Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

to the medical examiner’s office. They’re sending a car for me. They asked if I could bring a friend. I don’t know what to do.”
    I knew that Donna had drifted away from most of her friends since Amy’s disappearance, and that her ex-husband lived in New York. He’d flown in when Amy first went missing, but had gone back after several weeks when Amy hadn’t been found. He had a new wife and family to look after now. Donna had no one. “Would you like me to go with you?”
    “Would you?” Her gratitude was so palpable I could almost hold it in my hands. “We’d have to go right now, which would mean canceling your other appointments. Of course, I’d pay you for your time and trouble. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do this without paying you for your time.”
    “Please don’t worry about that. It’s a slow day,” I lied, drawing an invisible X through the rest of the day’s appointments. “Tell me where to meet you.”
    “At the medical examiner’s office on Gun Club Road. West of Congress. In front of the jail.”
    “I’m on my way.” I hastily rescheduled the rest of my afternoon appointments, taped a note of apology to my office door for those I hadn’t been able to reach, and left the office, heading for the county morgue.

Chapter 4
    T wenty minutes later I pulled into the large entranceway of the Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Complex, an impressive array of sand-colored buildings that included the sheriff’s office, various administrative offices, and the jail, a towering structure at the rear, nicknamed the Gun Club Hilton. Were it not for the rows of barbed wire that ran along the top of the prison gates, the complex might be mistaken for just another series of offices, like the South Florida Water Management District buildings directly across the street.
    The medical examiner’s office, a squat one-story structure at the front of the complex, had the look and feel of a building that didn’t quite belong, like an old portable classroom that’s been tacked on to a brand-new school, necessary but vaguely unwelcome. I found a parking spot nearby, switched off the car’s engine, then sat staring out at the pond that stretched along the side of the road, my mind racing ahead to a sterile room smelling vaguely of chemicals. I saw myself positioned slightly behind Donna, my eyes carefully averted, my hands on the sides of her arms, bracing her as the coroner pulled back a white sheet from a steel slab, exposing the gray face of a teenage girl, possibly her daughter. I heard her cry out, saw her swaybackward, felt her collapse into my arms. The full, horrible weight of her grief fell on me, pressing against my nose and mouth like a pillow, robbing me of air, taking my breath away. I can’t do this, I thought.
    “If she can do it, you can do it,” I admonished myself, scrambling out of the car and hurrying along the concrete walkway to the side entrance of the unimpressive building, pursued by another unwanted image, more terrible than the first: the coroner pulling down the sheet, the body of my own child staring lifelessly up at me. “Sara,” I said, and gasped out loud.
    A sharp quack sent the image scattering in all directions, like a bullet through a pane of glass, and I turned toward the sound. There, in a corner of the building, close to the door, a large Muscovy duck sat watch over a bunch of freshly hatched ducklings, their recently discarded eggshells lying broken and empty on the grass around them. I stared at the unexpected scene in amazement, afraid to approach too closely, lest I frighten the baby ducks and antagonize their mother. I watched them for several seconds, marveling at the fragility and resilience of life, and then I took a deep breath, and opened the door on death.
    Donna Lokash was sitting in one of two steel-and-vinyl chairs along the off-white concrete-block wall of the small reception area, a uniformed police officer at her side. She was even thinner