43
Director Blaisdell Holmes, gowned up, stood in the far corner of the morgue, notebook in hand, as Dr. Huizinga and his assistant performed the autopsy on Reno. Romanski stood next to her, pale and silent as a ghost. They had worked with plenty of homicides before—but never one of their own. It was important to maintain detachment. Emotions created an environment for mistakes. And Blaisdell Holmes would not be making any mistakes, not with this homicide.
A cold spear of anger was slowly working its way through her as she watched Huizinga cutting away at the cadaver, as she listened to his monotonal description of each cut, each observation, for the video record. He would occasionally pause and murmur a comment to his technician, Ellen Zubriski. Holmes could hear a tremor in Huizinga’s voice, the occasional hoarseness brought on by emotion, which she could see he was keeping rigidly under control. She had told Huizinga that he didn’t have to do this—they could bring in another forensic pathologist. But he had insisted. Huizinga paused to take a deep breath, closing his eyes briefly. Holmes wanted to ask if he was all right, but suppressed the question, knowing it was both unnecessary and possibly offensive.
The killing of Castillo and that viral video had caused the case to blow up and go national, but now, with the additional murder of a law enforcement officer, it had ratcheted up even further. CBI was expending more resources on this case than any other since Erebus, and it was by far their most critical. Everything was riding on the case—including the safety of her staff, the reputation of CBI, possibly even her position.
Huizinga paused in his description again, his voice actually choking up. But he collected himself and kept going, reading out his actions in that same dead voice.
Holmes jotted notes as Huizinga worked. The homicide displayed the same bizarre MO as Grooms’s: Reno had been tortured and his left foot crushed using the Spanish boot. She wondered what they would find when they opened his stomach. More wafers?
Now they had detached and lifted out the organ set, placing it on a separate tray. It was all Holmes could do not to avert her eyes. She’d seen plenty of autopsies before, many with the cadaver in far worse condition than this, but never had one been as tough.
Huizinga and Zubriski shifted their work to the heap of innards, cutting and separating out the various organs, weighing them, taking samples, and sealing them in containers. She could see the stomach being separated and isolated. Finally, after the heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, and spleen had been removed, they started on the stomach. First, they cut away the esophagus, diaphragm, and duodenum. Then, with one slow, smooth stroke of a scalpel, Huizinga opened the stomach and placed retractors in the incision. He peered inside with tweezers as Zubriski angled a spotlight to illuminate the interior.
Holmes realized she was holding her breath.
Huizinga began speaking again. “In opening the stomach,” he said, “I note the presence of what appear to be Communion wafers, and furthermore note the odor of alcohol, probably wine.”
Holmes let out her breath. They’d done it to him too. She steadied
shaking hands against her pant legs. This was harder than she’d expected. One of the hardest days of her life. She glanced at Romanski, but he was as still and unmoving as a statue.
Huizinga began taking samples, drawing out crumbs and bits of wafer and placing them in sample containers being held out by Zubriski, who labeled and racked them. And then Huizinga seemed to freeze for a moment. He bent down closer, peering into the incision.
“I note a foreign object in here,” he said. “It appears to be made of plastic.”
Again with the tweezers, he reached inside, grasped something, anddrew it out. There was a glint from it as he held it to the light, turning it around, examining it.
Holmes narrowed her eyes, trying to see, but she was too far away.
As Huizinga turned it around in the light, a look of puzzlement on his face, Holmes finally had to ask, “What is it?”
Huizinga glanced at her. “I’m not sure. It’s a tiny, cylindrical vial, with something inside.”
“May I have a closer look?” Holmes asked.
He nodded and she came over and stared at it—but she couldn’t see inside, as it was smeared with gunk.
“Let me clean it up,” Huizinga said. He carried it over to a basin of water and gently swirled it around, rinsing off the gluey stomach residue, and held it up again.
Holmes recognized it with a start. “That’s the relic that Cash brought back from California!”
Huizinga asked, “Relic?”
“A piece of bone. Castillo stole it from a reliquary in Rome. I told Cash to turn it over to the priest who came here looking for it. It was supposed to be locked up in the evidence freezer.”
At this, Huizinga’s eyebrows shot up. “I know nothing about this.”
“No, you wouldn’t—I decided it wasn’t evidence in the case, and I was trying to keep it under wraps on account of the Catholic Church being involved. I wanted to return the relic as soon as possible.”
“What in the world was it doing in Reno’s stomach?”
Holmes stared at it, her mind churning. She knew that Reno had been carjacked after he left the CBI parking lot last night. The relic was locked in the freezer in his lab, which means he must have taken it out and been carrying it with him. Then he swallowed it. Why? She realized both Huizinga and Zubriski were looking at her, waiting for an answer.
She had no answer.
Romanski broke the silence, speaking in a flat voice. “He swallowed it. Because that’s what the killers wanted. They wanted that relic.”
Holmes turned and stared at Romanski. “And what do you know about this?”
He continued in a dead voice. “He was taking it to have the DNAsequenced in another lab. The killers probably figured it was locked in the lab—that’s the only place where CBI forensics would store it. And they knew he had access. I assume what happened was they demanded he go back into the lab and get it, and he wouldn’t. He had it on his person. You know Reno—he doesn’t like to be pushed around, and he didn’t comply. He must’ve swallowed it without them seeing him do it. So when he wouldn’t give it to them, or said he didn’t have it, they took him to the mill and tortured him to make him tell them where it was.”
“Why in the world was he taking it to another lab?” asked Holmes, although even as she asked the question, she knew the answer.
Romanski went on as if he hadn’t heard. “But the horror is that after swallowing it, Renocouldn’ttell them where it was, because it was now inside him. That admission would have been his death warrant: They would have killed and cut him open on the spot.”
“Cash,” Holmes said. “Cash wanted to test its DNA. I said no. But it looks like she went ahead anyway and enlisted you and Reno to help her. Am I right, Romanski?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment.
