CHAPTER 1
It wasn’t the way Kenzie’s cases normally came to her.
As an assistant to the medical examiner, she was used to bodies being brought in by van, laid out on the table and cleaned, ready for her to begin her postmortem. She would have some scene notes to peruse or, if she had gone out to the scene herself, she would have dictated the notes. Maybe she would be by herself, or maybe with Dr. Cook, who was substituting for Dr. Wiltshire while his broken hand was healing.
A very different scenario from the one she currently found herself in, sitting in the visiting area of the psych ward with Rhys sitting across from and Zachary next to her. Kenzie pulled her eyes away from the photograph on the phone she held in her hand to the serious Black teen who had handed it to her and was waiting for her to say something.
“Rhys, this needs to go to the police. They need to investigate. Do you even know who this is?”
Rhys, non-speaking as usual, spread his hands apart, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. Don’t know.
Zachary leaned in to look at the picture again, his face close to Kenzie’s so she could smell his shaving cream. He usually sported a three or four-day growth of beard, which made him look like a homeless person or, at least, someone down on their luck. Someone people didn’t want to make eye contact with and would forget as soon as they walked away. As a private investigator, he didn’t want people to remember him. But today, he happened to be clean-shaven. His dark eyes were intense as he stared at the photograph. He ran a hand over his close-cropped dark hair.
“We don’t even know if it is real,” he pointed out. “It could be… stage makeup.”
Kenzie didn’t have to look again at the grayish skin or the bullet hole in the man’s forehead to know that this was no makeup job. She had seen enough corpses in the course of her work to recognize one when she saw it, even in a picture.
“He’s dead,” she told Zachary with certainty. “It’s real.”
Rhys nodded his agreement. His dark skin kept him from looking pale, but his expression was pinched and worried. His frown deeper than usual. He had been through an ordeal, a mental collapse apparently triggered by this very picture, followed by a reaction to the drug used in the experimental treatment program he had been placed in, and then finally sedated to let him catch up on the sleep he needed and get back on track again.
It had been over a week since Stanley Green had found him wandering in the street in a fugue state. And if that fugue state had been triggered by viewing this picture, then the man in the picture had been dead for over a week and still hadn’t shown up in the morgue.
Maybe he never would. Maybe his body had been dumped somewhere no one would find it.
Rhys held out his hand for his phone. Kenzie shook her head, not giving it back to him. “This is evidence. The police will want to look at the photograph’s metadata and any other evidence on your phone. Where you got it from.” Kenzie raised her eyebrows, asking again for Rhys to tell her where he had gotten the picture. How did a teenager end up with the picture of a murdered man on his phone? Who had sent it to him and why?
Rhys looked frustrated. Maybe he wanted to text her something on his messaging app. He relied on his phone for communication. He couldn’t tell his story to her in gestures and facial expressions. Some things could be communicated that way, but he needed something more.
Kenzie slid her own phone across the table to him. “Send messages to Zachary’s phone,” she prompted.
Rhys picked up her phone with long, slender fingers and operated it quickly. He found the messaging app he wanted, swiped and tapped rapidly with his thumbs, and the first message popped up on Zachary’s phone in a few seconds. Zachary held it so that he and Kenzie could see it at the same time, their heads close together.
Rhys had sent a picture of a dog, a recurring theme in his messages. This one was a cartoon picture of a basset hound dressed in a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and peering into a magnifying glass.
Kenzie nodded. “I know you want me to look into it. To find out what I can. And I will… but this is a police matter. They will have to figure out where the picture came from and who it is. Until I actually see the body, there’s not much that I can tell just by looking at a picture.”
Rhys pointed at the picture of the dead man, rolling his eyes. What other information did Kenzie need than the fact that the man had been shot in the head? Wasn’t that enough to determine cause and manner of death? It was glaringly obvious.
Then what was he expecting her to find out in her investigation? Was she supposed to be able to tell from the photograph who did it? Why?
