suspect away.
“The police don’t just want to know how someone died. They want to know whether there are other things that have happened which they can use to charge the offender with. For example, they would have wanted to know, was she beaten?” he explained.
Yes.
“Was she raped?”
Yes.
His eyes came to rest right with me. “Had she still been alive when he slit her throat and let her bleed out on the floor?”
Also fucking yes.
And the joy in his face told me he fucking knew that too.
I needed to get out, my heart racing and my clammy hands no longer able to hold my damn pencil, but as I began to throw my shit together haphazardly, his slideshow changed—a new image lighting up the screen.
This one I didn’t recognize.
Not at first.
The body lay face down, the image was much older and grainier. The carpet on the floor was dated and stained with a pool of blood. The décor around kind of bland and boring, desperately in need of a bit of color.
“This crime was one I’ve looked into, one I found interest in,” Garrett rambled, pacing around the front of the room. He paused at the computer, zooming in on the body, and as things began to focus in a little more, I noticed the Brothers by Blood MC logo on the back of the man’s club cut. “You see, this crime was deemed self-defense… yet a lot of the crime scene evidence pointed toward the opposite. This is where a forensic pathologist can be important. We can look for things like defensive wounds. Of which there were none found.”
The way he looked across the room at me was so fucking high and mighty.
The I know your secret look, getting kind of fucking old.
I knew who that man was, and I knew why Shotgun had shot him.
“Excuse me.”
My voice was loud.
It didn’t shake.
Or cower.
Despite the way my body wanted to break down. How it wanted to give in and just crawl back inside the deep dark hole that was losing Micah. But instead, I stood, Garrett’s eyes lighting up as he eagerly moved closer to me, delighted he’d drawn me so far into his game that I’d put my hand up, now willing to play.
“Weren’t you just released from prison for beating your wife almost to death last year?”
The smug look dropped from his face instantly, his lip curling when a wave of whispers moved through the crowded room, even Mr. Singer’s eyes growing wider as he took a step back, putting distance between him and Garrett.
“Aren’t you also a suspect in her murder, given she was slaughtered less than twenty-four hours after you were released from prison.”
“All right, all right!” Mr. Singer finally called, trying to calm the class while Garrett Drake glared at me, the tension in the room so fucking thick you could carve it with a knife.
“What do you think those forensic reports will say?” I called over the commotion.
“Enough!” Mr. Singer bellowed.
I knew I’d pushed a button—the big red one—the one that said don’t push.
Oops.
SHOTGUN
“What kind of doctor is he again?”
“A pathologist,” Auron answered, leaning back into the hard wooden bench that sat in front of the hospital’s main entrance. The medical board of the hospital was meeting with Garrett today to determine whether he was getting his job back. The boys and I figured we would meet him outside after, let him know we were the reason he wasn’t.
Slate frowned, peeking around the pillar he was leaning against. “I’m gonna need a little more than that, brother.”
“There are many paths to pathology, but pathologists are generally the doctors who diagnose. They are the ones who study your medical tests, like blood, fluid, or biopsies, and detect any kind of disease or abnormality and what it is so it can be treated.” Auron’s ability to pull this kind of information from the depths of somewhere in his brain always astounded me, though it was usually just a bunch of words I didn’t understand. This time, though, I was hearing him, connecting the dots and placing the information into the back of my mind in case I needed it later. Anything I could use to get one up on this fucker.
“And this is important?” Slate confirmed.
The way Auron’s brow knotted gave me the answer I needed even without the explanation—yes, pathology is important, and Auron believed Slate was an idiot for asking, though none of the rest of us wanted to admit we were wondering the same