In the Darkest Hour Read online

  IN THE DARKEST HOUR

  A Gin Sullivan Mystery

  Anna Carlisle

  1

  “Nice job with Carolina today, Gin,” Gordon Samson said, bending to retrieve a test tube that had rolled under one of the long lab tables in the seventh-grade science classroom at Shoney Middle School. “I think you’re developing eyes in the back of your head. Which is absolutely a requirement of the job, if you haven’t figured it out already.”

  Gin laughed, tossing the antiseptic wipe she’d been using to clean the lab tables into the trash. “I wish. That would certainly have come in handy in my old job, too.”

  “I still have trouble believing you left a career in the Chicago medical examiner’s office to work with middle school kids in the middle of nowhere,” Gordon said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—you’re great at it. The kids love you, and though it pains me to admit it, you’ve managed to do the impossible and get them interested in the difference between qualitative and quantitative observations. But if I’d spent all those years getting through medical school and a residency, I’m not sure I’d be so ready to trade it for a chance to work with a bunch of hormone-crazed adolescents.”

  Gin shrugged noncommittally, searching for a response that would satisfy her colleague’s curiosity without getting into the details of her personal life. As much as she liked Gordon, who had spent more than two decades teaching science to the kids in Trumbull, Pennsylvania, she’d only recently begun volunteering in his classroom every Tuesday afternoon and was still getting to know the other teachers and staff. “I’ll still have my consulting work. And the position would only be part time, anyway. If they even approve it.” She grimaced at the thought. “I thought the red tape and institutional backlog were a challenge in the medical examiner’s office, but it’s nothing compared to getting things done in the school district.”

  “Yeah, I hear you. All kidding aside, though, I think you could really make a difference. Some of these girls—” A knock on the classroom door stopped him midsentence. “You might want to sneak out before one of the little darlings comes back to beg for more time to finish her lab report.”

  Gin laughed. “No, this is an opportunity for on-the-job training! Maybe I’ll learn something from watching the master at work.”

  Gordon rolled his eyes good-naturedly and went to answer the door.

  But it wasn’t a seventh-grade student. Jake Crosby entered the classroom, ducking to avoid a solar system mobile.

  “Jake! What are you doing here?” Gin said, adding, “Gordon, this is my boyfriend, Jake Crosby. Jake, meet Gordon Samson, who heads the science department here at Shoney.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jake said, barely acknowledging the other man.

  Recovering from the surprise of her boyfriend showing up at school, Gin noticed that Jake’s jeans were streaked with white dust and his ball cap was splattered with paint, meaning he’d probably come straight from the job site.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Gin, I’m sorry to bust in on you like this, but—are you about ready to go?”

  “What’s wrong?” Instantly on alert, Gin spoke more sharply than she intended.

  “You weren’t answering your phone.”

  It wasn’t an answer to her question. “Jake, I can’t have my phone on in the classroom!”

  “Look … please.”

  Gin took in Jake’s expression, his facial muscles tensed with some masked emotion, while Gordon did his best to pretend to be absorbed in the papers on his desk. She wouldn’t get more out of Jake until they were alone. “Let me just grab my things.”

  After saying a terse goodbye to Gordon, she followed Jake out into the empty, echoing hallways of the school.

  “What was so important that—”

  Jake stopped her with a hand on her arm the minute they were around the corner, in front of a row of lockers near the stairs. Gin had a sudden flashback to a time almost two decades ago, when she and Jake had been high school sweethearts just a couple of miles away at Trumbull High School. A lifetime ago.

  “It’s my mom.” Jake swallowed.

  “Your mom?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh my God—”

  “They found her in a motel room in Denton,” Jake barreled on grimly as Gin blanched in shock. They want…” He stared at the floor while struggling to get his emotions under control. “Someone has to go identify her.”

  “Of course. I’ll—I’ll call and let them know we’re on our way.” Gin did her best to absorb the news as she fought to keep her own emotions under control. She had never met the woman who gave birth to Jake, but she could see in his eyes that her death had dealt him a harsh blow.

  Her mind raced ahead, thinking through the task that awaited. As a consultant to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office, Gin had attended more than a dozen autopsies in their building near the Strip District of Pittsburgh, thirty miles away. She had learned the best routes when traffic was backed up, where to grab a cup of coffee or a quick lunch, and where to park when the visitor spaces were full.

  But she had no idea how to conduct an identification when the son of the decedent hadn’t seen his mother since he was an infant.

  2

  “When was the last time you had word of Marnie?” Gin asked carefully. They’d agreed to take her car; Jake’s truck would be safe at the school until they could come back and pick it up.

  “Jesus. Probably … at least ten years ago. Dad got a letter from her aunt when Marnie’s mother died. Believe it or not, she thought Dad might be able to help them find Marnie.”

  Jake’s parents had married impulsively, and his mother had been considerably younger than his father. She left before Jake was a year old to pursue a dream of acting in California. Lawrence Crosby, the Trumbull police chief until he passed away last year, had raised Jake by himself. By the time Jake and Gin started dating in high school, the hurt from his mother’s abandonment had hardened into armor that was all but impenetrable. In the years she’d known him, Gin could count on one hand the number of times she had heard Jake mention his mother’s name, and as far as she knew, they had never been in contact.

