Captured in death, p.1
Captured in Death, page 1
CAPTURED IN DEATH
A KENZIE KIRSCH MEDICAL THRILLER
BOOK TEN
P.D. WORKMAN
ABOUT CAPTURED IN DEATH
Some books take you a chapter or two to really feel invested. But this one got me at page one.
KANDY, GOODREADS REVIEWER
P.D Workman's relatable characters and believable storyline will draw you straight into the heart of the action.
ROSEMARY, GOODREADS REVIEWER
Uncover the chilling truth behind a disturbing photo that holds the key to a deadly secret in this gripping medical thriller.
Follow Kenzie, the assistant medical examiner, as she races against time to unravel the mystery behind photo of a dead man that has been circulating amongst the local teens. As she delves into the mystery behind the photo, Kenzie uncovers a dangerous secret. With lives at stake, Kenzie must navigate a treacherous path, risking everything to protect her friend and expose the truth.
Dive into this gripping case and join Kenzie on her thrilling quest to uncover the truth. Prepare for a pulse-pounding ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
Looking for a strong female lead in an engaging medical mystery? Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling Author P.D. Workman brings you an up-and-coming Medical Examiner’s Assistant who is right up your alley.
Join Dr. Kenzie Kirsch as she uncovers mysteries, conspiracies, and thrills!
Copyright © 2024 by P.D. Workman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 9781774686355 (KDP Paperback)
ISBN: 9781774686379 (KDP Hardcover)
ISBN: 9781774686348 (Large Print)
ISBN: 9781774686362 (Lulu Paperback)
ISBN: 9781774686331 (ePub)
ISBN: 9781774686386 (Accessible Audio)
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For friends who speak up
Even when speaking up is impossible
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Epilogue
Preview of She Was Out of Reach
Preview Chapter 1
Preview Chapter 2
Also by P.D. Workman
About the Author
1
It wasn’t the way Kenzie’s cases normally came to her.
As an assistant to the medical examiner, she was used to bodies being brought in by van, laid out on the table and cleaned, ready for her to begin her postmortem. She would have some scene notes to peruse or, if she had gone out to the scene herself, she would have dictated the notes. Maybe she would be by herself, or maybe with Dr. Cook, who was substituting for Dr. Wiltshire while his broken hand was healing.
A very different scenario from the one she currently found herself in, sitting in the visiting area of the psych ward with Rhys sitting across from and Zachary next to her. Kenzie pulled her eyes away from the photograph on the phone she held in her hand to the serious Black teen who had handed it to her and was waiting for her to say something.
“Rhys, this needs to go to the police. They need to investigate. Do you even know who this is?”
Rhys, non-speaking as usual, spread his hands apart, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. Don’t know.
Zachary leaned in to look at the picture again, his face close to Kenzie’s so she could smell his shaving cream. He usually sported a three or four-day growth of beard, which made him look like a homeless person or, at least, someone down on their luck. Someone people didn’t want to make eye contact with and would forget as soon as they walked away. As a private investigator, he didn’t want people to remember him. But today, he happened to be clean-shaven. His dark eyes were intense as he stared at the photograph. He ran a hand over his close-cropped dark hair.
“We don’t even know if it is real,” he pointed out. “It could be… stage makeup.”
Kenzie didn’t have to look again at the grayish skin or the bullet hole in the man’s forehead to know that this was no makeup job. She had seen enough corpses in the course of her work to recognize one when she saw it, even in a picture.
“He’s dead,” she told Zachary with certainty. “It’s real.”
Rhys nodded his agreement. His dark skin kept him from looking pale, but his expression was pinched and worried. His frown deeper than usual. He had been through an ordeal, a mental collapse apparently triggered by this very picture, followed by a reaction to the drug used in the experimental treatment program he had been placed in, and then finally sedated to let him catch up on the sleep he needed and get back on track again.
It had been over a week since Stanley Green had found him wandering in the street in a fugue state. And if that fugue state had been triggered by viewing this picture, then the man in the picture had been dead for over a week and still hadn’t shown up in the morgue.
Maybe he never would. Maybe his body had been dumped somewhere no one would find it.
