“Come in,” she said as she used her whole body to prop open the door to her office. “Sit down.”
“Did you check Janet Morrow’s DNA again?” Javi asked. The morgue didn’t give up much room for the pathologist’s office, and he had to squeeze into a chair wedged between the desk and a filing cabinet. “You could have just called me.”
Galloway shifted her body out of the door and let it slam behind her as she limped around the desk. She braced herself gingerly against the cheap plastic, one arm tucked carefully around her stomach.
There was no blood, no gun at her head, but Javi felt the quick pinch of adrenaline in the back of his brain anyhow. He could taste gas and blood on his tongue.
It had probably been his own blood. He was almost certain he hadn’t gotten any of Macintosh’s in his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure, at least not until the bloodwork the hospital had ordered came back.
He cleared his throat and tried to pin attention on the clean white T-shirt that wrinkled over Galloway’s bandage-padded stomach.
“Should you even be here?”
“It hurts,” she said curtly. “It would hurt at home too. Plus, if I am going to keel over dead from a minor gunshot injury, I might as well save the county the cost of transporting me here.”
“Doctor—”
She waved an impatient hand at him as she sat down hard behind her desk, her fingers blotched black and blue with old ink.
“I’m fine, Agent Merlo,” she said. “It was a literal flesh wound. Mostly fat, according to the doctor who treated me. And people said I had a bad bedside manner when I was at the hospital more often. Anyway, I didn’t call you here to talk about my health. Like I said, the other day I compared Janet Morrow’s DNA with what I had on file for Tommy Macintosh. No match.”
Reminded of the stitches in his shoulder, Javi scratched the itch of them through his shirt.
“You were going to retest.”
“I did. Janet Morrow’s DNA still doesn’t match the sample we had on file for Tommy Macintosh and definitely couldn’t belong to Andrew Macintosh’s child. I checked it multiple times.”
That was not the answer Javi expected. No matter how carefully he framed his theories, he’d been convinced he was right about Janet being Macintosh’s kid. In future, he thought dourly, he should probably leave the hunches to Cloister.
“However,” Galloway continued after she let him wallow for a second, “the dead man on the gurney in the other roomisJanet Morrow’s father.”
“Could the original samples have been contaminated somehow?” Javi asked. “Maybe a tainted batch of swabs?”
Galloway leaned forward and pecked one-handed at her keyboard. After a second she turned the screen around to face him. A row of DNA markers stared at him.
“According to my records, these are the DNA samples taken from the Macintosh family when they were brought in to the morgues. None of those people are related to each other,” Galloway said sharply. “One of them, based on genetic markers, is probably Native American. Nor are any of these three people related to the man we just brought in to the morgue. Contamination doesn’t explain this. Corruption does.”
She sat back in her chair and pressed her fingertips to her twitching eyelid. “No wonder Macintosh wanted to kill me. I was the closest he could get to whoever did this.”
“Except he didn’t want to,” Javi reminded her.
Ten years ago Andrew Macintosh was afraid his youngest child didn’t take after him enough. That he needed toughening up. But he was wrong. Janet was tough as nails and smart enough to build a whole new life for herself twice. So why would she have bothered to come back here with her dossier of evidence? What good would it have done her?
Unless Javi’s hunchwaswrong. He assumed Tommy—Janet—was the one with the reason to disappear. But she wasn’t. In fact she was the only one of the three to drive out to that coastal road with no reason to want to disappear.
All she was worried about back then was a miserable summer at a wilderness camp. It was only later that she realized, or was told, that it was somewhere to pray the gay away.
Andrew Macintosh liked photos, liked to collect evidence on what people close to him were up to. His daughter took after him in that too. Once she realized she’d been told one lie, she started to pick at all the rest. Javi remembered the clipped newspaper articles Janet had collected. He hadn’t seen the connection the first time he looked at them, but now he wondered if Janet had put all that together before she even got to Plenty.
“Galloway, I need you to look up a case file for me,” Javi said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and hunted through it for the notes he’d taken on Janet’s personal effects. “It was a body found in an abandoned house in Chant. A woman. Midthirties. A week before the Macintosh case.”
She gave him an exasperated look but pulled her monitor back around and searched. It took a minute and some very exasperated noises from her before she admitted defeat.
“Nothing,” she said. “Apparently my predecessor was having a very bad week.”
“What if I had a case number?” Javi asked. “Could you find that?”
Galloway rubbed her eye again, and her knuckle bumped against the lens of her glasses. “Maybe,” she said. “There would be physical evidence, records. That would be harder to alter. What is it?”
