Winchester pushed away from the wall and tucked his phone in its hip cradle. “Once I heard from you, I called ahead and let the medical examiner know we were coming.” He extended his hand. “Told them to clear the decks.”
Bragg’s iron grip matched Winchester’s. “Good. I want answers before I visit with the family.”
Bragg and Winchester showed their badges to the officer at the front desk and then headed to the bank of elevators.
“I pulled the victim’s rap sheet, like you requested. Sheriff Wheeler was right. Rory Edwards has been in trouble since he could drive. Family’s been cleaning up his messes for years.”
Bragg hit the down button, thinking his own old man had never eased his trouble, but had been the source of his burdens. The old bastard had been a worthless drunk who’d used Bragg and his older sister Sue as punching bags. Sue had left home at seventeen. He’d been fourteen and figured she’d send for him when she settled. But she’d found herself a man within months and married. Sorry, Tec, I just can’t take you with me. I got a chance to be happy and need to take it. You’ll find your chance one day.
Sue had sent him a Christmas card the next year and told him she’d had a son, Mitch, but that had been the last he’d received word from her until three years ago when an officer in Houston had notified him she’d died of an overdose. The husband, who’d never legally married Sue, had been long gone and the boy, Mitch, pissed as hell, had enlisted in the Marines.
Mitch had returned to Austin two months ago, recovering from wounds both visible and invisible from his tour in Iraq. Bragg would later learn the Humvee Mitch had been driving had been hit by a roadside bomb, which had all but obliterated the vehicle. There’d been four soldiers inside. Everyone but Mitch had died.
When the boy’s commanding officer had contacted Bragg, he’d informed him the boy was in a bad way. Seeing as Bragg was all the family Mitch had, he’d accepted the promotion and transfer back to Austin. His family might be a fractured mess, but it was his family.
Bragg didn’t hold illusions of a Hallmark family reunion, but he had figured he’d get the boy on his feet before he returned to fieldwork on the border. However, he’d quickly learned nurturing a troubled kid fit him as well as politicking.
Mitch’s wounds from shell fragments had been easy enough to fix but it was the post-traumatic stress disorder that had left invisible scars. The kid had nightmares constantly and most were loud and violent. Mitch wasn’t eating, and his drinking was becoming a real problem. Last night Mitch hadn’t come in the door until four A.M., and he’d been drunk. Bragg and Mitch had one hell of a fight, and Mitch would have left if Bragg hadn’t taken his keys. You’re not my father! The situation had to change soon for both their sakes.
Bragg could track a killer to hell and back, but he couldn’t find the words to soothe his nephew’s grief.
He shoved aside the unease and focused on the job. “They won’t be able to help him out of this mess.”
“No amount of money is gonna fix this.”
Bragg checked his phone half hoping he’d gotten a message or call from Mitch. He’d received several calls from the office, but none from his nephew.
After the predawn blowup, the boy had staggered to his room and fallen into bed. Bragg had left him but now questioned that decision. Bragg feared the boy wouldn’t make it to September at the rate he was withdrawing.
“How’s Mitch doing?” Winchester, a former marine, punched the elevator button.
Bragg never talked about his personal life. Ever. But this problem, like the weather, didn’t give a shit about what Bragg wanted. “He’s quiet. Doesn’t talk much.”
Winchester didn’t speak for a moment. “You know my wife is a psychologist.”
“Yeah.”
“Jo would be glad to talk to him. She’s good with people.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Getting Mitch to talk is like pulling teeth.”
“He needs to talk and get engaged. Being alone is the worst. Is he drinking excessively?”
He flexed his fingers. “Yeah.”
Mitch was Bragg’s only family. His problem. His to fix. But he didn’t have any ideas. “The VA hooked him up with a support group at the local crisis center. It’s run by volunteers and a guy named Stewart.”
Winchester kept his stance casual, his gaze ahead. “Is it helping?”
They stepped onto the elevator. “I don’t know. It’s hard to get the boy to string more than two words together.”
Winchester grunted disapproval. “I can ask Jo about the group. If she doesn’t know about it, she’ll find out.”
Bragg rubbed the back of his neck and punched LL for lower level. Getting outside help went against Bragg’s nature. “I’d appreciate that.”
