My throat tightened. “No change.”

He gave me a sympathetic smile. “It’s been only, what, six, seven weeks? There’s no trauma, so she has every chance of coming out of this.”

I sighed, and once again had to resist the urge to run my fingers through my hair. “Yeah. Sure.” I wished it was as easy as that.

“Doc’s right,” Carl said from behind me, thoroughly startling me. “She’ll come out of this. But you’re too stressed out. You need to eat more. You look better with some meat on your bones.” He extended a saw to me. “Wanna cut a head open?”

I groaned. “No. And thank you for going straight from eating to cutting heads.”

He shrugged and plugged the saw in as I escaped to the viewing room.

I ALMOST DIDN’T come back out for Brian’s autopsy. Even on the other side of the wall, I could feel that there was something wrong about the body. I’d maintained a fleeting hope that I was wrong on the scene, both with Brian Roth and Davis Sharp, but the gaping void and tattered remains were still there.

I forced myself to return to the cutting room once Brian’s body was on the table. His body was a lot messier, mostly because of all the blood that had seeped out into the bag from the big holes in his head. His head had been wrapped in a sheet to try to control some of the blood, but it was still a nasty mess when Carl opened up the bag.

Doc pulled Brian’s lips back and looked down at his teeth, eyes narrowed. “Missing right front incisor. You’re right, Kara.”

I allowed myself a pleased smile. “All right, Doc,” I said. “Did he pull the trigger himself or was he murdered?”

“No fucking idea,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he picked up a scalpel and began to shave around the holes in the scalp and skull. “But I’m hoping to have an answer for you soon.” He peered at the wounds, lifting sections of skull that had been in the body bag and fitting them to the still-intact part of the skull. He put his hand out and Carl placed a long plastic rod in it without being asked—a sign of how long the two had worked together.

Doc poked the rod into the hole at Brian’s right temple, working it carefully until it protruded through the other side. Despite the morbid look of the thing, there was no better way to get a solid idea of what the trajectory of the bullet had been.

Doc peered at the rod, then shrugged and glanced back at me. “Well, the angle’s consistent.…” He frowned, then shook his head. “And he was definitely shot at close range, though I’m not seeing signs that the gun was flush against his head.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed to the shaved area of scalp. “There’s plenty of stippling from gunpowder, but there aren’t any burns or blackening of the edges, and”—he peeled the scalp back to show the skull—“on a contact wound, you’d have a stellate-shaped entrance wound, and you’d see blackening on the skull as well.”

“So … he didn’t kill himself?”

He merely gave an infuriating shrug. “I can’t say that either. He could have held the gun a few inches away.”

“You’re no help,” I said sourly. “What about gunshot residue on his hands?”

“There could be GSR on his hands just from being in the same room when the gun was fired,” he pointed out.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Don’t give up hope yet,” he reassured me with a gesture toward the bagged hands. “I’ll check to see if there’s any blowback on his hands, plus I’ll ask the lab to swab the gun for contact DNA. It was his duty weapon?”

“Yeah.”

“Then if someone else’s DNA is found, that’s fairly telling.” He unbagged Brian’s hands, then lifted them for me to see and for Carl to photograph. “This isn’t much help either.”

I scowled. “Covered in blood.”

“Yep. He had his hands in a pool of his own blood.”

“So for now it’s undetermined?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

Doc nodded. “For now. Sorry.”

I stripped off my gloves and other protective gear. “All right. I guess I have to make some phone calls.” And continue to try to figure out what was eating essence. “You’ll call me if you find anything interesting on Davis Sharp?”

“You’ll be the first to know,” he replied.

Well, I wanted to bury myself in work, I reminded myself as I left the morgue. At this rate I won’t have time to worry about anything else.

A visit to tessa was next on my to-do list, and I pulled into the parking lot of the Nord du Lac Neurological Rehabilitation Center shortly before noon. Nord Neuro, as everyone called it, was a three-story facility situated across the street from St. Long Parish Hospital. The owners did their best to make the place look warm and inviting—nice landscaping, clean exterior, fresh paint—but there really was no way to make that kind of place look nice. Still, I appreciated that it didn’t look like a total hellhole. I’d tapped heavily into my own savings as well as Tessa’s to pay for her care—grateful that I had the power of attorney to do so. Nord Neuro was a private facility, which meant that it was fucking expensive, even with Tessa’s insurance. But I knew that, one way or another, I would be paying the bills for only a couple of months.

I shut the car off but stayed where I was, gripping the steering wheel and listening to the tick of the engine as it cooled. I hated coming here, but more than that, I hated having my aunt here. Hated it with my entire being—and the only reason I could stand it at all was because I knew that she was completely unaware of her surroundings. Or is she? Rhyzkahl had said that an essence could return—sometimes on its own, but with more surety if coaxed along. That’s why I was here today—to collect what I needed for the ritual that would hopefully do that coaxing.

I got out of my car, hefting my backpack onto my shoulder. Don’t get your hopes up, I chided myself. It was all well and good to hope, but the seemingly inevitable disappointment was bitter. And if more essence gets consumed, how will that affect my aunt? Her essence was floating free at the moment, but if the balance were to shift too far, her essence would be sucked back into the “pool” instead of returning to her body.

I didn’t like thinking about that.

The glass doors slid open, and I mentally braced myself against the feel of the place. It didn’t have the sour food and urine smell of most nursing homes, but it held enough of the over-antiseptic hospital smell that I had to shiver.

Tessa was in a “no vent” section, which simply meant that she didn’t need a ventilator—at least not yet. She shared a room with another coma patient, a middle-aged woman who’d been there for several months. Her husband was sitting next to the bed when I entered. He spoke in a low voice with a woman who I figured was either an attorney or a doctor, judging solely by her professional appearance—dressed in a stylish dark-blue suit, brown hair accented with honey-blond highlights coiled up into an elegant twist, and understated yet elegant jewelry.

He looked up and gave me a smile as I entered—the kind of smile that was exchanged between people who shared a difficult circumstance. I returned the smile and then felt guilty. He was there every time I visited, reading to his comatose wife from a wide variety of books. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d been to see Tessa.

“Good to see you, Kara,” he said. “This is our lawyer, Rachel Roth.”

The woman turned to me and gave me a neutral but pleasant smile. “It’s nice to meet you. I hope it won’t disturb your time with your aunt if we talk in here. If so, it’s no trouble at all for us to go down the hall.”

“No, that’s quite all right,” I said, suddenly realizing that this was Brian’s mother. No, his stepmother. I remembered Brian saying something about his birth mother passing away quite some time ago. I hesitated, then added, “I’m sorry for your loss. I worked with Brian.”