Free Last Look by Mariah Stewart Page A

Fuller had made it across the room and was standing in front of a drawer in the wall. He pulled the door open, and the body of Shannon Randall slid out on its slab. He waved the agents closer.
    Dorsey stood over the body and found it alarmingly difficult to look down, as if seeing Shannon Randall in the flesh would make this nightmare undisputedly true. If this was indeed Shannon, her father was in the deepest shit of his life.
    She looked down, and thoughts of her father’s predicament faded completely. She saw, not the child whose murder her father had sought to avenge, but a woman whose life had been taken from her in a violent manner. The corpse was not unlike others she had seen before. The skin dry and a particular shade of gray. The hair lifeless and matted where the skin from the skull had been peeled back. Eyes open and glassy, sightlessly staring into Dorsey’s.
    Traces of black mascara had flaked onto the skin under the eyes. For some reason, Dorsey’s eyes kept returning to those flecks. To her, those tiny flecks were the only signs of life, the only indication that this had been a living, breathing woman before something terrible had happened to her. It was all she could do not to reach out and brush them from Shannon’s face. In her mind’s eye, Dorsey could see Shannon preparing to go out that night—that night she could not have known would be her last—putting on her makeup, applying mascara as she must have done thousands of times before. As Dorsey had done many times herself. As so many women do. It made the victim unexpectedly familiar, and Dorsey forced herself back to the task at hand.
    Shannon Randall had been five feet, three inches tall, slim, with muscular legs and arms, and hair dyed red. Dorsey’s fingers curled unconsciously into her own long, naturally red curls. She recalled from the photos of Shannon at fourteen that her hair had been light brown, and wondered whether she’d changed the color to make her stand out more on the street, or if it was part of a disguise she’d adopted long ago.
    Which brought Dorsey back to the first question that had gone through her mind when she’d heard Shannon Randall had been alive for the past twenty-four years: What had happened to this girl on that long ago night? Had she run away, and if so, from what? From whom?
    “You can see where the knife went in around the gunshot wound—right here, here, and here.” Fuller pointed with the scalpel he’d picked up from a nearby tray. His voice brought Dorsey back, reminded her why she was here.
    “Doctor Fuller, do you have some gloves we could use?” Andrew asked.
    Ever the gentleman, Fuller offered a box of latex gloves first to Dorsey, then to Andrew. They each took a pair and pulled them on.
    Andrew leaned close to the chest and studied the wounds.
    “May I?” he asked, and reached for the scalpel. Fuller handed it over, and watched from the opposite side of the table while the agent probed gently at the dry gray flesh to the left of the Y incision from the autopsy.
    “Yes, there it is,” he murmured. “You can see where the bullet entered, right here, but you really have to look for it. As you said, it’s almost as if the killer tried to cover up the bullet hole.” He looked up at Doctor Fuller. “Why would the killer try to disguise the cause of death?”
    “Knowing the answer to that could be a clue to who the killer is.” Fuller nodded, then paused and added, “Then again, maybe not. Sometimes, you just don’t know what’s significant and what’s mere coincidence. Could be the killer was covering up, could be he just wasn’t watching what he was doing.”
    “Even though he was doing it slowly enough to make very clean, very even wounds.”
    Fuller nodded. “Right. Still, as you know yourself, things aren’t always what they seem.”
    Dorsey studied the still figure for a long moment, her eyes trailing the length of the left arm, then moving down to the thigh, then to the