She knows all too well what can go wrong. She saw it today, in the bedroom of a dead woman.

An officer escorts Lutovic out of the room, but Frankie remains in her chair, jotting down notes from the interview. It has all been recorded on video, but she is old fashioned enough to prefer the touch and permanence of paper. Words written in ink don’t vanish into the ether or get accidentally deleted, and the act of writing them down helps sear the interview into her memory. Her phone dings with a text message, but she keeps writing, in a rush to record her impressions before they fade. But what will never fade is her disgust toward Eddie Lutovic. She is so focused on her notes that she scarcely notices when Mac walks into the room. Only when she hears him sneeze does she look up.

“ME’s office just called. They want to know if we’re coming,” he says.

“To what?”

“The autopsy on Taryn Moore.”

She looks down at her angry scribbles. Thinks of Eddie’s leering face and his wife’s blood splattered on the pillow. She shuts her notebook.

“It’s not like we have to go,” says Mac. “It’s just a suicide.”

“Are you absolutely sure about that?”

Mac gives a resigned sigh. “I’ll drive.”

CHAPTER 16

FRANKIE

In Frankie’s experience, autopsies seldom reveal surprises of any significance. Occasionally the ME might turn up an extra bullet wound or an occult tumor or, in the case of one deranged senior citizen who’d shot up his neighborhood, a whopping case of brain rot known as Pick’s disease. But most of the time, Frankie has already deduced the cause and manner of death even before the pathologist makes his first cut. Postmortems are often merely formalities, and Frankie is not required to attend them.

This one, she wishes she had skipped.

When she sees Taryn Moore’s body laid out on the table, it is far too easy for her to imagine it belonging to one of her own daughters. Daughters she nursed and bathed, whose diapers she changed; daughters she watched blossom from plump toddlers into slim-hipped teenagers into beautiful young women. Now here is another mother’s daughter, once equally beautiful, and the thought of that mother’s loss is so painful she wants to walk out of the room. Instead she stoically ties on a paper mask and joins Mac at the autopsy table.

“Didn’t know if you two were coming, so I got started without you,” says Dr. Fleer, the pathologist. If she didn’t know he was a fanatically health-conscious vegan and marathon runner, she would think he was seriously ill because he is cadaverically thin, his blue eyes staring from a disturbingly skull-like head. “I’m just about to open the thorax.”

Frankie forces herself to focus on the torso as Fleer cuts through the exposed ribs with pruning shears. Standing beside her, Mac gives an explosive sneeze behind his paper mask, but it is the crack-crack of snapping bone that makes her wince.

“Sounds like you should go home, Detective MacClellan,” Fleer says. “Before you infect us with whatever virus you’re incubating.”

“Why are you worried about a little virus?” Mac snorts. “I thought you vegans were invincible.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to try going vegan for once. A few months into it, you won’t even miss those animal fats.”

“When they make broccoli taste like steak, I may give it a try.”

“You don’t have a fever, do you? Myalgias?”

“It’s just a head cold. This damp weather is hell on my sinuses. Anyway, I’m wearing a mask, aren’t I?”

“Paper masks are not airtight, and you were already sneezing when you walked in. By now, your viral spray has been broadcast all over this room.”

“Excuse me for breathing.”

Fleer cuts through the last rib and lifts off the shield of breastbone, revealing the heart and lungs. He peers into the chest cavity. “Interesting.”

“What’s interesting?” asks Frankie.

“The aorta appears intact.”

“Is that a surprise?”

“A five-story fall onto concrete usually results in far more intrathoracic trauma than I’m seeing in here. When a body hits the ground at that velocity, the heart jerks against its ligaments, and that can tear the great vessels, but I don’t see any large-vessel rupture here. Probably because she was only twenty-two. People that young have much more elastic connective tissue. They can bounce back.”

Frankie looks at the glistening heart of Taryn Moore and thinks about the trauma from which young people sometimes don’t bounce back. A father who abandons you. A boyfriend breaking up with you.

