Livia Cutty appeared from around the corner, offered a quick good morning, keyed the front door, and all three headed inside. Ten minutes later, they were in the basement morgue.
“I wish I could get my hands on another cadaver,” Livia said. “But they’re not easy to come by. We only scored the two in Raleigh because we used them for the end-of-the-year project. If you give me a week, I might be able to pull some strings.”
Sidney shook her head. “I don’t have a week.”
“Then the Synbone and pigskin will have to do,” Livia said. “As you saw during the original experiments, they are remarkably similar to human bone and skin. This wouldn’thold up in a courtroom, but for what you’re after, it’ll be just fine.” Livia lifted her chin to Sidney. “Let’s have a look.”
Derrick was already filming when Sidney pulled Grace Sebold’s love lock from her purse. She’d placed it there last night after her chess game with Marshall and before claiming a headache to avoid having the conversation she had originally planned with Grace. It had been an abrupt and awkward departure, but with her mind processing so many things at once, Sidney could think of no more graceful way to get out of the apartment. She had called Livia on the way home and arranged this morning’s meeting.
She handed the mesh satchel to Livia, who poured the lock into her hand.
“Well,” Livia said, “it’s heavy enough. And the edges are smooth and round.”
“Do you think it could cause Henry or Julian’s skull fracture?” Sidney asked.
“Let’s find out.”
Dr. Cutty got down to business. Next to the morgue table was a Synbone replica of a human skull. Sidney remembered the polyurethane imitation that closely resembled human bone from when Cutty and her cohorts used them in Raleigh, along with cadavers, to disprove the boat oar theory. Livia draped the back of the skull model with pigskin, which contained an adhesive interface that tightly gripped the synthetic skull. She set the model on a pole and adjusted its height to six feet two inches to match Julian Crist.
Livia dropped the lock back into the satchel and cinched the strings together. Then she grasped the top of the sack in her fist like she was swinging a sock filled with lead, which she was. She stepped behind the skull on the pole, took an aggressive kickboxing stance, raised the satchel and love lock over her right shoulder, and finally brought it down hard onto the synthetic bone.
The sound of impact was less sickening than when Liviahad struck Damian the cadaver, but it still sent a shock wave through Sidney.
“Let’s see the damage,” Livia said.
She handed the love lock to Sidney and pulled the Synbone cranium off the pole. Like husking a coconut, she peeled away the pigskin to reveal the bare polyurethane beneath. Livia noticed immediately that the synthetic material was splintered with a dramatic depression fracture, which made her pulse quicken. She waved Sidney over, and together they viewed the damage while comparing it to the enlarged photos from Julian and Henry’s autopsies.
Livia used a measuring device to determine the depth of the break in the Synbone, as well as the length and width. She took the measurements silently, and then looked at Sidney. The YouTube video of Livia’s cadaver experiment had gone viral, with close to 20 million views. Dr. Cutty’s stock had risen in the circle of forensic medicine, and her celebrity had spawned interview requests and invitations to author chapters in forthcoming pathology textbooks. She had received a score of calls from defense attorneys around the country (and one in the U.K.) inviting her to consult (lucratively) on their cases. She was readying to start her first job after fellowship at the prestigious New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and by all accounts, Dr. Cutty needed no more enhancements to her profile. Yet, the scene in front of her was certain to bring it.
“Same depth,” Livia said. “About three centimeters. This could vary, obviously, on how hard the lock was swung. But the length and width of the fractures are a spot-on match. At least similar enough to argue that they were produced by the love lock.”
Sidney ran a hand through her hair and looked briefly at Derrick, who hadn’t taken his eye away from the viewfinder.
“Let’s run a fiber analysis on that satchel,” Livia said. “See if it’s made from organza nylon.”
CHAPTER 54
Friday, July 21, 2017
IT WAS FRIDAY EVENING, JUST ABOUT THE TIME THE SEASON RECAPepisode ofThe Girl of Sugar Beachwas airing, when Sidney shut down her computer. She had just strung together the footage Derrick had taken this morning in Livia Cutty’s morgue. What, exactly, she was planning to do with it was not yet clear. Graham had stormed into her office earlier in the day to show her the latest test audience numbers, which indicated that 95 percent of viewers would be satisfied with Grace Sebold’s exoneration, which was scheduled to be shown in the final portion of episode ten. Graham also revealed the proposed outlines the executive team had created that detailed the content for episodes eight and nine. Sidney listened to Graham’s pitch with the type of deaf concentration of someone with more pressing matters on her mind.
When he left, she had spent the rest of the afternoon buried in Julian Crist’s file, reading and re-reading the information, until she found what she was looking for. She remembered Don Markus, the detective she had interviewed early in the documentary, having mentioned the document. It was buried in the reams of information that came from theSt. Lucian Police Force, but after a page-by-page search, she’d located it. The find sent her mind off on a tangent until she put together its potential use. Now, at nearly 8:00 p.m., at the end of a whirlwind week, black circles grew darker under her eyes and a fluttering twitch took to her left eyelid. The pressure of what she had discovered, and the anxiety of being on the brink of proving it, had exhausted her and she still needed to make one more stop tonight. Without warning, the deep, practiced voice of Luke Barrington filled her office. It was sure to add to her stress level.
“I hear you’re causing quite a fuss for the brass around this place,” Luke said.
Sidney grabbed the thumb drive that contained her edits from the past two hours and dropped it in her purse, which she hung over her shoulder.
“I was just leaving, Luke. Do you need anything, or are you just here to give me grief?”
“I’m here to tell you I’m proud of you.”
She was collecting the pages from Julian Crist’s file and preparing to walk past him without offering eye contact, but his sentence stopped her. She stood upright behind her desk and stared at him.
“I’m not much for humility,” Luke said, “so take this for what it’s worth. You’ve got them running scared, I hope you know that.”
“Who?”
“The suits. They consider you a loose cannon, but they also know you’re a talented producer. They hate you for not conforming to their way of doing things, but they love you for creating a show that twenty-plus million people are watching each week, and on which advertisers are fighting for space. For executives at a major network, you scare the hell out of them. You make them money, but you’re unpredictable.”
