Page 39 of Sinful Reality

“Yes. Because I don’t do this often, and I’m too woozy to stand much longer.”

Stunned, I cross the metaphorical picket line and come up behind my wife.Just in case.

“You’re sick, huh?” Sauntering forward, Aubree takes Minka’s hand and cups it in both of hers, bringing them up and holding them at chest height. “You should be in bed, not in the office, attempting to assert your dominance.”

“You should mind your damn business, accept my apology so we can move on, and then get the hell out of my autopsy suite. This is my bag of bones.”

“Ourautopsy suite, O Captain.” She rubs their hands together, creating friction and warmth and somehow drawing a rosy blush to Minka’s cheeks. Then she releases her and moves to the sink. “We work together, Boss. We dug her up together, so now we’ll sort her out. Together.” She pumps soap into her palm and flips the tap on to start the water. “I’ve started separating human from animal. I’m no veterinary scientist, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and declare that,” she dips her head toward the table and a stack of bones that I guess aren’t human, “a hoofed ruminant ungulate of the family Cervidae.”

She switches the tap off and drags paper towels from the dispenser. But she glances across and meets my confused eyes. “It’s a deer. Or, well, was. Danika is?—”

“Not yet formally identified,” Minka cuts in.The chief is back. “We have bones, and we have assumptions. We have a compelling argument we could present to the investigating detectives. But we havenoformal identification, and until we do, we don’t get to call her Danika.”

Behind Minka’s back, Aubree purses her lips. “The as yet unidentified skeletal remains are female.” Tossing the towels in the trash, she comes around and stops on the opposite side of the table from her boss. “Early assessment indicates they belong to a woman in her early to mid-twenties. Pelvis concludes female, and that she has never carried a child. Decomp suggests she’s been in the ground for approximately twelve to eighteen months. Female’s height is estimated between five feet, three inches and five feet, seven inches. Unidentified female’s left ankle shows what was a significant break earlier in her life. The fracture healed longbefore her time inside the ground.” She peeks up with smiling eyes. “Can you confirm, Detective Malone, if your missing person’s medical history includes a fractured left talus?”

Yes. I fucking can. Because I’ve been looking for this girl for a year and a half already, and I’ve studied her files front to back, back to front, and upside down so many times I could almost recite every detail by memory. But I clear my throat and nod. “Yes, Doctor Emeri. The woman I’ve been searching for did, in fact, suffer an injury to her left ankle when she was nine years old.”

She was also mid-twenties, five-five, and had never carried a child.

“Good.” Aubree peers at her boss, whose hands remain firmly in her pockets so she’s not tempted to contaminate evidence with her own mucusy discharge. “We recovered the skull.” She moves to Danika’s head and lifts it the way Hamlet intended, gently twisting her wrist and allowing the overhead lights to illuminate shattered lines. “This skull met something very hard, at deathly force, at some point surrounding her death.”

“He hit her?” I question. “The way Tarran says it, Buke choked her.”

Minka leans closer to study her find. “We can’t say yet if she was hit before or after death.”

“Willyou be able to?” I step forward, too, so she has something to lean on if she needs it. “Or is decomp too advanced?”

“We’ll be able to tell.” Aubree twists her wrist and shows me a red staining on the inside of the skull. “We’ll get you a pretty decent recount of events. The ankle injury is step one in identifying the remains. Step two will be to pull her dental records and confirm. No jewelry or distinguishable clothing was recovered at the scene, which means he probably dumped her naked.”

“Sad, really.” Minka sniffles and wipes her nose with the sleeve of her white coat. But if she intended to take a moment to be embarrassed about it, her phone trills instead, stealing the air from our autopsy suite and casting a thick sheen of unease over us all.

We know who it is, and fuck, but we know he bothers us.

Minka’s focus remains on Danika for a moment more. Mourning a life and grieving a woman she’s never met. Danika’s only crime was to trust someone she shouldn’t have. “I’m glad that inmate called you,” shemurmurs. “Her family deserves closure.” But she steps away from the table and fishes the phone from her pocket to read the screen. “I’m putting this on speaker,” she decides. “Record’s still off.” Swiping to answer, she hobbles to the far wall and leans against the cold glass. “Pax. It’s Minka.”

“Min!” His breath explodes with relief. “Hey. I heard you’re not feeling well. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m not sick.” And yet, she tugs a tissue from her pocket and wipes her nose.Honk. “I never get sick. What’s happening in New York?”

“I worked down the list of moms, starting with the most recent and tracking my way back. I asked about their movements in the last few weeks before their daughter was taken.”

“Caught any overlaps yet?”

“Yeah!” He’s a high-energy blend, the kind we’d get if we mixed Aubree, Fletch, and Cato. “Sort of. It’s loose, but I’ll run them through and see what you think.”

Couldn’t do that with your own team? You fuckin’ bitch.

“Elouise’s mom mentioned how it had been her birthday recently—the mom’s,” he clarifies, “which, obviously, we already knew from the initial files. But it was an entire month before the abduction, so no one really explored that as a significant event. You mentioned the ‘free things people do to save money’ last time we talked, so with that in mind, I asked her about shows or zoos or whatever they might have visited over the holiday period. Since mom’s birthday is in December, they’d made a habit of swinging by this local juice bar. Sign up for their email list, and you get a free jumbo juice on your birthday month. You can also sign up for some fancy makeup brand and get the same deal. Give them your email, visit their store on your birthday, and you get all these extra free samples.”

“Sounds like a good way to be spammed with bullshit for the rest of your life.” Tired, Minka turns to the long counter spanning most of the floor-to-ceiling window and leans on her elbow, resting her face in her hand.Power-nap time. “But okay. So makeup and juice. What else?”

“Well, she was a little embarrassed when I pushed this angle, but eventually, it all came tumbling out. I guess it’s common knowledgeamongst the frugal-livers to sign up for everything and turn your birthday into a tour-de-free. Krispy Kreme will give you a free donut. There’s a theater in the city that gives you a free popcorn and soda. Show your ID at this bakery, prove it’s your birthday, get a free cookie. Pretzel place, same. Yogurt place, same. Free wings. Free burrito. Free coffee. You can walk all over Manhattan if you have the time and energy and fuel up on stuff you maybe couldn’t afford the rest of the year. Elouise and her mom did that every single December. It was their tradition.”

“Okay. Who’d you call next? And did they sign up for the yogurt place, too?”

“Tegan Webb’s mother. She took her baby to the zoo for free every single winter break. The lines were short, the weather was abysmal, but the animals were magical after the snow, she said, and she’d cut a coupon from the Sunday Times a few weeks before.”

“So free is how they connect.” She’s so sick, so tired, so fucking weak as she sluggishly brings her head up and meets my eyes. She blinks owlishly, pained because I know each time she does, it’s like dragging sandpaper over her eyeball. “But free isn’t a particular place or person. It’s multiple places.”

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