Close to the Bone Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Theresa Maclean Series by Lisa Black

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Theresa MacLean series by Lisa Black

  TAKEOVER

  EVIDENCE OF MURDER

  TRAIL OF BLOOD

  DEFENSIVE WOUNDS

  BLUNT IMPACT *

  THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE *

  CLOSE TO THE BONE *

  * available from Severn House

  CLOSE TO THE BONE

  Lisa Black

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2014

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Black.

  The right of Lisa Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Black, Lisa, 1963- author.

  Close to the Bone.

  1. MacLean, Theresa (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Women forensic scientists–Ohio–Cleveland–Fiction.

  3. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 4. Detective and

  mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8402-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-552-9 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  The blood didn’t worry her, not at first. A few drops of blood at a morgue are like a coffee stain or an errant paper clip in a sea of cubicles. The dead are often not tidy, and any person overly concerned with biohazards quickly chooses another line of work.

  Theresa MacLean was not overly concerned with biohazards, so she ignored the red smear on the ancient tiled wall as she crossed to the elevator, just as she ignored the lone occupant of the receiving dock, a large figure lying lifeless beneath a white sheet on a rolling steel gurney. Theresa carried no less than ten small paper bags, clutched in both hands, containing bits of windshield glass and amber brake lights from a hit-and-run, for which Dispatch had ripped her from her warm bed in the wee hours of the morning. The clock now gained on three a.m., placing her in that awful limbo in which she had to decide whether ’tis nobler to go home and try to eke out, by the time she finally got between the sheets, perhaps another hour of sleep before the morning began, or to just give up and stay at work. Even after a dozen years in forensic work this particular debate never failed to stymie her and, getting a firmer grip on the bags, she spared one finger to punch the ‘Up’ button with a touch more force than strictly necessary. The corpse under the sheet left her to it. The dead are courteous that way.

  Then she noticed the rest of the blood.

  A tiny smear on the floor in front of the elevator, underneath the hand-like print on the wall. Another near the door to the front area, which contained the deskmen’s office, Property, and Reception.

  Theresa glanced up the long hallway of the back half of the building, to the autopsy suite and teaching amphitheater. Nothing. The rooms were dark, as would be expected in these early hours. Cleveland’s death rate remained robust, but the county budget had never allowed for a night shift.

  There should have been no one present in the three-story building except two deskmen with their feet up, watching television and venturing out to the dock only when the bodysnatchers brought in an after-hours victim. The deskmen would transfer the deceased to a gurney, accept the paperwork, wheel the body into cold storage and return to the small flat-screen. Now Theresa realized that she did not hear the television. No gunshots or canned laughter. Nothing.

  Walking away from the elevator now, she managed to pull open the door without dropping the ten small bags and move into the front hallway.

  Property was closed, of course, and only a nightlight glowed out in the lobby, next to the reception desk. The Property officer worked banker’s hours but would be available for callback if a corpse rolled in with a few bricks of gold or a briefcase of cash. Anything smaller went into a drop box. Through large glass windows Theresa could see into the deskmen’s office; it looked messy, but then it always did. She stepped into the doorway of this, the only brightly lit room in the entire building, and promptly wished she hadn’t.

  She let the ten small paper bags slip to the counter. Some landed in dark flecks of dried blood – terrific, nothing like contaminating one set of evidence by disturbing another set. She pulled her cellphone from a pocket. Theresa had no intention of plucking her way through the puddles to use the office phone, off its hook and lying in a tangle of wire next to the body. Her fingers began to shake as she called the only number that doesn’t mind answering in the middle of the night.

  Dispatch answered; specifically, a recent transplant who had left her former life in Manhattan but kept the accent.

  Theresa identified herself, which the dispatcher probably already knew from the caller ID. Then she told the dispatcher where she called from. Then she told the dispatcher that their deskman, Darryl Johnson, now lay on the floor in front of Theresa, covered in blood and not moving, eyeglasses lying unbroken in a nearby puddle.

  ‘Can you find a pulse?’ the dispatcher asked.

  Theresa picked her way through the red swipes on the floor – she could see from the color that they had largely dried and only the thicker pools still glistened with wet centers – and put two fingers to the fleshy, blood-covered neck, wondering how callous she would seem if she stopped first to pull on a pair of gloves. She had them right in her pocket … perhaps she’d been a bit hasty to dismiss the dangers of biohazards.

