Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91452 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Get up,” he ordered. “You have to go bring him home.”
How many men, how many intelligence assets, friends, brothers, had we made sure to bring home? The number had to be in the hundreds. And now it was Owen’s turn.
“On your feet,” he directed, and there was steel in his voice as he stood and left a couple hundred euros on the table, which more than covered our bill and the tip. It was rude, leaving like that, but I didn’t care, couldn’t focus. Only his voice centered me. The person I loved most in the world was gone.
Darius would have flown with me to Bangkok, but he knew better. Knew that was a trip I had to make alone. Still, he made sure to put me on his private jet so I didn’t have to wait for mine. It felt like the greatest gift he’d ever bestowed.
And now I could report back that Owen Moss was, in fact, not dead. The emotion, though, the relief, felt just like grief. I couldn’t parse it from sadness. It was hard to tell the difference. But the man standing in front of me didn’t need to know what I was feeling. Better for him to think he was looking at anguish.
Most people would have let the man know immediately: “No, thank God, that’s not the person I love,” but I wasn’t most people. The fact of the matter was, Owen’s wallet and phone were found on this man. Fingerprints were a match, as was the DNA—at least, that’s what their report said. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make me believe this was Owen. I might even have bought the charade, but my eyes knew the difference. If I’d argued, facts would have been thrown at me. Better to fake acceptance and find out who this man on the slab truly was. More to the point, I wasn’t leaving him behind. His family, whoever they were, needed closure as well. But now I was left trusting no one.
Finally, I met the police surgeon’s gaze and repeated woodenly, “It’s Owen.” I felt lost, unable to shake off the cold chill of the morgue as we stood over a stranger’s lifeless corpse. Glancing around the room, at the walls, at the body, I felt haunted. Other ghosts, other times. “Where was he found?” I didn’t try and conceal the tears in my eyes. My gaze returned to the deep Y-shaped incision on the man’s trunk, to his swollen, lifeless eyes.
“Water bus found him floating in the Saen Saep canal. Death by drowning. Appears accidental.” The Khlong Saen Saep was one of the city’s heaviest water arteries, running some eighteen kilometers through central Bangkok.
“How long was the body in the water?” I asked, wanting to hear his answer. The body—not Owen’s body, not his body—was in terrible shape, so my guess was a week at least.
“Three days by my estimate.”
The condition of the body was shocking. It was badly mutilated from being struck repeatedly by canal traffic, and decomposed to the point of being unrecognizable. The days Saen Saep canal was clean enough to wash clothes, bathe, or swim in were long gone, as Bangkok’s canals were so heavily polluted, they were considered environmentally toxic.
“May I see his dossier?”
The surgeon looked surprised by my request. I was betting most people didn’t ask to peruse the chart. He turned away from me, toward the third man in the room, who had remained suspiciously quiet the entire time, not even breaking his silence to introduce himself. Easy to figure out I was looking at the surgeon’s boss. He was official-looking, the dark suit and polished shoes out of place in the morgue. He’d stood mostly hidden in the shadows of the surgical lamps’ bright halo of white light.
I watched as the shadow man gestured to the surgeon to hand the file over. Crossing to his desk, he retrieved the file and handed it to me gently, reverently, and I appreciated the care. A slight wince told me he sympathized with my pain. Perhaps he too had lost a loved one.
As I reviewed the notes, I studied everything, especially the Polaroids taken prior to the autopsy. I scrutinized an extreme close-up of the face, needing that extra bit of evidence to be certain. I wanted to be right, hoped I was, but the beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt part soothed my soul. This was not my friends’ son, and I knew it down deep.
Checking the toxicology report, I flipped forward and then back, surprised by what was missing. “Are you still waiting for tests to come back?”
“We—”
“This is only a rudimentary toxicological work-up,” I stated, knowing I was right, certain he was aware of that as well. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Everything is as it should be, Colonel Colter,” the shadow man finally spoke.