Page 122 of The Sister's Curse

“Nothing yet. I’ve been searching for Sumner and Lister on the down-low. Nobody’s seen them, either. I’m checking the city’s Flock cameras to see if any passive scanning picked up their license plates.”

“Good idea.” We didn’t have that tech in our rural county, but the nearby city was experimenting with creating a web of interconnected public and private video cameras that would passively scan license plates. It wasn’t uncommon for police cars to have that kind of tech installed, but involving local businesses was new.

“Also heard from Forensics. The blood found on the basement floor at the Sumner house matches the serotype for Dana Carson. Judge Chamberlain approved an arrest warrant for Sumner, at least. If we nab him, maybe he’ll confess. I can only hope he’ll implicate Lister if we reel him in.”

“Are you ready for that?” I asked quietly. “They might come for you, too.”

She exhaled into the phone. “There will be hell to pay for arresting him, sure, but Chief wants to see them in jail as badly as you and I do. So I’m gonna take that gamble.”

“Good girl,” I said.

“I’ll keep you in the loop,” she promised, and hung up.

I chewed my lip. I was afraid of those slimeballs going after Monica if she tried to arrest Sumner. Her career was one thing, but those assholes could do to her what they did to Jasper. And what they might be doing to Viv.

I considered that. They killed Jasper quickly, expediently. But they abducted Dana. Maybe in the same way they abducted Viv. Viv had been conscious when I left her, then suddenly not. Did they drug her? I doubted they used hospital drugs—that would have taken too much time. So they had to bring the drugs with them. I didn’t think that meth would knock anyone out so quickly, but they might have access to other drugs.

Maybe Jasper hadn’t been subjected to any weird ritualistic shit, but it was hard to know, given the flames at the scene. A lump rose in my throat. But Viv…I could see them doing to her what they’d done to her sister. And today was the Fourth of July, the anniversary of when Dana had disappeared. And given the amount of blood on the floor of the Sumner basement…she had to have died there. I knew it in my gut that they’d done some weird ritualistic shit to her and killed her, too.

When I got to the main street in town I could turn right, for donuts…or I could turn left and visit the coroner’s office.

I was off the case. I could be charged with interfering with an official investigation if I went to the coroner’s office.

But I already had it in my mind that I was going to resign. And I needed to see if there was something Dana left behind that could lead me to Viv.

I parked in the nearly empty parking lot behind the county coroner’s office. Leaving the air on for Gibby, I locked up and headed inside. The secretary waved me through without looking up from her phone; evidently rumors of my suspension hadn’t yet reached the coroner’s office. I was betting my time on that was running out.

The coroner, Dr.Navarro, was waiting for me in the hall, tapping her toe on the green tile.

“You’re keeping us busy, Detective Koray. I had to cancel my Alaskan cruise.”

I winced. “Sorry. I really am.”

“Don’t be. I hate vacationing with the in-laws. Come on. I have some things to show you.” She gestured for me to follow her to the morgue. I suited up in a Tyvek suit and followed her to the chilly examination room of the morgue.

I scanned the room, shoulders hunched. Jasper wouldn’t be here. He was killed in another county. I didn’t think I could handle seeing his ashes in a bag.

Dr.Navarro unzipped a body bag on a stainless steel slab. I presumed this was one of the Sims cousins, since the body was missing a head. The head was in a plastic bag tucked beneath an arm, a sunburned face with its mouth open.

“I just finished with this guy.”

“Let me guess…cause of death is decapitation?”

“You’d think that, but they were actually drowned before any of that happened. I found water in their lungs.”

“So the decapitation was postmortem?”

“Exactly. And given the angles of the cuts, the perp had to be in the water.”

I frowned, recalling how they were found, on inflated inner tubes. “So the guys were chilling…” I headed to the body’s emptyneck. “And someone came up out of the water and drowned them…” I mimicked pushing down on the missing head, then slashed with my hand. “And then made off with the heads?”

“Yeah, exactly.” Navarro stood back and nodded. “Your perpetrator was in the water.”

“I don’t get how one wouldn’t be alerted to the other’s death,” I said. “You’d think that the second victim would try to fight back or escape.”

“Well, I was able to compute BAC from the remaining blood in the bodies, and Amos was at .42 and Patrick was at .39.”

“They might not have even been conscious,” I realized.