  “Why would they think that?”

  “According to her aunt, she actually contacted Dad every few years.” The muscles in Jake’s jaw twitched dangerously. “Wrote letters and stuff.”

  “And … he never told you?”

  “No.” Just the one syllable, hard and bitten off.

  Gin knew better than to press Jake on the subject of his past, which had been a difficult one. After a stormy adolescence, in trouble more often than he was out of it—despite the fact that his father was the chief of police—Jake had settled into an uneasy truce with his hometown. He’d earned a solid reputation as a construction contractor, and steadily built his business until now he was building fine custom homes in several eastern Pennsylvania counties. But there were those who never forgot—or forgave—Jake’s troubled history.

  Sometimes the passage of time didn’t mean much. Gin wondered what was going through Jake’s head—if the pain of his mother’s abandonment was as fresh today as it had been then.

  “I … did do a little looking of my own,” Jake conceded. “Online mostly.”

  “When was that?”

  Jake shrugged. “After Dad got that letter. He told the aunt he couldn’t help, but … well, I couldn’t let go of it as easy as he did, I guess.”

  “What did you find out?”

  Jake didn’t answer for a moment, staring vacantly at the road ahead. “Nothing good. Records of her arrests—mostly petty stuff, check scams, shoplifting, drugs, a couple breaking and entering charges. She had a few different addresses, most
ly around Trafford—she only lasted a couple of years in California, I guess. Never married again or anything. Never … had any more kids.”

  “Oh.”

  Gin’s mind spun, trying to come up with something to say that would be a comfort. She’d known that Jake’s mother had been troubled; she wasn’t surprised to hear that Marnie had succumbed to drugs and minor crimes. But it hadn’t occurred to Gin that she might have spent most of Jake’s life living less than an hour away. She wondered if that was the most difficult thing for him to accept.

  The hardest part of loving a man like Jake Crosby wasn’t his solitude, or his habit of keeping his deepest hurts to himself.

  The hardest thing was watching him suffer and being unable to help.

  But there was one small thing that Gin could do: She could make the next hour of Jake’s life a little less painful than it would otherwise be.

  “Stephen’s going to meet us in his office. We’ll go together.”

  She got only a grunt in response, but she was sure that her friend and colleague Stephen Harper, the staff pathologist whom she’d worked with on several cases, would treat Jake’s situation with compassion.

  Traffic was light, most of the commuters heading home in the opposite direction, and they found a parking space right behind the modern concrete- and- glass building Gin used her ID to enter the quiet, nearly empty building. They found Stephen in his office, working at his computer.

  “Jake. I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said formally, rising and offering his hand. Jake mumbled a greeting.

  “Let’s sit for a moment before we go see her.” They took the guest chairs, and Stephen pulled his own chair around his desk so that the three of them could confer more informally. “Can I get you some coffee? A soda?”

  “No thanks,” Jake said. “Look, Stephen—I never knew my mother. I literally have not laid eyes on her since I was a baby. So you don’t need to spare my feelings here.”

  Stephen glanced at Gin, and she shrugged almost imperceptibly. Despite Jake’s words, both she and Stephen had years of experience with the families of the dead, and knew that the emotional response could not be easily predicted. Even in a situation like this, when family members were estranged, confronting death could bring up a host of buried emotions and experiences.

  “I understand,” Stephen said kindly. “Then, let me tell you what we know. Marnie Bertram was found by a motel maid this morning at a little after eleven o’clock, when the maid entered her room to clean it. She found Marnie lying in bed, unresponsive, and called the police. When they arrived they determined that Marnie had been using heroin, based on various items they found near her body and also the condition of her body. The coroner confirmed her death at 2:18 PM and she was brought here. Tox results won’t be available for several weeks, of course.” He paused, seeming to search for the least painful way to deliver the news. “Multiple, unhealed injection-site wounds on her body suggest that she was a habitual user, and imply that this was an overdose.”

  Jake briefly covered his face with his hands, but when he had composed himself his eyes were dry. “Intentional?”

  “I’m sorry, Jake, it’s hard to know when heroin is involved. We’ll know more with further testing, of course, but these overdoses are tragically common, as the street product is completely unregulated, so people can’t know what they’re getting.”

  “Yeah. I watch the news.” Jake sighed, and sat up straighter in the chair. “Okay. Well, let’s get this done.”

  He stood, and Gin and Stephen followed suit. Stephen led the way to the morgue, stepping aside so the others could enter. Only one body was waiting on one of several steel tables lined up in the middle of the room, draped in a white sheet. All the other bodies were stored in a state-of-the-art, high-density cold chamber that topped four thousand square feet. The entire facility had been built only seven years earlier, a showpiece of current forensic technology that was the envy of pathologists around the state, if not the country.

  Gin had been here dozens of times, and while she always maintained clinical detachment when working, she had once come into this room to identify a loved one of her own: her only sibling, her sister Lily, who had disappeared at the age of seventeen. Her body had been discovered many years later, buried near the creek where she used to go with her friends.