“Okay, yes,” she said as patiently as she could. “I can see that he was shot. Cause of death. I can’t issue a medical examiner’s report based on a photo. I don’t know who it is or the circumstances surrounding his death. I mean, I do issue reports on John Does, but it still needs to go through the official channels for me to do that. I need human remains. Who did you get this from?”
He shrugged and made the ASL sign for “friend,” both index fingers hooked together. A well-known sign, even though he did not generally use ASL to communicate, but relied on his own gestures and the phone pictures and short texts to get his message across.
“A friend from school?” Zachary asked.
Rhys nodded.
“And do you know where he got it from?”
Rhys shrugged. He had already communicated to them that it was something that had been circulating the school. His friend had gotten it from another friend, who had gotten it from another friend.
“What are they saying about it?” Kenzie asked. “They’re not just sending it around by itself with no explanation.”
He pointed at the phone and made a gun shape with his hand, complete with a jerk showing the gun had been fired.
“What?” Zachary asked. “ ‘Here is a picture of a man who was shot.’ That’s it?”
Rhys nodded. Kenzie wanted to search through his phone to see who it had come from and exactly what the attached text had said. But she didn’t want to touch anything that the police would want to look at. It had probably been sent through an app where the message self-destructed, and all of that information was gone. But maybe the police techs could pull off information that had been deleted but not overwritten.
There was just one thing that she needed to do. If Rhys wanted her to investigate the man’s death, she needed a copy of the picture. She didn’t know what she could do for Rhys, but he needed to see that she was doing everything she could. He had trusted them with this information that he hadn’t shown anyone else, and he was counting on her being able to make everything right.
She didn’t know if she could do that, but she would do everything she could for him.
CHAPTER 2
I’m going to send this to your phone,” she told Zachary.
It might make more sense to forward it to her own phone. She would need it there eventually. But Rhys didn’t need it popping up in his face again while he was holding her phone in his hands. It had been traumatic enough the first time.
And she would probably get Zachary to look at the photo’s metadata to see if he could tell her anything about its origin.
Zachary nodded his agreement. Kenzie sent it to him, then slid Rhys’s phone into her pocket. It would need to go to the police as evidence. Kenzie would get Rhys another phone. His grandmother, Vera, could probably not afford it. Kenzie didn’t think she had much disposable income. But Kenzie didn’t want Rhys to be left without a means to communicate beyond gestures.
“This whole thing,” Kenzie motioned to the phone in her pocket. “I’m so sorry you had to deal with it. It must be really difficult after what happened to your grandpa.”
Rhys nodded. His eyes dropped to the phone in his hand, but he didn’t type anything immediately.
Until the drug therapy that Rhys had reacted to, they had all assumed that what had happened to Grandpa Clarence when Rhys was just five was long forgotten, or at least very murky in Rhys’s memory. But the MDMA had made Rhys voluble, overcoming his usual mutism, and he had related the images to them over and over again.
His grandfather murdered before his eyes. Shot in the head, like the man in the picture.
It wasn’t that Rhys was afraid that the same murderer might have come back, that she had killed a second time and he might be in danger.
Because Rhys knew who the murderer was. He had always known, and he had lived with her for years after Grandpa Clarence’s death. Because it had been his aunt Robin. She had since passed. so they all knew that it wasn’t the same killer. Just the same cause of death.
Kenzie saw Rhys’s lips moving. The same mantra repeated over and over again. Even though he didn’t voice the words, she still recognized them.
Stop it. Just stop it.
Robin’s words, the night she had killed her father.
“I know,” Kenzie said softly. She leaned forward and put her hand over Rhys’s briefly, unsure how he would respond to the physical contact. “This is terrible for you. Are you having a lot of flashbacks?”
After remaining unfocused for a few long seconds, Rhys’s gaze finally returned to Kenzie’s face. He cocked his head slightly as if he knew that Kenzie had said something but wasn’t sure what it was or what she meant.
“I asked if you’re having flashbacks,” Kenzie said slowly, “If you keep remembering what you saw and felt the night that your grandpa was killed, there are things that you can do to try to reduce the impact of the flashbacks, to… get back to the present.”