Winchester texted the details to his wife. He hit send. Another text came back in seconds. He read it and nodded. “She says they’re a good group. Dr. Stewart’s well respected and good, she says. She’s off to a meeting but will dig up more information.”
“Great.”
The elevator doors opened. They stepped off and moved down the hallway toward a set of double doors and into the exam room. A foul odor greeted them and drew their attention to a stainless-steel gurney holding a sheet-clad body. Another smaller table held a collection of instruments. A medical assistant, dressed in scrubs, pulled the sheet back.
Next to the gurney stood Dr. Hank Watterson. In his mid-thirties, Watterson stood tall, thin like a young poplar, in his green scrubs. A thick dark mustache added interest to an average face.
“Dr. Watterson,” Bragg said.
The doctor glanced up from a sink where he lathered his hands with soap. Intelligent, sharp green eyes stared at them through horn-rimmed glasses. “So, you two are the reason I was called in on my day off?”
Winchester grinned. “Sorry, doc. No rest for the wicked.”
Dr. Watterson grunted. “Body arrived about a half hour ago, and I was just about to start the autopsy.”
Bragg didn’t care much for the medical examiner’s office. Cold and sterile, the buzz of fluorescent lights, it reminded him of the hospital where his mother died when he was six. “Appreciate you getting right on this.”
“Sooner it’s done, the sooner I can get out of here.” Dr. Watterson nodded toward the surgical gowns. “This one is not going to be easy. Might as well suit up.”
Bragg and Winchester donned hospital gowns, and stood back. The victim’s clothes had been stripped and tagged, and his hands remained wrapped in paper bags, as they had been at the crime scene. Dr. Watterson studied the body’s bloated belly.
Rory Edwards’s hands and feet were black with settled blood and his head tilted to the left as it had when he dangled from the rope. His arms and chest were covered with tattoos. A skull on fire. Barbed wire through a heart on his arm. Crosses. The letter E. Stripped he looked leaner and malnourished. Fading track marks peppered the veins of his left and right arms.
The doctor started with an external examination, noted the rope burns around the neck, and confirmed the victim also had ligature marks on his wrists. He went on to catalogue rope marks, tattoos, and the absence of any other trauma.
As he pressed a scalpel to make a Y incision in the victim’s chest, Dr. Watterson said, “I hear the victim’s brother’s pretty rich and has a lot of connections.”
“He is.” Bragg nodded. “Which is why we wanted to be absolutely sure we’ve identified the right man before we made the death notification.”
Dr. Watterson kept his gaze on the body as he spoke. “No sense churning up a hornet’s nest unless you have to.”
“About right.”
The technician removed the bags from the victim’s hands, and Dr. Watterson, after a thorough inspection, scraped under the fingernails. If Rory had fought with his killer, the possibility existed that DNA remained under his fingernails.
“I’ll run a toxicology screen but won’t have results back for a day or two. But judgi
ng by his teeth, he was malnourished and had one hell of a tooth infection. Left untreated the tooth infection alone would have done him serious damage soon. My guess is he turned to meth in recent years.”
Dr. Watterson turned to a light box illuminating dental X-rays. “The bridge work and fillings belonging to Rory Edwards’s dental records matches your victim.”
“This guy is Rory Edwards.”
“Yes. And I can confirm he did die of strangulation.”
“He was dangling from a tree,” Winchester said.
“You never can tell for sure until the exam.” The doctor moved to the head of the table and pulled lighted magnifying lenses toward the dead man’s neck. He studied the rope burns. “There is old scarring on his neck.”
Bragg frowned. “What kind?”
The doctor was quiet for a moment. “Looks like an old rope burn. The current burn covers most of it up. Could have been easily missed. But it’s there.” He pointed to a small faint white area ringing the victim’s throat. “He hanged by his neck before.”
“Suicide attempt?” Winchester said.
“Maybe. Asphyxiation games aren’t uncommon in high-risk individuals. And this fellow is definitely high-risk.”
Bragg leaned in and studied the faint white scar. “The crime scene didn’t have the look of an erotic game. But who knows. How old are the scars?”
Dr. Watterson shrugged. “Can’t say, Bragg. But it’s been years.”
Bragg thought about the image of the teenage couple nailed to the tree. It appeared Rory had been a happy kid. In fact, conjuring the picture, Bragg would have figured the girl with the moody, edgy glint in her eye was the troublemaker.
Chapter Two