pulled up to the Emergency entrance and Gretchen went inside to secure a gurney. Ten minutes later, they were pushing their charge down the dank, gray hallways in the bowels of the hospital toward Dr. Anya Feist’s large exam room. The doors to the morgue slid open as they approached. Dr. Feist and her assistant, Ramon, stood on either side, ushering them through.
“I just got a call,” Dr. Feist said, “Your Evidence Response Team should be here any minute.”
“Great,” Josie replied.
Ramon moved the gurney into the middle of the room, and he and Dr. Feist transferred the tarp onto one of her stainless-steel exam tables with a movable overhead light. “We’ll wait for the ERT so they can take photos,” she said. She looked over toward Josie and smiled as she tucked her shoulder-length silver-blonde hair up into a skull cap. “You had quite the morning, didn’t you? Exciting stuff. I saw the whole thing on the news. They streamed it live.”
“Oh jeez,” Josie muttered. Great. Now her humiliation was on video, preserved for the ages. Another thought occurred to her, making her chest feel tight—not only had she jumped back into the water and put the team in danger, but just about anything could have gone wrong on live television.
Gretchen said, “Good thing it was a successful rescue and recovery.”
Relief flooded Josie when Officer Hummel and his ERT colleague, Officer Jenny Chan, walked in, stopping the conversation in its tracks. All of them gathered around the table that held the rolled tarp. Hummel and Chan unpacked their equipment. Gretchen took her notebook and pen out, ready to take notes as they worked. Chan snapped photographs while Hummel took measurements and notes of his own.
Once they were finished, Dr. Feist asked, “How do you want to do this? Should we cut it open?”
Hummel studied the tarp and looked at Chan. Hummel had been the unofficial head of Denton’s ERT for the past five years, but Chan had come from a bigger department and had seen a lot more crime scenes. She turned to Josie. “How long was this in the water?”
“A few minutes?”
Gretchen said, “Maybe ten minutes. Once it dislodged, the boss got it and we hauled it into the boat pretty fast.”
“There’s a slim chance that we could get prints from the tarp and possibly the tape since it wasn’t in the water very long,” Chan told Hummel. “We’d have to use cyanoacrylate fuming.”
From the corner of the room, Ramon asked, “I’m sorry, what?”
Josie said, “It’s a way of lifting latent fingerprints by using superglue, basically. Fumes react with the cyanoacrylate to make this sticky white film on surfaces so you can see the prints and photograph them.”
“It works on non-porous surfaces, typically,” Chan cut in. “But we still might get something from the tarp or tape, or even both.”
“Right,” Josie agreed. “It would be worth a try.”
Gretchen said, “This was buried. We have no idea how long it was under that house. It could be years. You think you could still get prints?”
Chan shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a slim chance, but Detective Quinn is right. It’s worth trying.”
Hummel said, “Then we’ll try carefully peeling the tape and unraveling the tarp instead of cutting.”
No one protested. Josie and Gretchen stood back and watched while Hummel, Chan, Dr. Feist, and Ramon went to work, trying to keep as much of the tape and tarp intact as they could. Beneath the tarp was a second tarp and more tape. Ramon pushed the gurney flush against the side of the autopsy table as they began removing the next layer. A musty smell tinged with the scent of decay filled the room as they got closer to revealing the body inside the tarps. Finally, after an hour of painstaking work, the tape and tarps were carefully bagged and marked, and Dr. Feist and Ramon arranged the body on the autopsy table.
Josie and Gretchen stepped forward to take a closer look. Josie’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart did a little flutter. Hummel took out his camera and started snapping photos.
Gretchen said, “Is she—is she mummified?”
“Yes,” Dr. Feist answered softly, surveying the body.
Josie’s gaze panned the tableau from top to bottom. She had expected skeletal remains given how deeply the body had been buried beneath the foundation of Mrs. Bassett’s house. While much of the skeleton was evident, its bones were held together by taut blackened vestiges of skin and sinew. Long brown hair tangled near the scalp, the skin slippage