“Not yet,” Jessie said. “I wanted to give her a chance to come clean without being forced into it. But if she starts to get second thoughts, maybe bust this out for her.”

Dolan grinned like a kid opening his presents on Christmas morning.

“You are full of surprises, aren’t you?” he said.

She didn’t respond. But as the car pulled away, she allowed herself a little smile.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The trail team took the lead.

As Toomey circled the block, Collica and Emerson parked and secured the hospital, coordinating with police already on the scene before giving the go-ahead for the other car to park. They pulled onto the staff level of the garage and quickly made their way to the stairs. This time, Toomey stayed right behind Jessie while Murph took the lead.

Once on the main level, an officer led them to a taped off section of the hospital courtyard. Lying under a sheet on the sidewalk close to a flower bed was what Jessie assumed was a body. Blood radiated out from it in every direction. There were other, smaller sheets spread out nearby. Blood also oozed out from under them.

“That him?” Murph asked the officer.

“CSU thinks so,” the young man replied.

“Thinks?” Jessie asked.

“It’s a little hard to tell,” the slightly green-faced officer said. “He’s kind of…chopped up.”

“What?” Jessie said.

“You should talk to CSU,” he said. “They can explain it better.”

The three of them walked over to a CSU investigator Jessie recognized.

“What happened, Taylor?” she asked the petite African-American woman, skipping the introductory chit-chat. “I’m hearing making an ID is proving challenging.”

“You could say that,” she said as she pointed to the upper floors of the building. “It looks like the guy was trying to access the hospital interior through the cooling system. He was on the roof and ran a rope down to a cooling vent on the seventeenth floor. But then things went sideways.”

“What does that mean?” Murph asked.

“There’s a big circulating fan just a few feet into the duct. It looked like he jammed it with some kind of stopper to prevent the blades from spinning. But something must have gone wrong. It looks like he was just sliding past the fan when the stopper came loose. He got sliced to pieces and shot back out through the vent. That’s why there are these…chunks.”

Jessie stared at the sheets littering the courtyard. There were eight in total that she could see. Was that how many pieces her father had been chopped into?

She stared at them, waiting for the inevitable emotional response one would expect when seeing a dead parent lying on the ground in lumps of flesh. But there was nothing—certainly not sadness. Not even relief.

“How do you know it’s Thurman if he was all chopped up?” Murph asked.

“We found an ID on him. It was for one of his aliases.”

“That’s it?” Jessie said incredulously. “You’re basing an identification on some fake driver’s license?”