Page 27 of What Happened Last Night

“And she also tested positive for methamphetamines. Looking at the black spots on her liver and kidneys, she was no stranger to meth, although her teeth are all still in place and show little to no signs of rotting, so she hadn’t been taking it for a long time or in large quantities,” Dr. Karloff said.

I nodded my head. There was no real way of knowing at this point, but it sounded to me like Candy had gone off the rails and turned to meth, of all things, when William had ended things between them. It was consistent with Carlotta’s stalker story. The meth would have affected Candy, making even the most trivial things seem bigger than they were and making her paranoid. It might explain why she had thought that breaking into the Aldens’ house in the middle of the night was a good idea, if nothing else.

“And now for the big finale.” Dr. Karloff grinned. “You’ll like this one, Jamie.”

I winced at both his words and his expression. He rolled his eyes.

“Relax, Jamie. If I didn’t keep this stuff light, I would have been locked away in the nuthouse years ago,” Dr. Karloff said.

“Maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.” I grinned.

Dr. Karloff laughed and shook his head.

“But then you wouldn’t have me as your coroner. You’d have someone middle of the road, boring even. And that just wouldn’t do, would it?”

“I guess not.” I smiled. “So, what’s this big finale, then?”

I had a feeling I was going to regret asking the question, but I also felt like this was going to be something important. Dr. Karloff wouldn’t have made such a big deal out of this moment if there wasn’t something unexpected to be seen.

“What, no drumroll?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes and he shrugged.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said.

He leaned over Candy and made an incision.

“As I suspected,” he said to himself.

He reached into Candy’s open body and plucked something out. He held it out on his palm for me to see. It was small, kind of withered looking, and it took me a second to place it. When I did realize what it was, I couldn’t unsee it and I had to take a deep breath to stop myself from retching.

“Oh, my God. Is that what I think it is?” I said, feeling my stomach cramp and the room lurch around me. I swallowed hard, willing the nausea in my stomach to pass.

“An unborn baby,” Dr. Karloff said, serious now. “Around fourteen weeks would be my best guess.”

Shit. This changed everything. Maybe Candy wasn’t a crazy stalker type. Maybe she just wanted to know William would be there for her and the baby. But then again, she had been drinking and taking meth, so she wouldn’t exactly be up for any mother of the year award. And while I had no direct experience in this, I would hazard a guess that showing up in the middle of the night and breaking into someone’s house weren’t the actions of a normal person who just wanted some support for her child.

Candy’s pregnancy gave both William and Carlotta a stronger motive for murdering Candy. For William to hide from the inconvenient truth of his affair and Carlotta because she knew there was no way to hide this from the world and continue to play the part of the happy couple in public. At once, both motives seemed plausible and yet too weak to warrant killing a young girl. I’d seen flimsier reasons for killing, but not from a professional with the lifestyle of William and Carlotta.

My mind was working overtime as a hundred scenarios passed through it. Of course, it was possible that the baby wasn’t even William’s. He was playing away. Was it such a stretch to think Candy might be sleeping with more than one person? It was even possible that Candy didn’t know about the pregnancy. Both of those things were solvable.

“Take a DNA sample from the baby, please,” I said. “I have to make a call.”

I stepped into the corridor and pulled my cellphone out. I called Officer Stanford. She answered on the first ring.

“Hi,” I said. “Listen. I’m at Candy’s autopsy. She was pregnant.”

“Well, shit. I didn’t see that one coming,” she said after giving a low whistle.

Me neither, I thought, remembering the way Dr. Karloff had presented the baby to me.

“I need you to get a warrant for us to take a sample of William’s DNA so we can see if the baby was his. And I also need access to Candy’s medical records. There’s a chance she didn’t know she was pregnant,” I said.

“On it,” Officer Stanford said.

The line went dead, and for a second, I didn’t know whether I should be pissed off that she’d hung up on me or impressed by how efficient she was. I settled on being impressed by her efficiency. I stepped back into the autopsy room. Dr. Karloff was sewing Candy’s body back up with a fast, neat stitch.

“All done,” he said as he put in the last stitch and snapped off the suture thread. He nodded to a test tube on the metal instrument table. “That’s the DNA sample. I take it you want it cross-matching against the suspect?”

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