The doors slid open and Turner stalked inside. “What? You don’t want my apology?”
“No, I’ll take it,” she said, following him. “It’s just weird.”
He pushed the button for the ground floor, where the morgue was located. “Of course it is. Nothing’s ever—” Without finishing the thought, he took his phone out of his pocket and started scrolling again.
It was a short ride. When the doors opened, the smell of paint assaulted Josie’s nostrils. The hall leading to Anya’s suite of rooms was filled with men rolling taupe paint over the normally grimy walls. The cracked tile floor was covered in drop cloths. For as long as Josie could remember, this part of the hospital was drab, dirty, and except for the morgue, unused. Josie didn’t have time to indulge her curiosity as to the hospital’s plans for the basement because she was too busy trying to catch up with Turner’s long strides.
He stopped to hold the door to the morgue’s examination room open for her. “Come on, Quinn,” he muttered. “We don’t have all day.”
Something really had gotten under his skin. Common courtesy and douchebaggery all at once. Ignoring him, she stepped into Anya’s domain. Inside, the paint smell was fainter, overpowered by the usual morgue odors: harsh chemicals and decay. The exam room was large and windowless, its walls gray-painted cinderblock. Stainless-steel tables ran the lengths of the walls. In the center of the room were two autopsy tables. Both were occupied. Haven and Maxine Barnes lay side by side, eachcovered up to their shoulders with a thin white sheet. At a sink in the corner of the room, Anya washed her hands. A navy skull cap covered her silver-blonde locks. She hummed as she turned off the faucet and grabbed a wad of paper towels. Josie didn’t recognize the tune but felt its sadness.
“Doc,” Turner said.
Anya turned toward him, an annoyed look already firmly in place, but when she saw his face, it morphed into what Josie could only describe as concern. Was Turner growing on her?
“What’s wrong?” Anya asked.
He folded his arms across his chest. “I’m not answering any questions until you answer at least one of mine.”
Anya shook her head and walked over to Maxine Barnes’s body. “The song I’d want to be able to listen to if I was trapped on a desert island is not the same thing as me asking you what’s wrong.”
“A question is a question,” he shot back.
Josie sighed. “What do you have for us?”
“I believe that both women died from asphyxia. They both have some pretty classic signs of it. Petechial hemorrhages in the sclera of their eyes. Pulmonary edema with some froth in the bronchi and trachea. Right ventricular dilation. Those findings, in and of themselves, don’t necessarily point to homicide. Asphyxiation generally is just the interference of the oxygenation of tissue in the body. Things like cyanide and carbon monoxide poisoning can cause interference, but that’s on a cellular level. What we’ve got here is mechanical asphyxiation, meaning their external air passages were blocked.” Anya reached into her scrubs pocket for a pair of vinyl gloves. Snapping them on, she peeled back Maxine Barnes’s upper lip. “Her labial frenulum is lacerated. Top and bottom.”
Josie leaned in closer to study the small tear where Maxine Barnes’s lip connected to her gum. Anya pulled her lower lip down to reveal a similar injury.
“Haven has the same types of injuries. You can also see some injuries to the mucosa of the lips where the teeth cut into it from the pressure. I was able to pull small fibers from each of their mouths that Hummel tells me are consistent with the fabric from their pillowcases.”
“This is a whole lot of words to tell us that these women were smothered to death with their own pillows,” Turner said.
Anya glared at him before folding down the sheet to reveal the rest of Maxine’s body. Unlike Haven, the only bruise marring her pale skin was the one on the inside of her right forearm. “They weren’t just smothered. What we have here is a case of burking.”
Josie had seen and heard a lot of things in the course of her career. Burking was not one of them. Even Turner appeared baffled, a crease forming between his eyebrows.
“Murder by suffocation that leaves little to no evidence,” Anya explained. “In 1828, in Scotland, two Irish immigrants—William Burke and William Hare—started murdering people so they could sell the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox at his private anatomy school. He dissected the cadavers and used them in lectures. Sometimes burking is used to describe the act of killing someone and selling their body to a medical institution, but just as often it refers to a method of killing which Burke and Hare perfected.”
“Just a minute there, Doc,” Turner said, drumming his fingers along the edge of the autopsy table. “Are we really talking about a couple of guys from…what did you say? 1828?”
Anya forged ahead as if he hadn’t spoken. “The way the victims were killed left virtually no evidence of foul play. One of them would cover the victim’s nose and mouth to cut offtheir oxygen supply while the other sat on the victim’s chest. Mechanical asphyxia—smothering—and traumatic asphyxia, which is the restriction of respiratory movements. The killer or killers would need to be able to overpower the victim. Smothering or even traumatic asphyxia on its own is something we normally see in children, the elderly or among people who are very ill and frail. It’s quick and efficient. Usually. No muss, no fuss.”
“And quiet,” Josie murmured. There would be no screaming beneath the pillow because the restriction of chest movements wouldn’t allow for it. The coffee Josie had slugged down on the way to the hospital burned her insides. The round bruise on Maxine’s forearm went from odd to chilling. “That’s from a knee, isn’t it?”
Anya pulled the sheet back to Maxine’s neck. “I can’t say that unequivocally but given the way she was found, the evidence of asphyxia on exam and autopsy, the fact that she had two broken ribs, fibers from her pillowcase inside her mouth, it does seem consistent with someone pinning her arm under a knee.”
Turner’s eyes flickered in the direction of Haven. “Two perpetrators?”
Anya turned toward Haven’s body. Josie looked up at Turner to see him swallow hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. He stayed frozen in place while Josie walked over to where Anya gently turned down the sheet covering the girl.
“Not necessarily,” Anya replied. “It can be done by a single perpetrator if he or she is bigger and stronger than the victim. If there were two perpetrators and they murdered these women via burking…”
Josie picked up where she trailed off. “They’d need to kill them one at a time.”
“That makes no sense,” Turner said. “Two on one while the other victim is unrestrained and at risk of waking at any moment?”
Anya nodded. “Obviously I can’t say with any certainty whether there were one or two perpetrators but yes, in this case, it seems one is the most logical conclusion.”