  But she didn’t, and her fingers slid against his skin with a sickening ease. She couldn
’t find a pulse, but that might not mean anything … Theresa could barely find her own pulse in a calm moment, much less anyone else’s. The people she usually worked with no longer had pulses, or else they’d be heading next door to University instead of the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  ‘No pulse,’ Theresa said into the phone.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you turn him on his back? We can try CPR.’

  Theresa looked around the small room. ‘I don’t think you understand. The floor looks like a kid’s finger painting, and the desks and ledgers and stacks of paper are all flecked with red spots, beginning to turn brown. It got on the glass windows, some of it. One eye is swelling, and I’m pretty sure his nose is broken. He’s bleeding from the mouth, and there’s a tooth on the floor—’

  ‘Okay,’ the dispatcher said, ‘but we need to get some oxygen to his brain. You say he’s on the floor – just turn him so his back is flat.’

  Theresa said nothing for a moment, then stammered: ‘Move the body? Before I photograph the scene?’

  She’d sooner cut off a finger.

  But even ex-New Yorkers can still sound tough when they want to. ‘He’s not a body yet! Now shove him on to his back!’

  Theresa shoved. She tucked the phone between ear and shoulder and shoved, getting both hands bloody now. Biohazards be damned.

  The voice on the phone walked her through an awkward and completely ungraceful attempt at CPR, her hands pressing down with all the weight she could muster while balancing in a crouch to avoid soaking her pants or disturbing the blood pools around the body any more than she already had. Darryl spewed out a few droplets at first as Theresa worked his lungs, and she looked down at his ruined face and tried to muster up a sense of urgency. She had said goodnight to him only seven or so hours before, abandoning her shift as he came on for his. He had waved a hand and she had smiled, the routine for the past eleven or twelve years. But Theresa’s urgency went straight to grief. He was gone, his eyes clouding, his flesh cooling, his black skin coated with a red sheen of blood, and she could only marshal counter arguments for the dispatcher in case she even mentioned mouth-to-mouth. Sirens howled in the distance.

  ‘There’s a word,’ Theresa said, in between tiny puffs of exertion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A word. Written on the cabinet door. Just above the body.’ She added: ‘Written in blood.’

  This distracted the dispatcher from the revival efforts. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Confess.’ The sirens sounded closer now. ‘It says “confess”.’

  ‘Are you alone in the building?’ the dispatcher asked.

  ‘I have no idea. There should be a second guy here – Justin Warner, I think. They always work in pairs. I need to look for him. He might still be alive.’ And then she guiltily abandoned Darryl, who certainly wasn’t. None of the compressions had produced a pulse or affected him in any way. Sightless eyes continued to stare, and not so much as a knuckle hair moved. Theresa turned her back on him and used her elbows to hit push bars until she could open the loading dock door for the EMTs. She pointed with bloody hands and they went to work, and for the second time that night Theresa violated crime scene protocol by abandoning her crime scene to non-forensic personnel. She didn’t even stay to observe their disturbances but made her way up the darkened back hallway to the autopsy suite.

  The lights from the parking lot illuminated the room sufficiently for her to find a path to the sink, the orangey rays glinting off steel tables with their own drains and the implements from a cheesy horror movie which hung on the wall. She went through half a stack of folded paper towels getting the blood off her hands, then left them in a pile in a corner of the dissecting counter; she didn’t want to use the sink or the garbage cans in case the killer had done the same – though, to judge from the smears he left in the loading dock on his way out, she bet he hadn’t.

  Then she could finally remove the phone from under her neck before the extreme angle became a permanent crick.

  ‘EMTs are with the victim,’ she said to the voice on the phone, hoping to sound crisp and professional and, she felt certain, failing. Instead her voice trembled and cracked. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘You can stay on the phone with us until the police arrive,’ the dispatcher said in equal parts suggestion, order, and attempted comfort. ‘ETA is sixty seconds.’

  But Theresa had had enough of a victim’s job; time to get back to her own. ‘No. I’m going to find Justin.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other deskman,’ she said, and hung up.

