal for a kid that age," he said picking through the contents with a probe. "With the amount of congealed grease and artificial colors in here I'd say his last few meals consisted of fast food and...by the looks of it...Fruit Loops cereal."
Jordan nodded at the rainbowed colored clump of ...stuff...Franks had pointed out.
"Normal...that's what bothers me. If a kid is stressed out to the point of suicide you'd think his appetite would be off."
"Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Maybe he just had classic case of the munchies..."
"Maybe...but his doesn't jive with someone who just decided that offing himself sounded like a good thing to do after dinner at Mickey D's..."
"If he was starting to shoot up...maybe he was in over his head...this could have been accidental..."
"Could be," Jordan answered, but her tone wasn't very convincing sounding.
Jordan triple checked the locations of all the injuries attributed to the fall. Checking everything as objectively as she could.
Jordan stood back and let Franks and Woody lift the second victim on to the table. It was painful to see the waxy pale mound of her cold body.
Garret was careful to keep any situations like this away from her back in Boston. Objectivity was always a concern. They all worried that she'd see herself on the table...Jordan worried about it herself.
It was Jordan's turn to make her excuses and go check her voice mail.
Franks looked at Woody for an explanation. Woody closed his mind against his own vivid imagination and gave the man a benign shrug.
Woody looked away as the first cut was made. He focused on the girl's blonde hair instead of her pronounced belly. Dr. Franks was kind enough to warn him before he lifted the girl's engorged womb out of her body.
"It's times like this I really hate this job..." Dr. Franks murmured. He set the organ on a separate gurney and covered it will a drape for which Woody was thankful.
When Jordan returned Dr Franks had already removed and cataloged the rest of the woman's internal organs. Exsanguination was the obvious cause of death.
Jordan ignored the draped table, hoping that that part of the procedure had been taken care of already.
She regloved and approached the body. Jordan had seen her share of slashed wrists before. She lifted the girls arm to study the incisions again. Woody watched her mind work and asked her what she was seeing that they didn't.
Jordan pointed at the ridges of the wounds. "She cut both sides from elbow to wrist. They're clean and deep."
"Which means?"
"She wasn't afraid of the razor."
"Cutters usually aren't..." Dr Franks added.
"I don't think she was. I don't see any other scars on her body. The length and depth of these cuts make me think they were made by someone who has had some...practice."
Dr. Franks mulled over what Jordan was saying and thought she had a valid point.
"So you think maybe someone else cut her?"
"I don't know...it's just these cuts. Why up and down instead of side to side? Granted, these caused some serious damage and the results would end probably have ended up the up being the same. But the incisions were very inefficient. Arteries cut like this tend to curl into each other in many cases they can almost seal themselves off, at least enough so to make it a slower...certainly more painful death. If you wanted to off yourself it would be quicker to go making redial cuts?"
"It was a cry out for help?"
"Most suicides are. But I'm confused about her intentions. Her suicide note talks about her boyfriend disserting her. Yet the police report says she called to schedule an OB appointment just that morning. Why do you make a doctor's appointment if you are planning on killing yourself?"
"My point exactly," Woody said with a humorless smile.
Jordan put the arm down and brushed her hand over the girl's soft blonde hair, "I'm not the one who has to sign off on either one of these cases...but if it were me I'd have to mark them both as inconclusive and open an investigation into both deaths."
"After hearing both of your arguments I have to concur." Dr Franks agreed.
Woody nodded and left the two examiners to finish their job.
