Chapter 36 The Autopsy Room (Daniel Ward POV)

Chapter 36 The Autopsy Room (Daniel Ward POV)

I can't make myself go inside.
Been standing in this hallway for twenty minutes now, staring at the frosted glass door marked MEDICAL EXAMINER - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. My credentials are clipped to my belt. My authorization is unquestionable. But my feet won't move.
Behind that door, Dr. Patricia Reeves is cutting into a ten-year-old girl.
Behind that door, Emma Cross is being catalogued, photographed, weighed, and measured like evidence instead of a child who drew sunflowers and was afraid of the dark.
Behind that door is proof that I failed.
My hand reaches for the door handle. Stops six inches away. Reaches again.
"Agent Ward?"
I spin around too fast, my hand dropping to my weapon instinctively before I recognize Deputy Mills standing at the end of the hallway. She's holding two coffee cups, her expression carefully neutral.
"Deputy." My voice comes out rougher than intended. "You shouldn't be here."
"Neither should you." She walks closer, extending one cup toward me. "Not without drinking something first. You've been going thirty-six hours straight."
I take the coffee because refusing would require conversation I don't have energy for. The liquid is lukewarm.
Mills nods toward the door. "Dr. Reeves know you're out here?"
"No."
"You planning to go in?"
"Yes."
"When?"
I don't answer. Just stare at that frosted glass and try to remember how to make my legs work.
Mills sighs. "You want me to..."
The door opens.
Dr. Reeves emerges, pulling off latex gloves that have Emma's blood on them. She's sixty-three, gray-haired, and has performed over two thousand autopsies in her career. Nothing rattles her. But right now, her hands are shaking.
"Daniel." She never uses my first name. Always Agent Ward or just Ward. The familiarity is worse than any clinical report could be. "We need to talk."
"Is it done?" The question scrapes out of my throat.
"Preliminary exam is complete. Full toxicology will take seventy-two hours, but I've got enough for an initial report." She glances at Mills. "Deputy, this is federal..."
"She stays." I don't know why I say it. Maybe because Mills was there on the dock. Maybe because shared trauma creates obligations. "Whatever you've got, she hears it."
Reeves nods slowly. "Conference room. Not out here."
She leads us down the hallway to a small room with a table, four chairs, and a whiteboard covered in someone else's case notes. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, that particular frequency that makes everything feel surreal and slightly nauseating.
Reeves drops a manila folder on the table but doesn't open it. Just stands there with both palms pressed flat against the cardboard like she's trying to hold something inside.
"Give it to me straight," I say. "How did she die?"
"Exsanguination. Blood loss." Reeves's voice is clinical now, the professional mask sliding back into place. "She was alive when they started cutting her. The wounds were designed to bleed her out slowly over approximately forty-five minutes to an hour."
Mills makes a small sound. I don't make any sound at all.
"The markings," I manage. "The symbols carved into..."
"Match historical patterns documented in Margaret Cross's case file and the other recent victims. Same depth, same precision, same ritual significance." Reeves opens the folder now, extracting crime scene photos I refuse to look at. "Whoever did this has been practicing for years. Maybe decades. The technique is too refined to be recent."
"Stomach contents?" My training kicks in, asking the questions my grief-paralyzed brain can't formulate on its own.
"Partially digested food consistent with a child's diet. Crackers, applesauce, something with chocolate. But also..." She hesitates. "Scopolamine."
"She was drugged." The words come out flat.
"Heavily. Enough to make her compliant but not unconscious. She would have been aware of what was happening but unable to resist or fight back."
I'm going to vomit. The coffee in my stomach is trying to come back up, and I have to breathe through my nose for ten seconds before I can speak again.
"Time of death?"
"Based on liver temp, rigor progression, and environmental factors...approximately two AM. Give or take thirty minutes."
Two AM.
We were still on the island at two AM. Still searching. Still believing we could save her.
She died while I was fifty yards away, calling her name into the fog.
"Daniel?" Reeves's voice cuts through the white noise in my head. "You still with me?"
"Yeah." The lie is automatic. "What else?"
"This is where it gets strange." She extracts another document—toxicology preliminary report. "The scopolamine isn't surprising. But there was something else in her system. A compound I've never seen before."
I lean forward, focusing on the chemical breakdown because focusing on chemistry means not thinking about Emma's fear. "What compound?"
"We're still isolating it, but initial analysis suggests it's organic. Plant-based. With trace elements of something that reads like..." She stops. Shakes her head. "You're going to think I'm losing it."