He held out one hand, palm out, inviting her to go on, eyebrows raised curiously.
“One method that helps Zachary is called anchoring.” Kenzie looked at Zachary.
He nodded but didn’t explain. His flashbacks were better than they had been, but he wasn’t over them. The fire that had destroyed his childhood home and precipitated the rift in his family was still ever-present in his mind. Even if he wasn’t having flashbacks, he was still aware of it. And although he could stand to be around a lit candle or small campfire now without being thrown back to that experience, other things still triggered flashbacks for him.
“You concentrate on your senses,” she told Rhys, since Zachary didn’t seem inclined to explain. “You name five things that you see, five things that you hear, five things that you smell or feel. Focusing on those things, on your senses and surroundings, helps minimize the flashback and anchor you to the present.”
Rhys nodded slowly. He couldn’t name the things he saw out loud and probably couldn’t type them on his phone when he was in the throes of a flashback, but he could still focus on them and hopefully get himself out of a flashback faster.
“Maybe you could tell Vera about anchoring, too,” Zachary suggested. “She can help talk Rhys through it.”
Kenzie nodded. “You should probably talk to her rather than me.”
Kenzie wasn’t exactly in Vera’s good books these days. Kenzie had been vocal about Rhys not going to Persons, the private psychiatric facility that had done the experimental drug protocol, for treatment. Kenzie had tried to tell Vera that it was too dangerous, that what they were doing there was not ethical, and that MDMA therapy was too risky for Rhys.
But Vera had been desperate. After years of not hearing Rhys’s voice more than just a word or two here and there, and then his falling into the fugue state where he was completely uncommunicative, not even acknowledging that they were speaking to him, let alone trying to respond, she had been willing to risk anything for the miracle cure Persons had dangled in front of her.
Kenzie had been right. The fact did not endear her to Vera. Kenzie was sure Vera would feel awkward and embarrassed that she had gone ahead and done what Kenzie had warned her about and that the result had been negative, just as Kenzie had feared it would be. Kenzie being right about the therapy would be harder for Vera to forgive than being wrong would have been.
Zachary looked at Kenzie for a few seconds, reading this in her face, and eventually nodded. “I’ll talk to her about anchoring,” he agreed. “Walk her through how to do it.” He looked at Rhys. “It does help. It doesn’t make them go away completely, but it helps you to… not drown in the flashbacks.”
Rhys gave a thumbs-up. He was all for anything that might help.
Kenzie wondered how he felt about the treatment that Vera had put him through. Did he understand that she had just been trying to help him? Did he resent being treated like an animal or a child with no understanding, with no choice in how she decided he should be treated? He hadn’t been able to talk to her at the time, hadn’t been able to understand or to express his wishes one way or the other, but that understanding wouldn’t necessarily change his feelings about what had happened.
Feelings were not always logical. Kenzie sometimes found herself feeling completely opposite from what she wanted to sometimes. No matter how much she tried to talk herself into feeling a certain way, she couldn’t control her primitive brain.
“So…” Kenzie took a deep breath and let it go.
They had asked him whether he wanted to talk about Grandpa Clarence and what he remembered. He had shown them the picture of the stranger and asked Kenzie to look into it. Kenzie didn’t know how much success she would have in her assignment.
Rhys was looking tired and strained around the eyes. It was bound to be taking a lot of effort for him to act as normal as possible and socialize with them. He had been through a lot in the last couple of weeks, and it would take time for him to recover.
“So, I guess we should probably be going,” Kenzie said, standing up and looking at Zachary to encourage him to do the same. “You’re looking pretty tired,” she told Rhys. “I don’t want to wear you out. I’ll talk to the police and get started on this… and one of us will bring you a new phone by the end of the day so you can use it to communicate. I don’t know how long it will be before you get this one back. I assume they’ll need it for a day or two to get all the information they need.”
Rhys shrugged, looking unconcerned about whether he got the phone back or not. Kenzie supposed that if he got a new phone in the deal, he wouldn’t be too upset about it, as long as he could still log back in to all of his accounts and not lose any information.
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