Ruth stopped abruptly. Javi saw a thought flutter across her face—a shadow of suspicion—and then vanish as she dismissed it.
“You thought of something,” Javi said. “What?”
Ruth pinched her lips together. “It’s… nothing,” she said. “Something Bonnie said once, but she makes up these dramas from nothing. Someone doesn’t have a Facebook account, and suddenly they’re in witness protection, oh, and they visited Japan once, so it’s probably from the Yakuza.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Javi said. “But the doctors don’t know if Janet will regain consciousness. So she can’t tell me anything about who’d want to do this to her. Your wife had to have based this ‘story’ she told you on something. It might help.”
The struggle between Ruth’s desire to help and her need to keep her wife out of it played over her face. Help won by a hair. She sighed resentfully and crossed her arms across her stomach, her fingers tight around her elbows.
“Janet never talked about her past, so I don’t know where Bonnie got this idea,” Ruth said. “But she was convinced Janet’s family had been abusive, that they’d tried to send her to one of those Bible camps to be ‘fixed.’ She thought that was why Janet wouldn’t accept any help, why she couldn’t trust anyone.”
“Did she mention any names or—”
“No,” Ruth snapped. Her voice cracked. “It was just a story, all right? Bonnie tells stories about people. The only thing that Janet ever said about her past was that someone out here owed her money. Find them. Maybe they’ll have your answers.” She stormed out and slammed the door behind her.
Javi turned the recorder on his phone off with a tap. “Easier said than done,” he murmured. “How do you find out who owes a ghost?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THERE WASalways an odd quality to the calls Galloway took while she was at work in the morgue. The background noise was disconcertingly banal, interrupted by only the squeak of a wheel that needed oil and the muted squeal of a saw. It could have been a kitchen remodel going on around her instead of human bodies being taken apart and put back together.
At least until you heard the crack of bones and the squelch of organs being moved.
“I ran the DNA profile against some of the open missing person cases,” Galloway said. From the faintly muffled sound of her voice, Javi assumed she had the phone tucked against her shoulder as she worked. “Any that matched Ms. Morrow’s age and general description. Nothing popped. If you want to know who she is, you have to wait and see if there’s a match in CODIS.”
“How long will that take?” Javi asked.
Someone had left a tray of donuts in the break room. Javi wasn’t the first to discover them. Half of the box was gone, only a greasy print left on the paper, and the others had been picked over. He grabbed a cinnamon-glazed one with a napkin and then put it back down when he saw a distinct finger scoop gouged out of the icing.
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Galloway fired back. When he just waited her out, she sighed and set something wet down. “Cross your fingers that no one newsworthy gets kidnapped or murdered. If the search doesn’t get bumped by a higher-priority case, two weeks. Maybe. Anything else?”
“One thing,” Javi said. He poured himself a cup of coffee. Instead of the usual tar-black liquid, it came out of the carafe the color of tea. He tasted it carefully and grimaced at the bitter, oily tang of it. Someone had run out of coffee and decided to run another pot through the already-squeezed grounds. “When Janet transitioned, it looks like she paid for the surgery herself, probably for all of it, because I doubt she had any insurance. Is there any way that makes it easier to find out where it was done?”
Gallowayhmmmed. “Definitively? No. Surgeons don’t actually sign their work, idiots notwithstanding. However, if she didn’t have insurance, I doubt she’s rich?”
“She lived in her car before she came here. Apparently she had a small inheritance when her mother died.”
“Tijuana.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s a guess, but it’s an educated one. Unless Janet was prone to understatement, a small inheritance wouldn’t pay for her to get the procedure done in the US. Besides, if she did get it done stateside, that won’t exactly narrow it down for you. More likely she went abroad. Thailand is more popular, but Tijuana would be cheaper for her to get to and less daunting if she was on her own.” Galloway paused, and Javi imagined the shrug. “Or she did something else entirely. I have no evidence. It’s up to you.”
“Thanks,” Javi said. “If anything else does come up, let me know.”
“Of course,” Galloway said. Before Javi could lower the phone from his ear, Galloway blurted out, “If you could do the same with Ms. Morrow? I’ll find out if she dies, but if she recovers, I’d like to know that too. It’d be a first for me.”
She chuckled self-deprecatingly. Javi promised he would and hung up. As he tucked his phone away, he made a mental note to send Galloway some good coffee. He still didn’t plan to stay in Plenty long enough to need friends, but a well-disposed pathologist was a different matter.
Sugar and cream turned the coffee a paler shade than Javi usually took it but did nothing for the taste. He resisted the urge to spit the mouthful back out like a child and headed over to the sink to empty the rest of the cup instead.
The door opened a crack, and Tancredi looked in as he rinsed the cup. Her hair had escaped its braid in a straggle of humidity-set curls, and there was a long line of grease smudged over her jaw. She saw Javi, and a mixture of resentment and worry tucked into the crease of her eyebrows.
“Agent Merlo,” she said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was looking for Collins.”
“He took the professor to the hospital,” he said. “She wanted to see Janet.”
The irritation that furrowed Tancredi’s forehead turned into a real frown. “I wanted him to run the hard drive from the car to the lab,” she said.
