“I needed to talk to Dr. Galloway about another case,” he said with a nod toward the bed. “Since she was here, I thought I’d follow up on Ms. Morrow’s case. Lieutenant Frome doesn’t think this is anything to do with the cartels, but I want to make sure. If they’re targeting local police, that’s an escalation that needs to be addressed.”
It was always hard to read Javi. His thoughts were discreetly tucked behind that stern, handsome face. He liked to be in control, even in bed… even in Cloister. Still, he didn’t sound as though unsaid words were trapped in his chest. Maybe they weren’t. He might just be focused on what happened to Janet, not distracted by anything else. Cloister shifted his weight and scratched the bit of wrist he could reach under his cast.
“As far as Tancredi can tell, Janet’s not from around here,” he said as he shoved his own feelings out of the way until later. Once he did, the words came easier as he followed Javi’s lead. Most of the time, they didn’t work well together—Cloister still had a disciplinary on his record from the time he tried to punch Javi through a wall—but sometimes the way they clashed worked. “She flew in from New York a few days ago.”
“Why?”
Cloister shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “We still haven’t found her next of kin, and the only contact she left is out of touch for the weekend. We’ve got her name, but other than that, she might as well be a ghost.”
The screen rolled back from the bed, and Galloway stepped out from behind it. She snapped off her latex gloves, rolled them up, and tossed them into the plastic bin in the corner of the room. She made the shot and then gave Cloister a critical once-over.
“What happened to you?”
“I got hit by a car.”
“Fine,” Galloway said. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead, her limp blonde hair tangled around the legs, and rubbed the dents they’d left in her nose. “Don’t tell me, then.”
Cloister started to explain but decided it didn’t matter as Galloway turned back to the bed. She pulled the wrinkled sheet back down over Janet’s skinny, bruised legs.
“I still have privileges here. It only makes sense to maintain them, but it’s been a while since I had to conduct an examination on someone who’s warm,” she said as she smoothed the sheet down flat. “Or who’d care if someone saw them naked. It’s disconcerting.”
She started to bag and label the samples she’d laid out on the table by bed. She worked quickly with her square, blunt fingers as she talked, on autopilot at this part of the job.
“I’ll have to send the samples off to the lab before I can tell you anything in detail,” she said. “And obviously my physical examination was considerably less thorough than usual. A living victim can tell you what happened, a dead victim can tell me what happened, but this leaves us all in the dark.”
“Understood,” Javi said. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
She collected the bagged samples and turned to pack them into the cooler. The girl on the bed looked even smaller against the white sheets than she had against the wet tarmac. Other than her hair, tamed into a heavy braid over one shoulder, Janet didn’t look much like the girl on her driver’s license. Her face was bruised and swollen, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and both her arms were in casts. A bank of machines clicked and ticked as they monitored her status.
“How is she?” he asked.
Galloway glanced from him to Javi and raised her eyebrows. It dislodged her glasses from their perch on her forehead, and they dropped back down onto her nose.
“There’s not a lot to tell either of you,” she said. “Ms. Morrow’s condition is precarious, the next few days will see if she recovers, declines, or simply… perseveres. My examination and the X-rays taken during intake suggest that her injuries were the result of an assault rather than misadventure or a hit-and-run. Although at this point, that’s just my informed opinion.”
She paused to give Cloister a brief disapproving look and then picked up her phone to flick back through her notes.
“Both her forearms have fractures consistent with a fall.” She raised one arm and marked the snap points out against her sleeve with her other finger. “Colles fracture on her left hand, fractures at the head of the radius on both arms and left clavicle.”
She tapped her wrist, elbow, and collarbone.
“However, there are also spiral fractures to her humerus and ulna on the right and left arms respectively.” She poked the meat of her upper arm and then tapped the underside of her lower arm. “In the absence of machinery or extreme sports, the most likely cause of that is someone twisting her arms during an argument or altercation.”
Cloister glanced at the bed. Even with her arms bundled up in casts, they looked as skinny as Bourneville’s when she got wet, just bone and skin. It couldn’t have been hard to break them.
“Did the spiral fractures come before or after the other breaks?” he asked.
Galloway held up both index fingers to make sure she had their attention. Her nails were cut down to the quick, the skin raw around them, and traces of powder clung to her fingertips. “It’s hard to be sure without going in to look directly at the muscle groups, but from the swelling and the signs of additional bone trauma to the spiral breaks, I’d say before.”
Javi narrowed his eyes. “So someone fought with her violently enough to break both her arms and then chased her into the road, where she fell down and hurt herself more trying to break the fall?” He raised both arms, hands braced for impact, to demonstrate. When Galloway nodded, he turned his attention to the bed and frowned. “Then how did she get the head injury on the back of her skull?”
A thin smile of approval curved Galloway’s mouth. “Exactly,” she said. “I don’t see any way the injury to the back of Ms. Morrow’s skull, once you take into account her other injuries, matches with an accident. There are two impact points—here and here.” She turned and pushed her fingers through her pale hair at the base of her skull and slightly to the side. Then she turned back to the bed and gestured at Janet’s face, her finger an inch or so over the skin. “There’s also distinct bruising on the patient’s cheekbones and behind her ears where someone would have gripped her head before it made contact with the ground. At least that’s my theory. I’ll be able to tell you some more once I get these samples back. Not much more, though.”
“What about the rape kit?” Javi asked.
Galloway hesitated. She gave the girl in the bed a quick look, grimaced, and then gestured for them to go outside. It was the first time Cloister had ever seen Galloway act squeamish about anything, and some of the bodies she dealt with had turned his stomach. They followed her out into the hall, and Javi closed the door behind him.
“Was she raped?” he repeated.
