Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) by Craig Schaefer

Author:Craig Schaefer [Schaefer, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944806163
Publisher: Demimonde Books
Published: 2019-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

21.

The medical examiner’s details were sparse: male, mid-twenties, his remains bound to a cinder block to keep him weighted down. Unlike Cooper’s rope, his didn’t come loose.

He also didn’t have a face.

His naked, broken skull stared up at the hard morgue lights, scalp clinging on by thin strips of sinew. His bottom jaw was fractured, teeth reduced to chips and jagged shards of porcelain. The sharks had also taken one of his arms, along with his left leg up to the kneecap. The dead man’s skin was mottled and slug-white, his remains laid out on a stainless-steel slab.

“It’s not Agent Dominguez,” Jessie said.

Harmony stood at her side, gazing down at the ravaged corpse.

“How can you tell?”

Jessie pointed to his surviving arm. “Dominguez had a memorial tattoo, from his days in the Rangers. Names of the buddies he lost. This guy doesn’t.”

His ink was on his collarbone. Solid black, the Roman numerals XIV with a pair of crossed swords behind it. Jessie’s pointed finger glided down along the slab. Toward the bloodless wound in the dead man’s abdomen.

“What does that look like? A .22?”

This had to be the thug Cooper shot outside the bar when she wrestled for his gun. It looked like he’d taken it in the gut. Not a fast way to die.

“So you know who he isn’t,” Briggs said. “Any idea who he is?”

They knew he was on Judah Cranston’s payroll, but they weren’t going to share that with the police. Harmony weighed how much she could afford to give him. Too much and Briggs might poke his nose into their investigation. Too little and they’d look like they were holding back, which might mean he held back next time he found a lead.

“We think there was an altercation when the first victim was abducted,” she said. “One of the kidnappers was shot with his own weapon.”

Briggs nodded at the gunshot wound.

“So he dies from the bullet, they toss his body to the sharks to make it harder to identify, and weigh ’em down side by side. Makes sense.”

“Except for one problem,” the medical examiner said. “Submersion in water is a highly effective counter-forensic measure. Given enough time, water damage to a corpse can conceal any multitude of sins. That said, the body was found quickly enough that I can still issue some preliminary observations based on tissue composition, the quantity of water in the lungs, internal gases—”

Briggs hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Cut to the chase, doc.”

“The bullet wound wasn’t fatal. If he’d been taken to a hospital or attended to by a private physician with the right equipment, he almost certainly would have survived.”

The medical examiner gestured to the corpse.

“He either died from drowning or severe trauma from the shark attack. He was alive when he went into the water.”

* * *

Harmony was thinking about a case. Not one of hers. She’d learned about it at Quantico, a side mention in a seminar about the psychology of criminal gangs. A drug mule, who had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.