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As she turned out of the parking lot of her apartment complex, with her mind racing and preoccupied, she was oblivious to the SUV that pulled into traffic behind her.
CHAPTER 12
Raleigh, North Carolina Friday, July 19, 2024
WHEN SHE ARRIVED AT THE OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER , Sloan swiped her ID to open the door next to the reception area. She rode the elevator to the basement level, smelling formaldehyde even before the doors opened. She was told that the scent of the morgue—a combination of gross anatomy lab and hospital sterility—would eventually go unnoticed. It was the end of her third week of fellowship and her olfactory senses were still on high alert.
She had texted Dr. Cox on her way over to the OCME to ask if he had a case that day. He did, a suicide. The postmortem was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. Required to scrub in on five autopsies during her first month of fellowship, this would be Sloan’s second. She had lost the last few days tied up in the revelation of her DNA profile and was behind schedule.
In the locker room, she changed into scrubs, pulled a surgical cap over her head, and tied a mask across her face before entering the morgue. The high-pitched buzzing of a bone saw filled her ears as she opened the door. The noise was coming from Dr. Cox’s table as he sawed through the patient’s breastbone to gain access to the chest cavity.
“Take that, will you?” Hayden asked, handing Sloan the saw as she approached the autopsy table.
Sloan placed the device on the surgical tray with the other instruments as the smell of burnt bone drifted in the air.
“Forty-six-year-old female. Suspected suicide,” Hayden said. “Swallowed a bottle of Valium.”
Sloan looked at the body on the cold, metal table. Naked as the day she was born, the woman’s skin carried a dead, blue tone.
“Toxicology is key in suicides,” Hayden said. “We’ll draw blood from various areas—femoral vein and heart for sure. We’ll also test the urine. We’ll measure the drug’s concentration throughout different parts of the body, determine how fully it was metabolized, and if the victim mixed the Valium with other drugs or alcohol. We’ll also take tissue samples and send them along so the forensic toxicologist can paint a fuller picture. What are the four areas we should sample?”
Sloan quickly blinked away the fog of the last few days and righted her mind.
“Liver, brain, kidney, and vitreous humor.”
“Nice job.”
Sloan watched as Dr. Cox placed a scalpel to the woman’s left shoulder and started the Y incision.
“The full tox report will take days or longer to come back. To present my finding in the cage this afternoon, we’ll run a Quick-Tox. Results are less complete, but we get them in an hour or so.”
“Got it,” Sloan said.
“Diazepam depresses respiration. Taken in high enough dosages, it can stop breathing altogether. The process is accelerated if it’s mixed with other depressants like alcohol. First, we’ll remove and dissect the lungs to inspect the air sacs and look for signs of suffocation.”
Twenty minutes later, Sloan was assisting Dr. Cox with the removal of each lung, which they weighed and photographed before they began the dissection. She had come to the morgue to get her thoughts away from her parents and what they were going through at FBI headquarters. It was working.
An hour and a half later, Sloan pinched the Y incision closed with staples. She stored the body in the freezer and headed to the locker room. Back in her street clothes, she spent an hour typing up her notes about the autopsy, which she attached to an email and sent to Dr. Cutty. Sloan was certain Dr. Cutty did not read lowly first-year fellows’ autopsy write-ups. That distinction likely went to an assistant. Or maybe the summaries were never read at all but simply accrued in a graveyard of unread documents that existed only to make sure newbies followed the rules.
It was just past three o’clock and she figured she had another few hours to kill before her parents would be finished with the FBI. She pulled out of the parking lot of the OCME, turned onto District Drive and then onto Blue Ridge Road. After being confined in the morgue for the morning, the CrossFit gym would be her next distraction. She glanced into the rearview mirror and saw a Toyota SUV behind her. Something pinged in her mind, a subtle warning that might have gone unnoticed had the last few days not put her nervous system into overdrive. Sport utility vehicles were everywhere, and she worked to figure out what made the one behind her stand out. It was a late-model silver Toyota 4Runner that should have blended in with the hundreds of others that made up the Raleigh area traffic. Yet something about the vehicle caught her attention.
Sloan made a turn and approached the entrance to Highway 40. At the last second she swerved onto the on-ramp and merged into traffic. In her rearview mirror she watched the 4Runner follow her onto the highway and pass a few cars to keep pace. She slid into the middle lane and aggressively passed a few cars before jumping into the left lane, where she gunned the engine and flew past an eighteen-wheeler semitruck. Once clear of the big rig, she cut across all three lanes of traffic to narrowly catch the exit ramp. The reckless maneuver drew a cacophony of horns. As she exited the highway, she watched the silver Toyota continue on in the middle lane wholly uninterested in her lunacy, continuing north on Highway 40 as if it were any other vehicle on the road.
Sloan caught her breath and turned at the end of the exit ramp. The last few days had her on edge. She doubled back to the gym, changed into shorts and a tank top, and laced her shoes tight for the brutal AMRAP workout—As Many Reps As Possible—that was listed on the gym’s chalkboard as the workout of the day. It was exactly what she needed. A popular CrossFit routine, it condensed a full-body workout into a small window of time. Music blared from speakers, the coach bounced on his toes to get everyone going, then counted down—three, two, one—and the workout began. Along with ten other CrossFitters, Sloan began on the rowing machine, worked through wall-ball shots and cleans, and finished with a brutal cycle of muscle-ups until her body was drenched with sweat, her lungs burned like hell, and her shoulders and arms were engorged with blood and lactic acid. She took a cold shower, changed into jeans and a blouse, and checked her phone for messages from her parents. None.
Outside she surveyed the health club’s parking lot and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Ten minutes later, however, she spotted the Toyota parked under a maple tree across the street from her apartment. As Sloan slowly passed the SUV, she finally understood what had caught her attention about the vehicle. It was the license plate. Absent was the typical “First in Flight” North Carolina plate. Instead, the 4Runner sported colorful mountains running along the bottom of the plate, and NEVADA stenciled across the top.
CHAPTER 13
Raleigh, North Carolina Friday, July 19, 2024
AS SLOAN PULLED PAST THE TOYOTA SHE NOTICED IT WAS EMPTY. SHE turned into the parking lot of her apartment complex, slid into a spot, and looked around. Several options ran through her mind. The first was to get the hell out of there, drive to her parents’ house, and wait for them to get home. Or, she could go back to the OCME and bide her time there. Hell, she could drive to FBI headquarters and tell the agents that someone with Nevada plates was following her. Nevada. As in Cedar Creek, Nevada, where she and her birth parents disappeared from.
In the end, she got out of her car and hustled to the steps of her apartment, still feeling the burn in her quads from her workout. She lived on the third story. She raced up the steps and turned the corner to find a man standing next to her front door. Leaning against the stucco wall, with one leg crossed over the other, he casually scrolled through his phone. But the man’s unimposing body language did nothing to staunch her fear. Sloan’s eyes went wide, and a rush of anxiety took control of her body, momentarily paralyzing her. After a couple of seconds, she managed a step backward as she fumbled for her purse.
“Sloan?” the man asked, pushing away from the wall and slipping his phone into the front pocket of his jeans. He took a few steps toward her. “Sloan Hastings?”
With shaking hands, Sloan unzipped her purse. She tried to scream but her lungs were void of air from hyperventilating. The man was another step closer, and then another, before Sloan found the bottle at the bottom of her purse. She looked up just as the man was reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. In one swift movement Sloan raised the can of pepper spray and delivered a powerful stream to the man’s face.
