“I don’t know. I feel pain now, like a deep pain. I don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Then she said something else that completely blew him away. “Maybe you need to sink into this instead of fight it. Sorry. I would talk, but I’ve got to go.”
With that she hung up, and he stared down at the phone in surprise. First, he wondered why she called him to begin with. Could she feel him in distress? He chuckled. Boy, he would not want to entertain that thought. Secondly, was she worried about him? That’s what it sounded like. As long as she was thinking about him.… He knew she cared, but it made him feel infinitely less worried to see evidence of her feelings for him.
But, third, that was a very interesting comment on her part at the end of her for-whatever-reason phone call.Sink into it instead of fight it. Interesting. Nothing that he would have expected, and yet she continuously surprised him. Just when he thought he understood some of this stuff, she said something that blew him away. It was fascinating; it was troubling, and it was also enlivening because she was probably right.
Maybe he needed to stop resisting it and to sink into it. Maybe a message was in this somewhere. Maybe a person was at the end of this, just like there had been the children who had needed help. He hadn’t seen any of the dead women cyclists so far in Kate’s current cases, but, then again, he’d done his best to block everything out, so no more dying people were in his world.
“How is that working for you?” he said out loud, with a note of bitterness. Because, while he wasn’t seeing kids in pedophile rings needing saving or suicidal folks standing on bridges, definitely something was going on.
Chapter 12
Kate picked upthe phone as it rang under her hand. “Hello?”
“It’s Dr. Smidge,” said the coroner, his voice gruff. “I just sent you the autopsy report on your bike accident victim.”
“Good enough. I’ll go over it now. What about the dead UBC student?”
“Don’t get greedy. We had a four-car pileup last night.”
“I get it. I’ve also got murders happening.”
“I know, but unfortunately there is always one of those.”
She winced at that.
“Anyway, I’ve taken a preliminary look. Cause of death is blunt force trauma. She was hit over the head at the front temple.”
“Interesting, so by somebody facing her.”
“Yes, with a blunt object, but we didn’t find anything at the scene.” He gave her a TOD estimate, which put it somewhere around four o’clock in the morning.
“That’s interesting,” she murmured.
“Not really. It’s student life, all kinds of activity, all night long.”
“I get that. I guess I think more in terms of sleep at that hour.”
“You and me both, but, at her age, not so much.”
“Anything on the bloodstains?”
“Hang on a minute. I did ask them to rush that.” And he hung up. He called back almost immediately. “I just got the email in on it, and you should have a copy too. Just as you thought, they confirmed two different blood types.”
She whistled at that. “Please tell me that they’re both female.”
“Do you have any DNA from the missing woman?”
“No, but I’ll contact the family. I’ll get on that today.”
“We don’t know for sure that it’s her. Remember that,” he noted.
“No, we don’t, but she’s missing, and it’s her place.”
“But it’s been cleaned up,” he said.
“Yes, but the question is, by whom?”