Free Mortar and Murder by Jennie Bentley Page A

nose.
    “Avery?” Wayne shook my shoulder, gently. “The visiting room is this way.”
    I opened my eyes. The visiting room. Like we were stopping by to see an old friend in a nursing home or hospital. Or prison.
    The visiting room was small, with just enough space for a gurney and a handful of people. A woman was already there: a tall and sturdy lady in her late fifties, with graying blond hair cut short. She was dressed in a white lab coat over green scrubs and was holding a clipboard. When Wayne ushered us in, she nodded a greeting. “Morning, Chief Rasmussen.”
    “Morning, Dr. Lawrence,” Wayne returned. “This is Avery Baker and Irina . . . um. . .”
    “Rozhdestvensky,” Irina said faintly.
    Dr. Lawrence bobbed her head at us both. “You’re the one who found her,” she said to me, tapping her clipboard. “I remember your name.”
    I nodded. “My boyfriend and I came across her in the ocean yesterday morning and brought her back to shore. Wayne took over from there.”
    Dr. Lawrence, who must be the medical examiner, turned to Irina. “And you’re here to see if she’s someone you know.”
    Irina hesitated. Her sideways glance at the covered gurney was agonized.
    I had avoided looking at it myself so far. Not that there was much to see, really. A steel table with wheels, and a white sheet covering what could have been anything, but which was probably our girl from yesterday.
    “Don’t worry,” Dr. Lawrence said reassuringly. “We’ve taken good care of her.”
    By way of proof, she folded the sheet gently back from the corpse’s head. I averted my eyes automatically and had to force myself to look back.
    Dr. Lawrence was right; from what I could see of the body—and that was just the head down to the very top of the shoulders—the medical examiner had been careful to be as respectful as possible. The blond hair was dry and combed, fanning out around the young woman’s head. It still looked natural to me, not colored. I was certain Dr. Lawrence had sliced the body open and taken samples of all the innards, those incisions now decently hidden by the sheet, but if her examination had included opening the cranium and looking at the brain, I couldn’t see any sign of it. Although I’ll readily admit I didn’t look closely. As far as the face went, it looked just like it had yesterday when Derek had lifted the young woman out of the ocean. Pale and wan, with sunken eyes and colorless lips.
    “Her eyes are blue,” Dr. Lawrence said softly, “and the hair color is her own. She was small, just five feet one inch tall and roughly one hundred and five pounds, and as far as I could determine, she was healthy. She had a broken leg sometime in childhood, but it healed completely, and in a way that wouldn’t have given her any trouble. There are old fillings in some of her teeth”—she handed Wayne a dental chart—“but no untreated cavities, which leads me to believe she took care of her health.”
    He nodded.
    “Other than a few bruises here and there, on her upper arms and one on her hip, there are no fresh injuries on her body other than some abrasions on the soles of her feet. From walking around barefoot recently, I gather. I removed a few small pebbles and pieces of vegetation.” She took a small ziplock baggie off the clipboard and gave it to Wayne, who held it up to the light to peer at it.
    “Looks like just regular sand and rock and maybe a pine needle?”
    “Something very like that.” Dr. Lawrence nodded. “Just what you’d expect if she’d been walking barefoot anywhere along the coast. I place time of death at some point between midnight and six A.M. yesterday morning. By the time you found her”—she nodded in my direction—“it was hours too late to do anything for her. She died from exposure, by the way. From being in the cold water. There was no water in her lungs.”
    I nodded. “I’ll tell my boyfriend. He said all those things, too, and I’m sure he’ll be