"Tell me."
"It reads like ceremonial wine. Specifically, the kind used in old Lutheran consecration rituals from the 1800s. We're talking sacramental wine mixed with herbs that haven't been cultivated in this region for over a century."
Mills speaks for the first time. "How would someone even get that?"
"They couldn't. Not commercially. Which means someone either preserved it from historical sources or recreated the formula from archival records." Reeves looks directly at me. "Daniel, this wasn't just murder. This was a rite. A ceremony performed exactly according to historical protocol."
"The Hollow." The words come from my mouth without permission.
Reeves doesn't laugh. Doesn't dismiss it. Just nods slowly. "I don't know what that means. But whatever happened to Emma Cross, it followed a pattern that's been repeated in this town for over two hundred years. Same drugs, same symbols, same methodology. Different victims, same ritual."
I stand up. Can't sit anymore. Can't be in this room with its buzzing lights and its manila folders full of a child's destruction.
"Thank you, Doctor." My voice sounds robotic. Disconnected. "Send the full report to my SAC and to the county prosecutor. I want charges filed within forty-eight hours."
"Against who?" Reeves asks. "The deputies are dead. Robert Henshaw is in custody but claims he was just following orders he received anonymously. Without physical evidence placing someone at the scene..."
"Then find the evidence!" The words explode out of me, louder than intended. "Process the island. Every inch. Soil samples, fiber analysis, DNA workup. Someone killed that child and I want them in federal custody before..."
My voice cracks. Completely breaks apart mid-sentence.
Reeves and Mills are both staring at me. I can see the concern on their faces, the worry that Agent Ward is coming apart at the seams and can't be trusted to hold it together.
They're right.
"Excuse me." I'm already moving toward the door. "I need some air."
"Daniel..." Reeves starts.
I don't stop. Just walk out of the conference room, down the hallway, through the security door that requires badge access, and out into the parking lot where morning sun is burning off the last of the fog.
The parking lot is empty except for my rental sedan and two county vehicles. I make it to my car, get the door open, and then just stand there with one hand braced against the roof because my legs are shaking too badly to hold my weight.
Emma's drawing is still in my jacket pocket.
I'd forgotten about it. Shoved it in there yesterday, no, the day before? Time has stopped meaning anything. Before the island. Before the search. When Emma was alive and drawing sunflowers.
My hands are shaking as I pull it out. Construction paper, slightly crumpled. Yellow crayon petals around a brown center. Green stem. A child's perfect interpretation of hope.
FOR AUNT EVIE written in careful block letters at the bottom.
I LOVE YOU in red crayon beside a misshapen heart.
Something breaks inside my chest. Some last wall I'd been using to hold back the flood. It cracks, shatters, and everything I've been containing since I saw that body bag comes pouring out.
I slam my fist into the car door. Once. Twice. Three times. The metal dents, paint flaking off. My knuckles split open. Blood wells up. I hit it again.
"Fuck!" The word rips out of me.
Again. The door crumples further.
"FUCK!"
Again. My hand is probably broken now. Don't care.
"I promised!" I'm screaming at no one. At God, maybe, if God exists and gives a damn about ten-year-old girls. "I promised her! I told Evelyn I wouldn't let Emma be alone in the dark and I fucking LIED!"
One more hit. The door frame buckles. My hand is definitely broken now. Blood streaking down my wrist. Pain shooting up my arm.
I collapse forward, my forehead pressed against the car's roof, and just breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Trying to remember how to exist in a world where Emma Cross is dead and I couldn't stop it.
Michael warned me.
The thought comes unbidden. My brother, five years dead, warning me in dreams that I'd watch someone die like I watched him die if I didn't start believing in what I couldn't see.
I didn't believe. I categorized. I rationalized. I treated the supernatural like a puzzle to solve instead of a reality to accept.
And Emma paid the price.
"I'm sorry." The words are barely audible. Directed at Emma, at Evelyn, at everyone I've failed by clinging to evidence and protocol when what they needed was faith. "I'm so fucking sorry."
My phone buzzes against my hip.
I ignore it. It buzzes again. And again. And again with the insistent pattern that means emergency contact.
With my unbroken hand, I fumble the phone from my pocket. Jonas's name on the screen.
"What." Not a question. Just a flat acknowledgment that he's calling.
"Daniel." Jonas's voice is tight. Controlled. But underneath is panic. "Evelyn's gone."