Page 72 of Manner of Death
Of course he got me to let down my guard. That’s literally his fucking job.
Bashir’s mouth suddenly tasted sour. “Okay. What have you got?”
“I sent an officer by her apartment building with a warrant for records of packages received by the front desk.” He grimaced and pulled some images and printouts free. “Bashir, she got a package from a company that distributes snake venom.” Shaking his head, he whispered, “I can’t overlook that.”
Bashir took the papers.
A photo of a package log with Tami’s distinctive loopy signature beside a tracking number.
A screenshot of a shipping website with the tracking information entered.
A return address to Fangz Direct.
And an emailed receipt from Fangz Direct showing a successful credit card payment from one Tamara Lynn Glen for one vial of black mamba venom.
Bashir pushed out a breath and shoved everything back at Sawyer.
There was no way. Tami wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t.
But he couldn’t deny the connections Sawyer was making. Sawyer and Walker were professionally obligated to pull every thread they found, and to keep pulling them until they solved the case. It was their job. Like Bashir, they owed it to the victims and their families to leave no stone unturned, no matter what ugliness they found underneath.
And no matter what tactics they had to use to crack through the killer’s defenses.
“I’m sorry, Bashir,” Sawyer said again. “I really am.”
“I know,” Bashir whispered without looking at him. He meant it, too. He didn’t think Sawyer was being malicious to him or to Tami. “Let me know if you have any more updates.”
With that, he brushed past both of them and headed up the hall.
And for the second time today, he heard Walker murmur, “Let him go.”
Regardless of what was happening with Tami, Bashir had a job to do. Usually, he could throw himself into his work and ignore anything else, but that was a tougher task today because there was no separating that work from what was happening. His assistant was gone. His own autopsies and forensic reports would quite possibly be what sealed her fate.
No, Bashir, he reminded himself as he went through the motions of a routine autopsy, she sealed her own fate when she killed all those people.
He swallowed hard behind his mask. He rarely got queasy during an autopsy anymore—though everybody got a little green when the body had been bloating in the August heat for a couple of weeks—but today, he may as well have been back in med school. Back when that first cadaver had sent his stomach into his throat and kept it there for the whole semester.
It had nothing to do with the body in front of him, though, and everything to do with the trail of corpses his own assistant had left behind. He wanted everything to go back to normal. He wanted her here, perched on her stool, taking notes for him, and sometimes helping out when he needed an extra pair of hands.
Her musical voice echoed in his ears: “I love watching you work, Bash.”
He’d chuckled, glancing up at her. “You love watching me take apart a body?”
“No, no.” She’d actually giggled at that. “I mean watching your mind work. It’s just… You see things, you know? The little details that anyone else would miss.”
In the present, Bashir froze, the decedent’s liver heavy in his hands.
Other moments flickered through his mind like a film highlight reel, zeroing in on moments when Tami had been assisting him.
“No other pathologist would’ve caught that. No way.”
“The way you think is mind-blowing.”
“It’s like watching someone figure out the world’s most complicated puzzle!”
He lowered the organ back into the abdominal cavity and leaned his hands on the exam table as the world rocked beneath him. Another conversation—this one much more recent—lurched into the forefront of his mind like his breakfast wanted to lurch up into his mouth:
“Seems like a lot of work to cover something up,” Tami had said. “Any pathologist was going to put the pieces together. Wouldn’t a killer just let the reaction do its thing?”