Edge of Black by J. T. Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A

Xander might be able to help find them.

Chapter 7
    Washington, D. C. Dr. Samantha Owens
    Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”
    Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”
    She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.
    “Good luck with that.”
    “Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”
    “I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”
    With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.
    Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.
    So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.
    What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and more edema present. She began the dissection. His enlarged heart was otherwise healthy for a man his age, with little cholesterol plaque built up in the arteries, so cardiac arrest wasn’t the culprit. She started to work on the block of lungs and quickly realized Leighton was suffering from an underlying disease. His lungs were distended and the air pockets diffusely enlarged, ravaged most certainly from a lifetime of asthma. Bronchiectasis. Which made her wonder—why hadn’t he used his inhaler? In a case of fulminant pneumonia, surely the congressman would have been sucking hard on his albuterol. And if that didn’t work...
    “Hey, Murphy, you have his clothes?”
    “Sure.” She pulled out the plastic bag and held it up. “What do you need?”
    “Look through his pockets for an inhaler. He’s asthmatic. Just curious what he was using.”
    Murphy dug in, but came up empty.
    “That’s weird. I guess he could have dropped it at his office, right?”
    “Sure. In the heat of the moment, absolutely. It’s not something we would grab to bring in, either. What are you thinking, Doc?”
    “He’s had asthma for a long time. He definitely had an attack quite recent to his death. The airways are reddened and swollen inside. His inhaler would have started to make at least a little dent in the swelling in his bronchial tree, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Honestly, I’m not seeing anything that indicated he tried to arrest the attack at all.”
    She went back to the body and looked him over carefully. On a man who had a normal spread of hair on