Close to the Bone Read Online Free PDF Page A

to relay the narrowed timeline to his men, and Theresa slipped to the front again in search of Justin Warner’s locker.

    In between the deskmen’s office and the viewing chamber sat a row of metal cabinets. The doors had become decorated over the years with peeling stickers of rock bands, refrigerator magnets and the occasional political comment, but above this din each had been labeled with an old-fashioned punch-style label maker, and finding Justin’s proved easy. Theresa pulled on fresh gloves and lifted the latch, careful to use only the tip of one finger should they want to process for prints later. None of the lockers had a lock on them – perhaps the deskmen felt it would show a lack of trust, and besides, lunches were the only thing subject to theft at the ME’s office and the deskman had a refrigerator in their office, where they could keep an eye on theirs. Theresa had to use the general staff lunchroom and had lost a number of candy bars and leftover stromboli over the years. Not even injecting some decoy mini Milky Ways with Tabasco sauce seemed to help.
    Justin’s locker seemed as unremarkable as he had been. With a mini flashlight she took a closer look, but found only a hairbrush, a windbreaker with nothing in the pockets but (hopefully) clean tissues and a quarter, expired bus passes (county employees got them at a discount), two front page sections of the Plain Dealer from two and two-and-a-half months previously, and three loose but unopened foil Pop-Tarts packages, no doubt reserved for dire emergencies and of sufficiently low value to risk losing to the lunch thief. When Theresa moved the Plain Dealers – none of the stories suggested a connection to Darryl – a piece of paper fell out. The three-by-four white square had a series of numbers on it in distressing penmanship: 1432, 1433, 1555, 1830 . They were two digits too short for case numbers and one digit too short for evidence numbers. They might be bets of some type for his bookie, but she wouldn’t know, sports so not being her thing.
    Theresa pulled two Manila envelopes out of yet another of her pockets and scribbled down the numbers on one, then collected a bundle of hairs from the brush into the other. She had wondered all along if the police would decide to handle the entire investigation or even call in the state, shut the ME’s office out entirely. That would be more or less standard procedure – if a cop is involved in an on-duty car crash resulting in injury, cops had the state Highway Patrol do the report. But the Medical Examiner’s staff fell into a sort of gray area. Technically, they weren’t an investigative agency. Theresa examined and processed crime scenes only when asked to by the police agencies, and had no authority of her own. On the other hand, the Medical Examiner was the highest official in the county, outranking even the Sheriff, so if Stone decided to dig in his heels there could be no telling what might happen.

    In any event, if the cops needed a DNA sample there were plenty more hairs in the brush, and the paper remained unmolested.
    The uniformed officer appeared at Theresa’s shoulder, and she nearly dropped both her envelopes. ‘Ma’am? Someone wants to see you.’
    ‘Uh … yeah, okay.’ His set of handcuffs remained clipped to his belt. Maybe he thought it was her locker.
    It turned out that Stone had issued the summons, and he led the way from the first floor to his office on the second with Theresa and Shephard in tow. Apparently, they were going to powwow. They could have powwowed in the lobby, but then Stone wouldn’t have been able to show off his office, and Theresa figured he felt more secure inside it. Medical Examiner Stone didn’t believe in the austerity and stripped-down professionalism of other county offices and had enough of his own and his wife’s money that he didn’t have to. His workspace, while small, had been outfitted with suitably crammed bookshelves in deep cherry, a