Free Grave Echoes: A Kate Waters Mystery by Erin Cole Page B

may be the reason why she crashed her car. I need to know what happened to her.” Kate needed to know where Jev spent the last few days of her life, what she was doing, who she was with, and why she hadn’t returned her phone calls. Something was wrong. Moreover, Kate had a burgeoning suspicion Sean was somehow involved.
    ***
    Normally, he would phone the coroner regarding the reports on his victims, but Wells caught word from Ted that the Waters’ autopsy was almost completed. Since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d attended one, he saw it as an opportunity to examine a case from a different perspective. He knew that sometimes, when in the heart of a crime scene, the smallest details went unnoticed, but the stillness of the autopsy room offered a new light on a case. Even though Jev’s death was an unfortunate accident, inspection of her body, lying neatly on a metal gurney with all the surgical tools there ready for an examination, gave an entirely different perspective of a case.
    Wells supposed he was also there because he felt a connection with the Waters’ girl, being so close in age and looks to his daughter, Julie. He’d called her up this morning to tell her to drive safely on her way to college. She’d laughed, accusing him of being the same old worrywart and that he should go on a date. He figured she was probably right.
    Equipped with a piece of peppermint gum in his mouth, Wells descended to the first sub floor of Emanuel Hospital’s north wing. He knocked on the door. John Collins, senior coroner at the hospital, answered the door wearing a white coat, turtle green pants, and black Converse shoes. Tufts of brownish gray hair stuck out of his blue cap.
    “Wells! Come on in,” he said, opening the door.
    “Thought I might sit in on this one.”
    “Ah, great, might be a little boring though—her death was just a high-impact head trauma.”
    Three tall metal tables aligned across the middle of the drab, gray room, cold as a winter morning. Two of them held deceased bodies, one cased in the black plastic bag and the other beneath a white sheet. Both of them were women, with stone faces, pale as granite marble. John placed the instruments that were in his hands into a bucket inside the sink.
    “Is that Jevanna Waters?” Wells asked, pointing to the girl under the white sheet on the left.
    John glanced back. “Yup, I’m just finishing up with her. I heard it was quite a wreck.”
    “Speed kills, especially when you flip your car into a tree.” Wells stuffed his hands into his pockets, ignoring the tightening of his stomach as he caught sight of staples in the side of the girl’s head. They looked to him like metal teeth.
    John shook his head and wiped his hands on a white towel. “Kids and fast cars…they’ll never learn.” He moved over to Wells and picked up a black object on the counter that looked like a wand. “We just got in a new toy.” He held it up to Wells. “You want to see how it works?” He moved to the girl in the black bag.
    “Who doesn’t like new toys?” Wells commented. He walked over to the table, carefully stepping around a tray of instruments. John unzipped the bag, exposing a half-naked girl. Her undergarments were ripped, as if she had been in a struggle.
    Even though Wells had observed over a hundred bodies in his lifetime, the two dead girls in the room today, close in age to his own daughter Julie, evoked a fear so deep inside him, he struggled to stay focused. “What are we looking at?”
    “This poor gal was strangled; we’re trying to lift fingerprints from the epidermis. Normally we start with a casting medium, such as black magnetic powder and dust over the entire body to locate prints. When we find a set, we lift them using silicones, or sometimes even photography.” He turned on the tool and blue light shone along the length of it. “But with this UV light, differences can be detected between the oils of someone’s fingerprint and those