  Gin counted herself lucky to have been able to help track down Lily’s killer, and the investigation had begun right here. But that was later. In the first seconds—the same seconds Jake was about to experience—there was nothing but the confrontation with death, the fragility of the assemblage of tissues and bones that had once laughed, cried, loved, raged, and experienced both joy and pain. A human life was so much more than the sum of its physical parts, but in the silence of the morgue, the body waited to tell its story.

  Stephen stood at the head of the table and gently grasped the sheet. Glancing up at Jake to make sure he was prepared, he raised his eyebrows questioningly. Jake nodded and Stephen pulled back the sheet.

  The body of the woman lying underneath seemed impossibly delicate and small, but Gin knew that it was partly an illusion, the contrast between the unaccustomed stillness of the form against the stark, steel surface. Marnie Bertram’s face was weathered and aged beyond her sixty years. Her staring eyes were bloodshot and sightless; her skin purpled and sunken. Chapped, pale lips parted over broken and missing teeth. Her hair was thin and greasy and lay limply around her wrinkled neck and bony shoulders. A long, relatively recent gash near her collarbone had healed poorly, evidence of infection in its angry, swollen ridge.

  Stephen drew the fabric away from one arm, while keeping her torso covered. The arm lay with the hand palm up, half a dozen red welts on the pale inner flesh. Track marks—Gin had seen more of them in her career than she ever would have wanted.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Jake said roughly. “The only photos I’ve seen of her in the last twenty years are the mug shots that came up when I searched her online.”

  “Of course,” Stephen said, pulling the sheet gently back in place. “This is mostly a formality.”

  The forensic technicians would have taken fingerprints as part of the intake process, and given Marnie’s criminal history, the print match in AFIS would provide the necessary proof of identity.

  “There is, however, one thing that I thought you might like to see,” Stephen added. “If I may.”

  He went to the other side of the table, and lifted the sheet to reveal the other arm. “Ms. Bertram was right handed, so the injection sites are, predictably, mostly on the left side of her body. But on her right shoulder, if you take a look…”

  Jake bent down, obstructing Gin’s view, and made a sound that was a cross between a curse and a strangled gasp. He backed away from the body, and Gin could see what he’d been looking at.

  On his mother’s shoulder, faded with time and inexpertly done, was a tattoo of a heart surrounded by roses.

  In the middle was the name “Jake.”

  * * *

  “You’re sure you still need to go tomorrow?” Gin asked for the second time, standing in the doorway to their bedroom with a mostly untouched glass of wine in her hand. She was watching Jake pack, as she had every Tuesday night for the past month. Jake’s firm had begun construction on his most ambitious project yet: a conference and retreat center commissioned by a Philadelphia pharmaceutical company. Because it was to be built on a wooded hillside two hours to the north in the tiny town of Tionesta on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest, Jake had arranged to be on-site Wednesday through Friday of each week to supervise the work of the local crew that he had hired. The rest of the week he spent on local projects, including the framing of a complete internal remodel of a downtown Trumbull restaurant—the project he’d been working on earlier today when he got the news.

  “I’m fine,” Jake said. “I already told you that. Marnie Bertram was a junkie who died a junkie’s death. She doesn’t have anything t
o do with me other than getting knocked up by my dad and giving birth. And that happened a long, long time ago, Gin.”

  Gin thought of the tattoo, the bluish, faded design against the pale, waxy skin. The face that bore the ravages of bad decisions and worse luck. The pain that the woman who had given birth to Jake had carried.

  “I understand,” she said. “But in my experience, it wouldn’t be surprising if you had a … response to what you saw today. It might even hit you later, when you’ve had a chance to—”

  “Drop it, Gin,” Jake snapped. “Okay?”

  He tossed a pair of jeans roughly into his duffle, and threw in a belt. Then his hands stilled, and he sighed. “Look,” he said, in a considerably gentler tone. “I know what you’re trying to do and I appreciate it. I do. But I don’t need you analyzing me, and I don’t need to be treated with kid gloves. The best thing for me to do is get back to work. I’ll make some calls tomorrow—I’ll make sure that my mother is given a proper burial. But that’s where my obligation ends, and I hope you can understand that and let it go.”

  Gin nodded. She’d said her piece and now she needed to respect Jake’s wishes. He might even be right; people handled grief in many different ways, and even if Jake was more affected by the death of his mother than he was letting on, it was unlikely that he would seek professional help.

  If Gin had learned one thing in her career, it was not to anticipate—or try to change the course of—the recovery process of the families and loved ones of the dead.

  “Okay,” she said, aiming for a lighter tone. “We’ve got the dinner party on Saturday night, though. Are you still up for that? Or I could reschedule it for another time…”

  “No, that’s fine,” Jake said. He attempted a smile. “It’ll be nice to see everyone. I’ll help you get ready when I get back.”

  “That’s okay,” Gin said. “I’ll get the shopping and the prep done on Friday, and then when you get home we can just relax.”

  “That sounds good,” Jake said. He zipped the duffle closed and slung it over his shoulder. “I’m going to throw this in the truck and then I need to take a look at that engineering report.”