The Rogue's Daughter, The Alpha's Mate

Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Gastric Aspirate

NORA

So I do the same thing I do when I can't think of anything when I'm on the loading dock. I pondered on paper.

The log would indicate 5:50 am for the body's departure. The cold room would be devoid of any food. Then I had collected a gastric aspirate for toxicology “as I do on all necropsies” at 3:40, before Jonah Pruitt was a wolf, and put it in a bag and started to black Sharpie it: WF-2610-114 / GASTRIC / ASP / N.W.

Cal didn't know about the aspirate. He felt the evidence went with the body.

I stood, "Bathroom" I said to Dana.

"It's the other direction."

I'm driving around the back way.

She didn't laugh. She collected her mug and approached the break room, Dana's version of merciful, had left the door open and waited to see if I walked through it.

The cold room at the Missoula lab is the re-purposed walk-in cooler with a floor drain and a laminated sign on the door: IF YOU PROP THIS OPEN YOU WILL BE SENT TO THE MORGUE ON PURPOSE. Dana had had the skull.

The bag was located on the second shelf, behind a rack of deer lungs from a CWD survey. I took it into the prep room, placed it on the steel counter, stood with my hands flat either side of it, and was on the verge of disregarding an order that I wasn't on duty to obey.

Don't, said some sensible part of me. Walk out. Tell Greg. Fill out the correct documents.

Then I remembered about the rope marks on Jonah's wrist, and then I came up with an idea to get a fine mesh sieve from the drawer.

It was largely the aspirate that you would expect. Brown slurry, bone bits, snags of something whitish that used to be rabbit. I washed it gently under the cold tap using a plastic spatula working it through the mesh. After three weeks, a man who has been a wolf for three weeks would have been eating like a wolf. Fur. A black beetle with a smooth shell, which was out of place in October.

And caught in the corner of the mesh, dull gray, about the size of my thumbnail, a small piece of metal.

With the pointy tip of the spatula, I flipped it over.

It was not very good looking. A clasp, pewter or pot metal, as found on many hundred dollar necklaces at craft fairs. Slightly corroded around edges and slightly pitted. The shape had become worn away but I could see the outline of a leaf, an ash leaf with its 7 narrow lobes. A strip of bright silver solder, thick and shaggy, went down the middle of the back of the fitting, made by a man who worked in a feed store and never got the hang of being tidy.

I couldn't breathe for a long time. I saw that this time.

My mother always wore that pendant on her daily life. It was from her own mother and as a toddler I'm told I chewed one lobe from the leaf so the third point was blunted. When I was 13 years old, in the barn and a skittish mare caught the chain, the chain had broke. My dad was at the kitchen table for a long time, with a soldering iron under his arm and muttering, and he fixed it. She never again wore it away.

She had been wearing it the night that eight years ago, she walked out of our house and never came back.

Under the surgical lamp, I held the clasp and the part of me that does this for a living had a running check. Corrosion: moderate – consistent with days of acid exposure not years. This wasn't a relic some scavenger had picked up out of the woods. It had been carried by someone very recently, close, and had fallen and whatever Jonah Pruitt had been forced to eat, or have been trying to hide.

Rope on his wrists. A tight knot in his belly. Three weeks gone.

I realized, "He swallowed it so that nobody would take it".

I said to myself, ‘Which means he knew what it was.

Then, out there, someone's been holding my mother's necklace for a long, long time, and it is small and cold and very clear.

My back moved to the new compartment behind my ribs. Anger or grief wasn't the cause. It was more like a recognition and it scared me more than either would have.

I took the clasp apart and dried it on a paper towel and placed it in a small specimen envelope. I didn't write anything on the front. Then I did what I'd sworn on my first day at the lab I'd never do. I placed the envelope in my jeans pocket, re-bagged the aspirate and in the log I wrote: Gastric contents: hair, rodent bone, beetle fragments. No foreign material.

His pen trembled a bit, so I didn't mind.

Dana had her arms folded, holding her beanie in her hand and stood at the door of the prep room.

"Okay," she said. This is the only time I'm going to tell you, and after I'm getting breakfast burritos at the gas station and can talk or not at that point.

"Dana—"

“When someone died on your table last time, you said it was okay and you didn't sleep for four days.” She wasn't loud. Dana never speaks out when it matters. I don't know what that was out on the dock, I don't know who that guy is, or why he can get Greg to sign. But your hands were doing something and I'm not stupid and you're my best friend.

"I know."

“So, you'll have until Friday.” She put the hat hat on her head. Friday, whatever it is, I believe it or I say I don't, tell me.

"Friday."

"Pinky promise."

"We're not twelve."

"Pinky."

I hooked my little finger around hers. Her grip was warm and dry and absolutely ordinary, and the clasp in my pocket weighed more than the rest of me.

She went off to find burritos. I stood in the hallway of a state building at 6:10 in the morning, with my mother's necklace against my thigh and a wolf stretching in the back of my mind like something that had slept in a cramped place for twenty-six years.

I had never lied in a lab log in my life. I was going to have to do it again.