“So it’s the head injury that killed her?” says Mac.

“Almost certainly.” Fleer turns and calls across the room to his assistant, who is setting up the instrument tray for the next autopsy. “Lisa, can you pull up Taryn Moore’s skull x-rays so they can take a look?”

“What are we supposed to see there?” says Mac.

“I’ll show you. To fracture a skull takes only five foot-pounds of force. You can get that much force just by falling three feet onto your head, and this was a five-story fall.” Fleer crosses to the computer monitor, where Lisa has pulled up the skull films. “Based on these AP and lateral views, it appears she hit the ground, bounced, and hit the ground a second time. The initial impact caused this compression fracture of the squamous part of the temporal bone. The second impact fractured the frontal bone and resulted in the facial trauma. Using Puppe’s rule, we know the sequence.”

“Puppe’s rule?” says Mac. “Does that have something to do with dogs?”

Fleer sighs. “It’s called Puppe’s rule after Dr. Georg Puppe, the physician who first described the principle. It simply states that a fracture line will be stopped by any previous fracture line. And here, on this x-ray, you see where the bone has caved in? Based on the location, near the temporal fossa, I’d say there was very likely a rupture of the middle meningeal artery. When we open up the cranium, we’re almost certainly going to find a subarachnoid bleed. But let me continue with the thorax.” Fleer returns to the autopsy table and picks up a scalpel. He excises the heart and lungs, sets them in a basin, and moves on to the abdominal cavity. Swiftly and efficiently he removes stomach and bowel, liver and spleen. Frankie turns away, nauseated, when he slits open the stomach and empties the contents into a basin, releasing the sour stench of gastric juices.

“The last meal she ingested was . . . red wine, I’d guess,” he says. “I don’t see any food.”

“She had macaroni and cheese in her microwave,” says Frankie.

“Well, she never ate it. There’s no solid food in here.” Fleer sets aside the sectioned stomach and turns his attention to the hollowed-out abdominal cavity. The viscera he’s removed so far are undiseased, the organs of a healthy young woman who should have outlived everyone around this table. Yet here they are, Fleer and Mac and Frankie, still alive and breathing, while Taryn Moore is not.

“As soon as I finish the pelvis, we’ll open the cranium, and you’ll see just how much damage a five-story fall can . . .” He pauses, his hands deep in the pelvic cavity. Abruptly he turns to Lisa. “Make sure you include a serum HCG in her blood work. And I’ll want to preserve this uterus in formalin gel.”

“HCG?” Lisa approaches the table. “Do you think she’s—”

“Let’s have Dr. Siu look at the uterine sections.” He reaches for a syringe. “And we’ll need to collect DNA from these tissues.”

“DNA? What’s going on?” Mac says.

Frankie doesn’t need to ask; she already understands the reason for the DNA collection. She looks down at Taryn Moore’s exposed pelvic cavity and asks: “How far along was she?”

“I don’t want to hazard a guess. All I can tell you is her uterus is abnormally large, and it feels soft, almost boggy, to me. We’ll preserve it in formalin and have a pediatric pathologist examine the sections.”

“She was pregnant?” Mac looks at Frankie. “But her boyfriend said they broke up months ago. You think it’s his baby?”

“If it isn’t his, we’ve just opened up a whole new can of worms.”

Fleer uncaps the syringe. “DNA is the answer to all life’s mysteries.”

“So now we know the reason she killed herself,” says Mac. “She finds out she’s pregnant. Tells the ex-boyfriend, who refuses to marry her. He says it’s not his problem; it’s hers. She gets so depressed she takes a flying leap off the balcony. Yeah, it all makes sense.”

“It certainly seems like a logical scenario,” says Fleer.

Mac looks at Frankie. “So are we finally satisfied this was suicide?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“It’s that goddamn cell phone, isn’t it? It’s still bothering you.”

“What cell phone?” Fleer asks.

“The girl’s cell phone is missing,” says Frankie.

“You think it was stolen?”