That obviously wasn’t true because Aidan Bridges’s arm was sitting in cold storage in her lab.
Her head spinning at the implications, Samantha went through all of Hugh’s autopsy records from the staff briefing, stunned at how many cases the man cleared in a month. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for until she found a John Doe with a circular-shaped scar on the inner part of his left forearm—the same scar she’d seen Monday morning on the arm from the body dump near the homeless camp. The John Doe had been picked up in the woods west of Cockrell Hill, with Hugh declaring the man’s death a suicide. Like Aiden Bridges, this body had been cremated about two weeks ago.
Samantha wasn’t sure how long she sat there staring at the photos of Aiden Bridges and the John Doe, wondering how many more of the Butcher’s victims had first been on Hugh’s autopsy table. She finally closed the file and logged out even as she tried to understand what exactly was going on. Had Hugh murdered those two people himself, then used his position in the ME’s office to cover up the crime so he could give them to the Butcher? Or had those men actually committed suicide, then Hugh gave the bodies to the Butcher so he could dissect them? Or was Hugh the Butcher, doing some kind of insane experiments on people using the parts from these two corpses? Considering his medical and surgical training, that made sense on some sick level. No wonder she’d been having such a hard time coming up with any viable clues in the case. Who better than an ME to know how to hide stuff like that?
Samantha stood and ran for the door. She needed to tell somebody about all of this, and fast.
Chapter 16
“Trey, it’s Samantha,” she said into her cell, knowing how stupid it was to drive with one hand and operate a phone with the other. But she needed to talk to him about what she’d found. Unfortunately, she got his voicemail. “I stumbled onto something really big with the case I need to talk to you about it. Call me as soon as you get this.”
Samantha almost saidI love youbefore hanging up, but then chickened out at the last second. Yeah, maybe it was too soon for that. She should probably wait to see if they made it past the part where she confessed to stealing his blood and sending it out to a private lab for testing.
As she drove through the well-maintained streets and fancy homes in Westover Hills, Samantha began thinking she had the wrong address. When she reached the house taking up the entire end of the cul-de-sac, she was even more sure she’d taken a wrong turn. With its stacked stone walls and turreted roof, the three-story structure looked more like a castle where a king would live than a house belonging to a chief medical examiner.
She pulled her car into the broad driveway and stopped, staring up at her Louis’s home in disbelief. Even with the light streaming through the leaded-glass windows on the lower floor, “dark and foreboding” was the best way to describe the house. Not that it wasn’t beautiful. It simply wasn’t the kind of place she’d ever want to live.
Getting out of the car, she headed for the front door, taking in the manicured lawn and impeccable flower beds. She knew Louis came from money—or at least that’s what the rumors around the institute were—but if the man could afford a place like this, why the hell did he keep working? Especially as county medical examiner.
She rang the doorbell and waited, praying he was home. If he wasn’t, she’d have to go with her backup plan—going to see the task force lead detective or Chief Leclair. Truthfully, she wasn’t comfortable with either one. She didn’t know the lead detective well enough to refer to him by anything other than his title. She didn’t know his first name and couldn’t remember his last name. And while she’d at least talked to the chief a time or two outside of the Butcher case, the woman had always struck her as overwhelmingly busy and not very interested in the thoughts of anyone not wearing DPD blue.
It didn’t help that Samantha had no idea how well her theory would be received. The idea that Hugh was either the Butcher or working directly with him was a little out there. Especially when the only evidence she had at the moment was that two of the body parts she’d recovered had come from corpses that had been on his examiner’s table. It’s why she wanted to talk to Louis first and see if she was completely off base. If he found her ideas sane and reasonable, the task force would be more likely to take them seriously.
She lifted her hand to ring the doorbell again when the front door opened. Louis stood there in the entryway wearing a Mr. Rogers cardigan, clearly surprised to see her.
“Samantha! What are you doing here so late?”
“I discovered something disturbing about the Butcher case and wanted to talk to you first before I told anyone else.”
Louis’s expression quickly became all business, and he opened the door wider, motioning her forward. “Of course. Come in and we can talk.”
Samantha stopped inside the large foyer, completely awed. The circular space was breathtaking, open all the way up to the third floor, with lots of marble and gilt edges, beautiful curving stairs leading to the floors above. But the most unexpected find were the gleaming suits of armor positioned on pedestals all around the perimeter of the room, each holding a weapon that looked real as hell to her.
“Forgive my taste in home decor,” Louis said with a laugh, motioning toward the suits of armor. “My family name has historical roots in sixteenth-century Italy, hence an obsession with antique armor and weapons from that time. Feel free to look around if you wish, or if you prefer, my study is ahead and to the left. I have to take care of something I was in the middle of when you knocked.”
Samantha spent a few moments looking at all the armor and weapons but was too distracted to pay them any attention, so she instead headed for the arched doorway Louis had pointed out.
The study was as nice as the entryway, with antique furniture and shelves loaded with leather bound books. While she waited for her boss to take care of that thing he’d been in the middle of, Samantha looked around. Taking in the books, paintings, and the glass case filled with more edged weapons and a handful of extremely modern handguns and rifles, she was pretty sure this one room was worth more than her whole apartment.
One particular painting on the back wall behind the desk caught her attention. It was extremely well done, depicting Louis with a teenage boy and a pretty, dark-haired woman. The boy was obviously the son she’d heard about that had died years ago. The woman in the painting must have been his wife, but Samantha had heard rumors they’d gotten divorced a little while after that.
“Jamison was killed in a car accident several years ago,” Louis said from behind her and Samantha turned to see him standing in the arched doorway, gazing up at the painting she’d been studying. “I’m sure you knew that already, though. But the fact that my wife divorced me less than a year later is probably something not as widely known. Not that I blame her for leaving. I was an inconsolable prick after my son’s death and gave her no reason to stay.”
Samantha couldn’t help but feel badly for Louis. He’d gone through a lot of tragedy. “I know saying this doesn’t mean much, but I’m sorry for your loss.”
Louis nodded, continuing to gaze up at the painting for some time. Then he seemed to come back to himself, walking across the room to move behind the desk and take a seat there. “Thank you for that. And thank you for waiting so patiently while I took care of that other issue. But I’m sure that you didn’t drive all the way out here at this time to night to talk about my family. You mentioned discovering something about the Butcher case?”
Samantha took a seat in one of the two fancy armchairs in front of the desk. “I have good reason to believe that Hugh is the Butcher. Or at the very minimum, is working directly with the killer.”
Louis lifted a brow. “I think you’d better tell me everything—and I do mean everything.”
Taking a deep breath, Samantha laid it all out for him—the body parts she’d identified from Hugh’s staff briefing, the paperwork trail the assistant ME had left showing that Aiden Bridges and the John Doe had been cremated, her theory that Hugh was helping to make sure the Butcher case was never solved and that he was conducting some kind of macabre experiments using cadaver parts, trying to reattach them to other bodies. She told Louis everything she knew or suspected, no matter how insignificant she thought it might be.
Louis sat there speechless for what felt like five minutes after she finished, and Samantha wondered if she’d screwed up and thrown in too much conjecture when all her boss wanted was the facts.
“To say this is bad is the understatement of the century,” he finally said, and Samantha could almost see the wheels in his mind turning as he considered the various ways this could play out. “But I think you’ve found the Butcher.”
Before she could say anything, Louis reached for the fancy French phone on the corner of his desk. “Have you told anyone else about this yet? You might have put them at risk if Hugh figures out you’ve told them. At this point, I doubt there’s anything left the man wouldn’t do to cover up his crimes.”
