A Good Month for Murder by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

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THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Jonathan Hill arrives at Prince George’s County Hospital Center. On his smartphone he has the leaseholder’s driver’s-license photograph, which he will compare to the dead woman in the morgue. So far, Watts and Hill have no reason to doubt that their victim is the leaseholder—the woman clearly lived in the apartment, and the detectives have learned from an apartment manager that the leaseholder was the only occupant listed in the manager’s records. But if there is a cardinal rule in homicide, it is that a detective must never make a mistake when identifying the dead.

Hill enters a hallway just off the trauma bay and finds detectives Mike Delaney and Mike Barnhardt, as well as Trasee Cosby, the forensic investigator. Cosby asks if they’re ready to head down to the hospital’s basement to visit the morgue. Hill nods and mentions that he and Watts found no ID or medications in the apartment.

“That’s probably why she was acting all crazy,” quips Barnhardt, a tall detective with the face of a bulldog and the unit’s driest sense of humor.

“It sounds like it went down crazy,” says Delaney, who responded to the shooting and took statements from several witnesses, including the two women living upstairs in apartment 4. The residents all reported that the older woman living in apartment 1 was a loner, that they didn’t know her very well, and that she had been acting strangely for a long time.

Joined by two evidence techs, the three detectives and Cosby walk down a hallway to a bank of three elevators. They file into the middle one and descend a level. When the doors open, they walk straight toward a doorway with a faded blue sign: MORGUE. They enter a short hallway, make a left, and stop at a wooden door with a piece of paper taped to it: PLEASE MAKE SURE DOOR IS CLOSED. To the right is a red phone for calling an attendant to open the locked door.

“Anyone have a knife?” Cosby asks.

One of the techs hands one over. Cosby opens the blade, jams it between the door handle and the jamb, and jiggles it. The door pops open. She smiles. “That did not happen,” she says, handing the knife back.

Cosby strides to a large refrigerator door, opens it, vanishes, and returns pushing a gurney with a body bag on top. Once the detectives have gathered around, she unzips the bag about halfway, revealing a small black woman whose body is covered by medical tape and electrodes. She has what appear to be several bullet holes in her left arm and abdomen.

Moving to the head of the corpse, Hill pulls out his phone and holds it next to the woman’s face. The photo on the phone looks similar to the dead woman’s, but it’s not a perfect match.

The detective frowns. The woman on the table seems younger and thinner than the woman in the photo. And her hair isn’t right—it’s too stringy. “Shit,” says Hill.

Delaney, clad in

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