Because, with all things considered…
She actually wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Laura wasn’t sure exactly why she wanted to visit the coroner, only that she did.
There was something drawing her there, something in her feet that couldn’t resist the direction she was being taken in. It was natural, too, she supposed. There were no answers that could tell her whether she was right or wrong about Schafer. The best way to look for one was to retrace her steps and go back to the very beginning.
And where else had they started, but with crime scenes and dead bodies?
This time, when Laura tried the doors of the squat little building, they were locked. She smiled briefly, glad to think that the coroner was listening to their instructions and pushed the small buzzer by the door.
“Hell—Oh. Agent Frost! Please, come in.”
There was a buzzing tone and the door clicked unlocked. Laura nodded to the camera up above the door buzzer and then went inside, remembering the way to the mortuary itself from her first visit.
The coroner was rushing out to see her before she even made it.
“Agent!” she said, talking a little too fast, her face flushed. “I didn’t think you would be back. Since we don’t have any new bodies, you know.”
“Thankfully,” Laura replied, thinking of how close Alana Garland had got to lying on a cold slab in the very room that they were walking into. It was cold and smelled precisely of nothing, which was some achievement. Places like this often smelled of heavy-duty cleaning products, bleach that would sting your nostrils, because the alternative was to smell of the bodies.
“Right,” the coroner tittered, nervously, which made Laura wonder what she had to be nervous about.
“Do you have any evidence here connected to the bodies?” Laura asked. “I mean, aside from the bodies themselves. Personal effects, anything from the crime scene, that kind of thing?”
The coroner thought for a moment. “I have the figureheads,” she said.
Laura’s eyes nearly jumped out of her face. “You have them here?”
“We were able to go back and remove them from the ships once some specialist equipment came from up the coast,” the coroner nodded. “I have them in storage at the moment. We tested them forensically at the scene, but I thought it would be useful to keep them in case further testing is needed.”
“I’d like to see them,” Laura said immediately.
The coroner nodded mutely and led her through a small passageway into another room. Laura’s mind boggled at how the figureheads had been carried through here, but there they were: wrapped in plastic sheeting to keep them protected, sealed, and tagged as though they were in a much smaller evidence bag.
“Thanks,” Laura said, which was meant to be a dismissal. She was grateful when the coroner took it as such and left. It was always a bonus not to have to raise suspicion by insisting on being alone with items of evidence.
And she was alone with them, now. She could do something that she wasn’t supposed to. Something she would deny if she was ever asked, pass off as contamination of samples.
Laura hesitated before she did it. She looked at the figureheads and thought about what would happen if this didn’t work. If she never had any further visions to tell her whether she was right or wrong.
How sure was she that they had the right killer? Come to that, how sure was she that they had got it wrong? Because if she never got any proof either way, she would have to rely on her own instincts as a cop—not to mention pure, hard evidence.
And if that happened, maybe the real killer was going to get away with it.
She couldn’t let that happen.
She pushed aside the plastic sheeting on one of the figureheads and pressed her hand against the wood, grateful to feel a pulse of pain at her temple, to know what it meant.
She withdrew her hand—
She was in that room, that dark room, though it was getting clearer every time. The tendrils of dark fog were seeming to subside, allowing her to see more and more. To see walls and beams uncovered, as though she was in an attic. That made sense, given the fact that the window looked all the way down to the harbor.
And the table itself—and the book…
It was the right book, the one that she had found in the library. Now that she had seen it firsthand, she could recognize it easily. It was turned to that same page, the illustration of the figurehead, the information about the kaboutermanekkes.