Jake stared mutely at the doctor.
“That’s—that’s not possible,” he stammered. “We found her out back in the woods. I mean way, way back there at the bottom of Lewis Ridge, and she had the exact same bruises on her neck as Hannah Schroeder. How could her cause of death be drowning?”
“Well…” Doc Porter cleared his throat and hesitated, leaning around Jake to give Annie a pointed look, eyebrows raised behind his glasses. “You sure you want to be in here for this, ma’am? It’s rather gruesome.”
Annie opened her mouth to protest, but Jake spoke first.
“She’s been through a lot worse than this since she got to town, Doc, she can handle it.”
Jake waved Annie over then, as though he’d just noticed she wasn’t beside him, and she crossed the room to join the two men.
“All right,” Doc Porter said on a sigh, flipping the top sheet on the clipboard to pull free the polaroid beneath. “These bruises on her neck are consistent with hands, but she wasn’t strangled. You’ll notice they’re positioned differently than the ones on Hannah Schroeder’s neck, the thumbprints are around back instead of in front, here at C3. Now, my best guess is that someone held her head down in the water from behind until she… well, until her body forced her to breathe and she took all of that water into her lungs.”
“So… so she was drowned and moved afterward,” Jake said, glancing at Annie. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Annie nodded at the photograph. “Someone wanted it to look like a second Hannah Schroeder. Same area. Same bruises. They wanted it to look as similar as possible because they didn’t know Justin Grimes had already been caught. They wanted to pin it on him.”
Doc Porter’s brows lifted in approval. “I’d say that’s a fair guess.”
Jake looked between them. “So, it had to be someone who knew about what happened to Hannah Schroeder.”
Annie nodded.
“I’d say that limits your suspects to everyone in the whole town, then,” Doc Porter offered with a wry glance between them.
Jake shook his head. “I know it.”
“There’s more.” Doc Porter lifted a small plastic bag. “Woodshavings. From around the cuff of her shorts. And there was a smudge of something on her thumb. Dark gray. Ash, I’m thinking, but I can’t be sure. I was able to scrape off a small sample. I’ll personally drive everything up to the lab in Seattle to be analyzed. Quicker that way. They’ll get the results back to you as fast as they can. All I have to say is that it’s a good thing you two found her before the rain came, or all of that would have been washed away.”
“I just—” Jake closed his eyes, and a pained expression crossed his face. “I can’t understand the drowning thing. It makes no sense.”
“Was she anywhere near water?” Doc Porter asked. “A stream, maybe?”
“She was due east of Lake Lumin,” Annie said, “but at least half a mile, maybe more.”
“It couldn’t be the lake,” Jake interjected. “There’s that solid wall of briars on the eastern shore. Sharp as razor wire. It’s impassable. Fifty feet thick at least and closer to a hundred in places. There’s no way through, not without going all the way down and around the way we hiked, and that’s at least two miles. No one would carry her that far in the pitch black of night. She had to be driven there on the ridge road. It runs just up the hill from where we found her. And that means she could have been drowned anywhere. A bathtub across town for all we know.”
For a moment, no one spoke, then Annie asked, “Can you tell us anything about the water in her lungs?”
“Not for sure. Lab analysis will show more, but it looked fairly clear to me.” The doctor paused for a moment. “She worked down at the pool, didn’t she?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah, I think she did.”
“That might be worth looking into, then. Or a good place to start asking questions, at least.” Doc Porter cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses again. “But I’m straying into your line of work. Why don’t you head on back to the station and let me take care of getting the samples to the lab?”
Jake nodded. “You tell them I want it expedited. I want every scrap of information they have the second they have it. I’m headed up to Ronnie and Debra’s to give them an update now; you can reach me there if anything else comes up.”
Doc Porter frowned. “You already broke the news to them, I imagine?”
Jake nodded again. “Debra took it pretty hard, but I think Ronnie’s in denial.”
Doc Porter placed a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Tell her folks I sure am sorry. There’s no grief quite like the one they’re facing today.”
“I will.”
With a pat on Jake’s back, the doctor stepped back into the morgue and the door sealed itself shut behind him.
Jake turned to Annie again. He looked older, with dark circles beneath his eyes and unshaved stubble lining his jaw.
