Page 16 of Manner of Death
Bashir had just finished photographing every visible inch of the body and the ground immediately surrounding him when a commotion turned his head. He’d been vaguely aware of a car engine approaching, but he hadn’t paid it much mind because it was hardly out of the ordinary. People came and went at crime scenes.
The scream of, “Let me see him!” however, was… irregular.
Not unheard of, but not an everyday thing. Bashir swore under his breath, schooled his expression to something placid and professional, and peered around the curtain toward the sounds. Unsurprisingly, there was a woman trying to shove past police and onto the crime scene. She was probably in her sixties or so, and a man of about the same age was trying to hold her back. Her husband, Bashir guessed, especially since he looked distraught himself even as he tried to calm her down.
The woman was having none of it. She alternately sobbed and raged, demanding to see her son. Bashir felt for her. She wasn’t the first mother to come to a crime scene, overwhelmed with every stage of grief simultaneously, and she sadly would not be the last. Today was about to be the worst day of her life, and the ones that came after wouldn’t be much better.
Bashir sighed and got back to work. These poor people. At least they would most likely have an ID on the body now. He didn’t have any identification on him—the pockets of his swim trunks were empty—but some difficulty identifying a body was preferable to this. No one wanted the cops showing up at the door with hats in their hands, but personally, Bashir would take a somber visit like that over showing up to the scene and actually seeing the body of his lost loved one.
The screaming died down a little, and Bashir chanced another look outside. The woman was now perched on the front bumper of a patrol car, crying and dabbing at her eyes. In front of her, Detective Villeray was saying something, gesturing in a way that suggested he was trying to soothe her, but his expression and mannerisms weren’t patronizing. In fact, even from here, he looked genuinely sympathetic, and whatever he was saying… it was working.
Bashir ducked back into the tent and stood there for a moment, trying to process. Some cops were good at dealing with the panicked and the grief-stricken. Some were… not. He wasn’t even surprised that Villeray was apparently good at it. If anything, he was caught off-guard by the effect that had on him.
C’mon, Ramin. A cop with an understanding of basic compassion isn’t that out of the ordinary.
A cop with an understanding of basic compassion who was also attractive, queer, single, and interested? That was something of a unicorn.
Bashir shook himself and got back to work. The woman’s son deserved the focus of a forensic pathologist who would figure out what had happened to him. Not one who was distracted by the cop he maybe should’ve taken up on the offer for dinner. The cop who’d quite famously been a literal actor before getting his badge.
The thought gave Bashir pause. Then he rolled his eyes and got back to work.
No wonder Sawyer was so convincing.
And attractive.
And…
Goddammit. I am so fucked.
The following morning, Bashir found himself with a serious case of déjà vu.
Of course, starting the day with autopsies wasn’t unusual. Any bodies brought in were autopsied the following morning, and in a city this size, a handful of people dying on a given day wasn’t that out of ordinary. The vast majority of them weren’t even suspicious. Aneurysms. Embolisms. Myocardial infarctions. Accidents. Someone choking on a meatball at a wedding like that lady a few months back. That guy last spring who hadn’t thought to make sure he wasn’t allergic to bee stings before getting into beekeeping. Bashir had seen it all, and he started most of his days by opening up bodies to find out why they’d stopped ticking.
What was new, however, was two days in a row of staring at a body he’d been autopsying, completely at a loss to explain what had happened to the person.
Christopher James White, twenty-seven, had not drowned.
He had been in chlorinated water recently, but there was no sign of drowning. No water in the stomach or lungs. No hemorrhage in the mastoid cavity of the ear. No bloody froth in the mouth or trachea. It was still possible—drowning was a weird one that was sometimes determined by excluding everything else—but still, even this far into the autopsy, literally the only things that even remotely suggested drowning were the swim trunks and the smell of chlorine.
There were signs of bleeding between the endocardium and myocardium. Some fluid had also accumulated in the myocardial interstitium and in the brain. The stomach was mostly empty, and there was some damage to the esophagus that suggested the kid had been sick. Perhaps violently so.
He didn’t drown, Bashir, he told himself. Let go of that hypothesis and figure out how he did die.
That was how he always did things. Even when he had a general idea of what probably killed the person, he scrupulously kept an open mind so he didn’t miss anything. But this time, “drowning” hung in the back of his mind like a relentless earworm. Probably because it was so wildly incongruous with where and how the body was discovered. It was too weird to ignore.
Ignore it anyway. Stop trying to drown him.
Bashir stared at the body. At his notes. At the body again. “Hey, Tami?”
She looked up from some notes she’d been going over from a routine autopsy. “Yeah?”
“You’re not doing anything messy right now, are you?”
She showed her hands, which weren’t gloved. “Nope. Just paperwork.”
“If you’ve got a minute, would you mind calling Detectives McKay and Villeray for me?”
Her neutral expression darkened. “Oh. Them.”