Girl Missing by Tess Gerritsen Read Free Book Online Page B

gray. Her torso was marred by a sutured Y-incision, the ugly aftermath of an autopsy.
    Kat looked across at Adam.
    He shook his head. “You can close the drawer,” he murmured. “It’s not her.”
    “I wonder who she is?” said Kat, sliding the drawer shut. “She looks like the kind of woman who’d be missed. Not our usual Jane Doe type.”
    “Would you know how she died?” The question was asked softly, but its significance at once struck Kat.
    “Let’s pull the file,” she said.
    They found it in Clark’s office. It was buried in a stack on his desk, waiting to be completed. On top were clipped a few loose pages, recent correspondence from the central identification lab.
    “Looks like she’s no longer a Jane Doe,” said Kat. “They found a fingerprint match. Her name’s Mandy Barnett. I guess Clark never got around to relabeling the drawer.”
    “Why does she have fingerprints on file?”
    Kat flipped to the next page. “Because she has a police record. Shoplifting. Prostitution. Public drunkenness.” Kat glanced up at Adam. “Guess she wasn’t as sweet as she looked.”
    “What was the cause of death?”
    Kat opened the folder and squinted at Clark’s notes. He must have been in a rush when hewrote them; it was a typical doctor’s scrawl, the i ’s undotted, the t ’s uncrossed. “ ‘Subject found March twenty-seventh at two thirty-five A.M. in public restroom at Gilly’s bar, off Flashner Avenue.’ ” Kat looked up. “That’s in Bellemeade. I live there.” She turned to the next page. “ ‘No injuries noted … tox screens pending. Police report empty bottle of Fiorinal pills found near body. Conclusion: cardiopulmonary arrest, most likely due to barbiturate overdose. Awaiting tox screen from state lab.’ ”
    “Is the report back yet?”
    Kat went to the courier box and riffled through the stack of pages. “I don’t see it here. It’s probably still pending.” She closed the file. “This case doesn’t really fit with the others. Bellemeade’s a different neighborhood, with a different class of drug users. Higher-priced.”
    “The others were all in South Lexington?”
    “Within blocks of each other. Jane Doe was smack in the Projects. So was Xenia Vargas. Nicos Biagi was a little farther out, on Richmond Street. Let’s see, that’d make it somewhere near the old railroad tracks. But it’s still the same neighborhood.”
    “You seem to know the area well.”
    “Too well.” She tossed Mandy Barnett’s file on Clark’s desk. “I grew up there.”
    He looked at her in surprise. “You?”
    “Me.”
    “How did you …” He paused, as though not certain how to phrase the question with any delicacy.
    “How did I happen to grow up there? Simple. That’s where my mom lived. Right up until she died.”
    “So you would know the people there.”
    “Some of them. But the neighborhood’s always changing. People who can get out, get out. It’s like this giant pond. Either you float up and crawl out or you sink deeper into the mud.”
    “And you floated.”
    She shrugged. “I got lucky.”
    He studied her with new appreciation, as though he was really seeing her for the first time. “In your case, Dr. Novak,” he said, “I think luck had nothing to do with it.”
    “Not like some of us,” she said, looking at his tuxedo and his immaculate shirt.
    He laughed. “Yes, some of us do seem to be rolling in it.”
    They rode back up in the elevator and walkedout of the building. It was chilly outside. The wind blew an empty can down the street; they could trace its progress by the tinny echoes in the darkness.
    He had driven in his car, and she in hers. Now they paused beside their respective vehicles, as though reluctant to part.
    He turned to her. “What I was trying to say earlier—about your knowing people in South Lexington …” He paused. She waited, feeling strangely breathless. Eager. “I was trying to ask for your help,” he finished.
    “My