Page 47 of Manner of Death
“A sports car of some kind. We’re in the process of getting camera footage to find out.”
“Hmm.” He checked her legs. “Impact happened just above the knee. Severe bleeding from the legs. Probably severed the femoral artery…” He glanced over at Huerta. “Are you going to start writing this down sometime today?”
“Oh!” The young man had gone weirdly quiet as soon as the Boyce arrived. “Yes, Dr. Boyce, let me just—um—” He fumbled in his pockets for a few seconds before Dr. Boyce shook his head.
“Never mind, you’re useless. Go prep the stretcher.”
Huerta didn’t answer to Boyce and could’ve easily told him to pound sand because none of that was his damn job, but he probably wanted to avoid confrontation. And it was as good an excuse as any to get away from the asshole for a moment, which, Sawyer guessed, was why he took the order and ran off.
Sawyer weighed the good to be had from biting his tongue versus saying something. In the end, he decided to speak up. “I didn’t know it was his job to take notes at the scene for you. Or help you remove the body.”
“I didn’t know it was your business either,” Dr. Boyce replied as he got to his feet. “I don’t try to do your job, detective, so I’d appreciate it if you don’t even attempt to understand mine. I’ll have a preliminary report on the death for you sometime later today.” He took his gloves off with a resounding snap, then headed briskly toward the van where Huerta was getting the stretcher out of the back. “You’re not being paid by the hour—what the hell is taking so long?”
Sawyer wasn’t sad to see Dr. Boyce drive off with the victim fifteen minutes later, leaving a chastened tech who seemed to have had all the verve knocked right out of him. “I can finish up here,” Huerta said. “There’s not that much. You can go.”
“I’ll help,” Sawyer said. It took a few minutes, but Carlos finally seemed to get his second wind.
“I hate going out on scenes with Dr. Boyce,” he confessed. “He’s always really impatient and sometimes he doesn’t want to wait for me to finish taking photos or collecting all of the evidence I need to, but if I don’t get absolutely everything then we might end up compromising a case, so I really have to be thorough.”
“I get it.”
“And then he starts yelling at me to hurry up and he never listens when I tell him I am, and the last time he went out on site with Tami, she came back crying.”
That was surprising. Tami didn’t seem like the type of person to be intimidated by a blowhard like Andy Boyce. “Wow.”
That was all the encouragement Huerta needed to keep going. “Yeah, I mean, nobody really likes working with him in the field, but Tami especially. They always used to argue about who needed to do what and he tried to treat her like he treats me. Then one day she says she’s not his servant or something like that, and then he says she is basically his servant, and…it’s a real mess. She doesn’t ever argue with him or push back at all anymore. Like ever.” Huerta sighed. “I wish he could be more like Dr. Ramin. He never gets mad at us or acts like the CSIs work for him, but sometimes he’s busy somewhere else, you know?”
“He seems like a good guy.” I bet he’s even better in bed. Sawyer chided himself firmly for veering in a sordid direction while he was working. He blamed sleep deprivation.
“He is! He’s the best medical examiner I’ve ever worked for, including one guy named Dr. Krane who was one of my professors at school. I really thought he was the best for the longest time because he was also really patient and…”
Eventually, the kid shut up and got back to work. By the time Sawyer was waving goodbye to Huerta, the young man seemed in a much better mood.
Sawyer couldn’t say the same. He did not—absolutely did not—need a hit-and-run case on top of the fucking serial killer he was already investigating, but the world never seemed to care much about timing. He drove to the hospital to check on the second victim, whose family had been informed. Her older sister sat in the waiting room, drawn and red-eyed, with a sleeping baby in a sling across her chest as they spoke.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if Chris doesn’t recover,” she said, staring down at the baby. “Michael is hers, not mine. I’m not ready to be a mother, I…I just offered to babysit while she went out with Lena, I didn’t…I don’t—” Her face crumpled. “How could I ever tell him about this? About what happened to his mother?”
“She might pull through,” Sawyer said, although the doctor hadn’t been encouraging. Massive compound fractures to both legs, swelling on the brain from the impact with the ground; it was honestly surprising she’d lived this long. He left his contact information with the sister, gave the baby a gentle rub on the back, then headed for the precinct.
Nan was entering the building at the same time as him, a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. “Hey! I’m sorry about Felix. I hope you were able to ditch him after a few…” She slowed down and stared at him. “Holy shit, did you get any sleep?”
“Hit-and-run this morning.” Sawyer collapsed into the chair at his desk, then regretted it as his ribs tried to jump right out of his body. “Too many sick officers, not enough coverage. I handled it,” he added when she looked like she wanted to argue about it. “It’s fine.”
Nan made the face that meant she knew it wasn’t, in fact, fine, but that she also knew there was nothing either of them could do about it. “You want to work on that one and I’ll keep up with the others for now?”
“Sure.” At least reviewing camera footage was easy work compared to the mental slog of putting puzzle pieces together in the serial killer case. Sawyer normally would have preferred the complexity, but too few hours of sleep and too many cups of coffee after getting his ass handed to him yesterday didn’t make for the most attentive mental state today.
He got lucky with the footage. Two of the nearby stores had good angles on the car that hit the young women—a Maserati Levante, a heavy, luxury SUV that stuck out like a sore thumb from the Toyotas and Fords on the road. He couldn’t see the driver, but after a little bit of work he was able to get a partial on the license plate. UWAN…a quick search pulled it up, and Sawyer rolled his eyes. UWANTME, the perfect vanity plate for whoever was driving this fucking car, because Sawyer did want them now, badly, to be under arrest. The address associated with the car was in a city a hundred miles away, but that didn’t mean anything. He just needed to make a few calls, look for family connections or friends in town, and then—
Sawyer’s phone rang. “Detective Villeray,” he said distractedly.
“Sawyer.” It was Bashir, but his tone of voice said that this wasn’t a social call. “We’ve got another body.”
Sawyer’s heart sank. “Is it the other victim in the hit and run?” he asked. Her doctors hadn’t been confident she would make it, but damn it, her sister was going to be devastated—
“No. Another one of those bodies.”
Oh. Oh, shit.