She didn’t even comment when he stood there with a firm but gentle hand on her shoulder, obviously in prayer. In Jessie’s eyes Laura was far beyond most human help, and if he thought prayer might do something he was welcome to it. Nothing could hurt Laura now anyway.
After it was all over, hospital personnel led Jessie into the family waiting room where she sat again on one of the couches feeling numb and brittle as an ice carving. After a few minutes one of the nurses asked if she wanted to have a moment with Laura now that they’d taken out all the tubes and needles. Jessie almost said no, but something made her change her mind. Maybe it would hurt less some time down the line if she had a different last memory of Laura than the one she had now.
Jessie passed the deputy, writing something on a piece of paper at the nurses’ station. She hadn’t thought about all the paperwork that must have to get done at a time like this. It pained her that her sister’s life was reduced to paperwork for a sheriff’s deputy. Saying nothing, she went in to see Laura. The form on the bed looked as peaceful as possible. It was good to think that she was done with the horrible suffering of the last three days. Jessie reached out to touch a cool leg where the sheet had slipped. Her sister’s unburned flesh looked like pale marble in contrast to the bandages higher up on her body.
In that act of reaching out, her fingers froze and her brain refused to process what she was seeing. Perhaps she was even more confused than she thought. She went to the other side of the bed and looked down at the still body. Anger and bewilderment welled up in her. “Deputy Gardner?” When he didn’t answer, she said it louder.
He came into the cubicle still holding his papers. “What is it?”
“This isn’t Laura. I don’t know who this was, but it isn’t my sister.”
His brow wrinkled and he looked as if he wanted to say all kinds of things. Instead he stood there silently for a moment before he asked a simple question. “Why do you say that?”
Jessie lifted her right pant leg, exposing her ankle and the tiny bluebird tattooed there. “Look at this. We got them on vacation two summers ago. It was one of those stupid things you regret afterward when it’s already done.” Laura hadn’t regretted hers, though. In fact she’d shown it off.
He looked at the body on the bed before saying anything more, and then, understanding growing, looked back at Jessie. “Your sister had one, too?”
“On her ankle, just like I did.” Jessie pointed to the ankle of the person on the bed. The pale skin was unmarked by fire or anything else. Who just died in this hospital room? And where was her sister, Laura?
Steve Gardner’s brain hurt. An hour after the death of the person he’d thought was Laura Barker he’d made the first round of phone calls to get crime scene investigators involved. Although the hospital itself wasn’t the scene of a crime, the fact that this death was an obvious homicide meant all the sheriff’s department’s resources needed to be called into play.
It had been difficult to explain to the medical examiner’s staff why he needed as much care taken as he did. Nothing about this case so far made any sense. At first things seemed merely confusing; a young man who appeared to have come from nowhere was missing and a woman who’d only known him a couple of days was left in his apartment near death.
The fire someone had set to destroy evidence hadn’t left many clues except the identity of the woman and now that was in question. Not just in question according to Jessie. She was firm in saying that the body didn’t belong to her sister. In some cases he’d question a distraught relative’s statement, thinking that they just wanted to believe against hope that the person they cared about couldn’t possibly be dead. But Jessie wasn’t hysterical or in denial. Instead she seemed perfectly calm.
He realized that Jessie was staring at him, waiting for him to make some kind of decision about what to do next. Here he was, with his first case like this as a lead investigator, and it was threatening to implode on him. If Jessie Barker was right, then he’d have to involve the Major Case Squad. Only the combined efforts of the best homicide experts in the five counties that made up the St. Louis area would feel qualified to deal with this. Steve groaned inwardly. The last thing he wanted to do was make an immediate call to the county sheriff, but he didn’t have any other choice. “How sure are you that this isn’t your sister?” he asked Jessie, knowing even then what her answer would be.
“I’m positive.” Her gray-blue eyes were rimmed with red and her brown hair was in disarray, but Jessie spoke with a certainty Steve wasn’t ready to question. She had radiated authority the whole time he’d known her and it had impressed him. Most of the relatives he saw in tough cases went to pieces, but not this woman.
No one else was around who could dispute her claim anyway. To do that, he’d have to talk with Laura’s coworkers at the day spa and see if there were any friends there that knew her well enough to verify that she’d had that tattoo. Even then, he’d have more of a mess on his hands. If this wasn’t Laura Barker who was it? And what happened to the real Laura, and Adrian Bando?
So far Bando hadn’t turned up alive or dead, and trying to trace him hadn’t been promising, either. It was as if he’d just shown up out of the blue less than six months ago without any history before that. No driver’s license in any state, no Social Security number in the name he went by now and no other records that matched his name or fingerprints left in the apartment. Whoever Bando had been before that, he had a clean record and hadn’t been in the military.
Steve shook his head, trying to clear the fog. “You know, one thing is pretty certain. If that isn’t your sister…”
“It isn’t. I know for sure now that it isn’t,” Jessie said firmly.
“I wasn’t arguing with you, Ms. Barker. I was just thinking out loud. And if you’ll let me finish…” Steve felt bad immediately about the tone he’d used. No one who’d just gone through what Jessie Barker had needed more grief.
He stayed silent a moment trying to compose himself, asking God to settle his troubled feelings so that he could do his job with the skill it demanded. “As I said, if that isn’t your sister there’s not much either of us can do here to figure out who it is, and where Laura might be now. I need to go back to work, and you should probably go home and get some rest.”
Tears filled Jessie’s eyes and Steve felt even worse than before. He had no way to comfort this woman on what was probably the worst day of her life. “I know you’re right, but I feel so confused. Whoever this is, she must have looked a lot like Laura before all this happened to her.” Her eyes widened and she sat down quickly.
“What is it?”
“I know it’s not Laura, but I just realized something. The one time she spoke to me, she called me by name.” Steve leaned in close as the tears started to slide down her cheeks. He just caught her last whispered words. “She said I was beautiful.”
He felt an almost overpowering urge to gather this near stranger into his arms and give her someone to lean on. “Is there anybody at all we can call to be with you?”
Jessie shook her head. She looked at him with an intensity that made him wary. There was something that she wasn’t telling him. But then she sighed and her mood shifted. “There’s no one. I told you before that we lost our parents when we were children. We spent most of our childhood in the foster care system until Laura turned eighteen and we’ve lived together ever since.”
“No boyfriend?” Why did
