Page 37 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

“Or to a hospital or to a phone to call 911.”

“Right. The final analysis of his blood will tell.”

“Why GHB?” Reed asked.

“A street drug, relatively easy to get if you have the right connections. Easy to slip into a drink. Then Josh is putty in our killer’s hands. I can’t tell how out of it he was, maybe he was nearly comatose, but there’s a good chance that he knew what was happening to him.”

The doors on the far side of the room opened, and a gurney with a body bag strapped to it was being maneuvered inside by a heavyset EMT. As the doors shut, Reed caught a glimpse of an ambulance parked on the cement ramp that led up to the street.

“Can I get someone to sign for this?” the EMT asked.

St. Clair

e’s assistant looked up and nodded as he wiped his hands. With a much-practiced toss of his head, his headset fell to his shoulders and the throb of a deep bass thrummed through the sterile room.

St. Claire said, “So, in my opinion, Bandeaux didn’t die from a suicide. Something else was going on, and oh . . . take a look at this. I put it in my report.” The M.E. walked to a refrigerated drawer and opened it. There, draped in a sheet, his body bluish, was Josh Bandeaux. St. Claire pulled the sheet back carefully so that Reed got a view of the naked body with its odd color, lack of animation and incision lines where the medical examiner had made his cuts to examine Bandeaux’s internal organs. St. Claire gently lifted one of Josh’s hands. “Take a look at the marks on his wrists. Most of them are consistent with a right-handed person slicing his own skin. They match the blade of the knife with his prints on it; the knife you found on the carpet beneath his body. But if you look here . . .” He pointed to a spot on Josh’s arm. “You’ll see that these cuts are at a different angle, as if the blade was positioned straight up—vertically. As I said, the cuts are deep, the veins snipped cleanly, made by something very sharp. Like a surgical instrument or maybe a boning knife. These are the cuts that assured Josh of dying. They would have been very difficult to make by the victim.”

“So you’re saying the suicide was staged.”

“I’d bet my Ferrari on it.”

“You don’t own a Ferrari.”

“Yeah, but if I did.” He let the drape fall into place, then pushed Josh back into his refrigerated tomb. “The family wants me to release the body. You got any problem with that?”

“Not if you found everything we need.”

“I did,” St. Clair said as he braced himself on a table while leaning down to remove the green slippers that covered his shoes.

Reed’s pager beeped. Glancing at the readout, he recognized Morrisette’s number. “Gotta run. Thanks for pushing this through so fast.”

“No problem.”

Reed was already shouldering open the thick door and flipping open his cell phone as he stepped into a hallway where the floor tiles gleamed with layers of wax and the walls were painted a soft, quieting green. He took the stairs to an outside door and shoved it open. Heat, thick as tar, blasted him. The natives barely noticed, but it was hot as hell to a man who had grown up in Chicago and spent a lot of his adult life in San Francisco. Even the recent rain shower hadn’t done much more than settle the dust and leave a puddle or two on the streets.

Ignoring the fact that he was already sweating, he dialed the station, asked for Morrisette’s extension and was put on hold, only to be referred to her voice mail box. Damned automation. Frustrated, he left a terse message, walked the few blocks to the station and landed at her desk just as she was hanging up from a call that had brought a flush to her face and pulled the edges of her mouth downward.

“Fuck—effin’ ex-husband,” she muttered as Reed kicked out a side chair and dropped into it.

“Got your page. I was with the M.E.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Bandeaux?”

“Yep.”

“Anything interesting?”

“A lot.” He gave her a quick rundown of what St. Claire had told him. “He put a rush job on this. We’ll have the complete, typed report tomorrow.”

“GHB? Jesus, what’s that all about? Not date rape.”

“Maybe date murder. Unless Josh was experimenting.”

“With Midnight Blue? Then he was nuts.” She stood and stretched, arching her back as if it ached. “So you’re thinking someone killed him.”

“Very possibly. It’s looking that way.” Reed rubbed the inside of his palm with a thumb. He just wasn’t sure.

“So why try to make it look like a suicide?” Morrisette asked.

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