Page 94 of Manner of Death
Bashir shifted gingerly in his chair. He was aware of all that. He’d suspected it, anyway; it was unsettling to hear that Boyce had vocalized it to someone.
Tami went on, “The first year I was here, he said a few times that he wouldn’t be brokenhearted if he came in and found Bashir on a slab.”
That… caught Bashir off-guard.
Beside him, Sawyer stiffened, fingers tightening in Bashir’s hand, and they exchanged wide-eyed looks.
Tami’s chair creaked as she shifted nervously. “But then he’d go off on this tirade about how Bashir would just be replaced by someone even younger, and…” She sighed. “It just escalated over time, you know?”
Yang studied her intently. “How did it escalate to murder? And how exactly did you get involved?”
Her face turned beet red, and she glanced all around the room except in Bashir’s direction. After a painfully long moment, she exhaled. “He knew I didn’t work well under pressure. That’s—I mean, that’s why I dropped out of nursing and pursued becoming a forensic autopsy tech. I couldn’t handle the fear of making a mistake and killing a person. Autopsies—they require a lot of attention to detail and stuff, and if you fuck—if you make a mistake, they can screw somebody over. But it’s not the same as ‘if you don’t make this decision correctly in two-point-five seconds, the patient will die and it’ll be all your fault.’”
Bashir couldn’t help nodding. There were a lot of reasons he’d elected to forego working with the living, and the split second literal life-or-death nature of it was on the list.
Tami moistened her lips. “So Andy knew about that. And he’d mess with me over it. Like he was always making me second-guess everything I did. Suggesting I made a mistake until I went back and checked, and then when I saw that I hadn’t made a mistake, he’d act like he was just helping me learn to be thorough. It was…” Her shoulders dropped. “It was a lot. I couldn’t work like that, you know? That’s why I was happy to just be an assistant while he and Bashir took the more complicated cases and testified in court.”
“All right,” Yang said. “But… the murders?”
Tami again turned red, and she stared so hard at the floor, it was a wonder the dirty white linoleum didn’t start to curl into flames. “I, um…” She gulped. “I had a crush on Bashir, okay?”
Bashir’s own face burned. He’d known about that, too, but it wasn’t something he’d ever wanted getting out of the morgue. She’d probably felt the same way.
“My fiancé got super jealous about it,” she continued sheepishly. “He was an insecure manbaby, but he was also convinced I was sleeping with Bashir. To the point he confronted Bashir about it and…” She grimaced. “He told him. About… About my crush.”
All eyes except for Tami’s were suddenly on Bashir. He nodded to acknowledge that she was correct. He just hoped she didn’t mention the part about “Listen, pal. I’m not interested in either of you, but if I was, it wouldn’t be her. You feel me?” Bashir didn’t regret shutting down the idiot’s bullshit like that, but it wasn’t something he needed all the cops in the precinct to be reminded about. Those who knew had hopefully forgotten, and he didn’t need the rumor mill starting back up. Cops were the worst gossips on the planet.
“Things got really weird in the morgue for a while,” Tami went on. “Andy found out from one of the other techs about Bashir and my ex having it out, and that’s when Andy started kind of… I don’t know, getting really friendly with me, I guess?” She chafed her arms and squirmed. “He was always in my business and just… very, very friendly.”
Bashir swallowed bile. This part, he’d had no idea. They’d never even looked at each other when he was in the morgue.
“Last summer, we hooked up.” She squirmed in her chair, lip curling in disgust. “It was only one time, and—I mean, I won’t go into detail, but when he wanted to do it again…” She grimaced, shaking her head.
“Was this consensual?” Yang asked.
“Oh, yes. It was awful, and I still don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but… yeah. I consented. For some reason.” She fingered the hem of her T-shirt. “But as soon as he realized I wasn’t going to touch him again, he changed. He kept telling me that if anyone found out, we’d both lose our jobs. I’d never find work in law enforcement ever again, and his career would be over, and it would be my fault.”
Bashir ground his teeth. That sounded on-brand as hell for Boyce, but Jesus fucking Christ. If he’d known about any of this, he’d have fired the jackass in a heartbeat.
“Then he started really nitpicking my work,” she went on. “Making me think I’d messed up even though I hadn’t. Going absolutely apeshit on me when I did fuck up. It was…” She chafed her arms again and squirmed. “It was really hard to work. And he told me not to let Bashir even catch a whiff of any of this—that we’d slept together, or the mistakes I was making—because I’d be gone.”
Everyone in the room was silent for a long moment. Bashir wished like hell he’d crashed the car just a little bit harder or pretended not to hear Sawyer when he called him off. Yeah, the ideal situation was Boyce going to prison for all these murders, but in this moment, Bashir was too angry to want anything other than that son of a bitch crushed under his tire.
Tami swiped at her eyes. “A few months ago, I made a really big mistake on an autopsy, and Andy caught it.”
“What mistake?” Yang asked.
Deflating, Tami said, “I screwed up the chain of custody. On some tissue samples being sent to the lab. It…” She shook her head and sighed. “It was a stupid, stupid mistake. And it almost cost the defense their case because… Anyway, it was a huge error, and I just got really lucky that Andy caught it before the body was released to the funeral home. So, we were able to get another sample, and fortunately it hadn’t degraded enough that the evidence was lost.”
Fury swelled in Bashir’s sore chest. He’d had no idea this happened, and he could’ve gone down right alongside them if it had come out. Any report either of them submitted, he’d had to sign off on, which meant he could be implicated if it turned out something was hinky. Dr. Boyce should’ve reported the error to him immediately, and they should’ve disclosed the issue to all interested parties. Something like this could call an entire autopsy—hell, an entire case—into question and get the verdict overturned on appeal.
“He started blackmailing me after that,” Tami continued, her voice shaky. Her lawyer offered her a box of tissues, and she took one. Dabbing her eyes, she said, “He’d ask me to do all kinds of weird stuff—stuff that didn’t seem normal or ethical—and he’d threaten to report me for the chain of custody thing. He showed me this log he’d compiled of all of my errors, including some that I know for a fact didn’t happen, but he’d managed to create this history of write-ups and disciplinary action that didn’t exist.” Her composure was dangerously close to breaking apart. “He just had to email it to the powers that be, and both Bashir and I would be gone.”
Bashir’s stomach dropped.
Yang shifted his weight. “Why would Dr. Ramin have been gone?”
She swallowed hard as she flicked an apologetic look toward Bashir. “Because all the disciplinary action, all the reports, everything—he’d done it all through Bashir’s account. In his name. And there was so much stuff—major stuff—that he told me Bashir would be fired for keeping me in the morgue after doing all those things.” She dabbed her eyes some more. “I don’t even know if he had proof, or if… I don’t know. I was just so scared of losing my career and of being the reason Bashir lost his…” A sob escaped, and she added a quiet, “I couldn’t do that to Bashir.”