Page 58 of The First Gentleman

CHAPTER 54

Concord, New Hampshire

I n the chief medical examiner’s office, Detective Sergeant Marie Gagnon gets a text from her husband.

Their son’s fever has broken.

What a relief . Her mind is now clear to review her notes on the interview with Herb Lucienne.

To Gagnon, Lucienne seemed like the kind of simple, desperate man who would do just about anything for a buck, let alone hundreds, no questions asked.

A thorough search of the Sentra had not turned up any digging tools, and Lucienne’s shoes and clothes were not soiled with dirt.

Gagnon is convinced that Lucienne was telling the truth.

He is no prime mover, just an unwitting deliveryman.

Which means whoever actually dug up Suzanne Bonanno’s remains is still out there.

On the other side of the room is a plain metal door leading to the morgue and autopsy room that serve the entire state.

Gagnon was present for the delivery of the skeletal remains and had stood alongside deputy chief medical examiner Dr. Alice Woods in the autopsy room, as she had done many times before.

But today, there was no Y-shaped incision down the center of the chest. No weighing of organs.

No sightless eyes. No body at all.

Gagnon feels something like relief that she’s dealing with a long-dead victim who had been reduced to calcium and hardened collagen instead of the pale corpse of a teenager who’d OD’d on fentanyl or been ripped apart by bullets.

The metal door swings open.

Alice Woods emerges in scrubs, her face mask dangling from one ear.

“You’ll get my preliminary report in a couple of hours. Dental records confirm the identity. Age and size of the bones correlate. With that and the driver’s license, there isn’t any doubt.”

“Cause of death?”

“In my opinion? Strangulation. The hyoid bone was broken. Tiny little thing. We’re lucky whoever gathered the bones didn’t leave it behind. I believe that Suzanne Bonanno was strangled.”

Gagnon lowers her head.

Not that she’d been expecting to hear that the cheerleader had died of natural causes, but still, a horrible image.

And a slow, painful way to die.

“Marie, I did some other tests,” says Wood.

“That’s what took me so long.”

“What tests?”

“Detailed analysis of the pelvic bones showed reabsorption of bone at the ligamental attachment points.”

“Meaning what?”

“Look, the remains were buried in bare dirt for seventeen years, and this kind of analysis is not an exact science—”

“Alice, what are you trying to say?”

“What I’m trying to say is that there’s a good chance that your victim was pregnant when she died.”