  TWO

  Moving faster now that she didn’t have to risk contaminating surfaces or balance a cellphone on her shoulder, Theresa pulled on gloves (finally!) and flicked on the lights in the autopsy suite, small teaching amphitheater, and X-ray room, and pulled the chain to open the mechanical sliding door to the cooler. No drops of blood, no scrawled messages, and no signs of the missing deskman. The bodies in the refrigerated chamber lined up in a neat row, fatally cold within their zipped-up white bags, the abattoir smell leaching from the stainless steel walls.

  Next she stepped into the all-black room with the charcoal-gray paper backdrop and the lights with umbrellas over them – a standard photography studio, except that instead of happy couples and adorable babies the cameras here flashed on bloodied clothing and weapons of destruction. Through a rotating door sat a three-by-six-foot darkroom, no longer needed in these days of digital technology, but the photographers had left it in place (largely to discourage visitors, Theresa suspected). To pass through it required stepping into the rounded spot and staying a moment in complete blackness while pulling the cylinder around oneself, an experience Theresa avoided at the best of times. It wasn’t the darkness she minded but the close quarters, large enough for only one person. She stood in the exact center, found the handle, and rolled the recalcitrant cardboard cylinder to one side, wondering if she would be able to tell when the opening appeared in front of her, or if she’d have to push a hand through the space to know it was there.

  Or if someone would reach in for her instead.

  But the opening did come into view, near as she could tell, as a shade of less than total dark against inky blackness. She thrust first her hand, then her body into the unknown, its deep hues pulsing around her like a living thing.

  But one advantage to the digital age is the ubiquitous ready light. No room is truly dark any more – each one has a few, or an array, of tiny red, blue or green lights indicating the presence of a monitor, a tower, a battery back-up, a cellphone dock, a charging station, until the area glows with a faint but usable ambience. Theresa used this to find a light switch.

  Once the overhead fluorescents came on – no worries of overexposing a photo, the room hadn’t seen a strip of film in seven years – the cavern appeared as simply the messy, cramped work space of some very busy technicians rather than the lair of a bloody murderer. Unless he had wedged himself into one of the overfull cabinets, and Theresa wasn’t about to embarrass herself by checking. She flicked out the light and subjected herself to the claustrophobic cylinder. Her bravado clicked off as soon as the overhead bulbs did, and she hoped no one would be waiting to greet her on the other side.

  No one did, and she moved on, making her way back up the rear hallway.

  Truthfully, she might not even be looking for Justin. She hadn’t seen a second person in the deskmen’s office when she’d left that night; in a normal rotation it should have been Justin paired with Darryl, but for all Theresa knew he could have called in sick and someone else had taken his shift, or Darryl had toughed it out solo. Unusual, but not unheard of.

  The ME’s office consisted of three floors built in the early fifties, and neither the ventilation nor the decor had been improved since that time. Plans had been finalized for a gleaming new center, but after the housing market imploded and the economy went to hell the project had become lost in budget l
imbo. Theresa complained along with everyone else but secretly expected to weep the day they had to leave this battered piece of history behind. She spent most of her waking hours here, now with Rachael off at college, and felt as comfortable on this worn linoleum as she did puttering around her own house – so stalking alone around an empty building possibly inhabited by a bloody killer did not strike her as insane. This was not a crime scene or an unsecured area. This was her home.

  She heard the EMTs working in the front, destroying the sanctity of her scene while trying to save an already lost life, but still Theresa did not return. The remainder of the first floor consisted of three spaces. The first – the viewing room, a tiled chamber just large enough for a single gurney and large windows, through which the family could identify a loved one – sat empty. The second – the separate autopsy suite for decomposed cases – also appeared undisturbed. Though rarely used, the air there had long since festered into that of a slaughterhouse with even more disgusting overtones; without thinking she held her breath, and not from apprehension. Theresa moved on to the third and final space, the decomp autopsy suite’s accompanying ‘deep freeze’ cooler, kept at minus seventy degrees Fahrenheit. She flicked on the light. Nothing.

  She checked in on Darryl and the EMTs on her way back through the front hallway. They were crouching on her bloodied floor – she would have to get exemplars of their shoe prints, though most of the blood had dried and would not stick – and while one had his fingers pressed to the deskman’s neck, the other had clearly given up and was gazing at the word scrawled on the cabinet door. He jumped when Theresa spoke. ‘You’re not planning to transport, are you?’