Rhys held out his hand for his phone. Kenzie shook her head, not giving it back to him. “This is evidence. The police will want to look at the photograph’s metadata and any other evidence on your phone. Where you got it from.” Kenzie raised her eyebrows, asking again for Rhys to tell her where he had gotten the picture. How did a teenager end up with the picture of a murdered man on his phone? Who had sent it to him and why?
Rhys looked frustrated. Maybe he wanted to text her something on his messaging app. He relied on his phone for communication. He couldn’t tell his story to her in gestures and facial expressions. Some things could be communicated that way, but he needed something more.
Kenzie slid her own phone across the table to him. “Send messages to Zachary’s phone,” she prompted.
Rhys picked up her phone with long, slender fingers and operated it quickly. He found the messaging app he wanted, swiped and tapped rapidly with his thumbs, and the first message popped up on Zachary’s phone in a few seconds. Zachary held it so that he and Kenzie could see it at the same time, their heads close together.
Rhys had sent a picture of a dog, a recurring theme in his messages. This one was a cartoon picture of a basset hound dressed in a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and peering into a magnifying glass.
Kenzie nodded. “I know you want me to look into it. To find out what I can. And I will… but this is a police matter. They will have to figure out where the picture came from and who it is. Until I actually see the body, there’s not much that I can tell just by looking at a picture.”
Rhys pointed at the picture of the dead man, rolling his eyes. What other information did Kenzie need than the fact that the man had been shot in the head? Wasn’t that enough to determine cause and manner of death? It was glaringly obvious.
Then what was he expecting her to find out in her investigation? Was she supposed to be able to tell from the photograph who did it? Why?
“Okay, yes,” she said as patiently as she could. “I can see that he was shot. Cause of death. I can’t issue a medical examiner’s report based on a photo. I don’t know who it is or the circumstances surrounding his death. I mean, I do issue reports on John Does, but it still needs to go through the official channels for me to do that. I need human remains. Who did you get this from?”
He shrugged and made the ASL sign for “friend,” both index fingers hooked together. A well-known sign, even though he did not generally use ASL to communicate, but relied on his own gestures and the phone pictures and short texts to get his message across.
“A friend from school?” Zachary asked.
& nbsp; Rhys nodded.
“And do you know where he got it from?”
Rhys shrugged. He had already communicated to them that it was something that had been circulating the school. His friend had gotten it from another friend, who had gotten it from another friend.
“What are they saying about it?” Kenzie asked. “They’re not just sending it around by itself with no explanation.”
He pointed at the phone and made a gun shape with his hand, complete with a jerk showing the gun had been fired.
“What?” Zachary asked. “ ‘Here is a picture of a man who was shot.’ That’s it?”
Rhys nodded. Kenzie wanted to search through his phone to see who it had come from and exactly what the attached text had said. But she didn’t want to touch anything that the police would want to look at. It had probably been sent through an app where the message self-destructed, and all of that information was gone. But maybe the police techs could pull off information that had been deleted but not overwritten.
There was just one thing that she needed to do. If Rhys wanted her to investigate the man’s death, she needed a copy of the picture. She didn’t know what she could do for Rhys, but he needed to see that she was doing everything she could. He had trusted them with this information that he hadn’t shown anyone else, and he was counting on her being able to make everything right.
She didn’t know if she could do that, but she would do everything she could for him.
2
I’m going to send this to your phone,” she told Zachary.
It might make more sense to forward it to her own phone. She would need it there eventually. But Rhys didn’t need it popping up in his face again while he was holding her phone in his hands. It had been traumatic enough the first time.
And she would probably get Zachary to look at the photo’s metadata to see if he could tell her anything about its origin.
Zachary nodded his agreement. Kenzie sent it to him, then slid Rhys’s phone into her pocket. It would need to go to the police as evidence. Kenzie would get Rhys another phone. His grandmother, Vera, could probably not afford it. Kenzie didn’t think she had much disposable income. But Kenzie didn’t want Rhys to be left without a means to communicate beyond gestures.
“This whole thing,” Kenzie motioned to the phone in her pocket. “I’m so sorry you had to deal with it. It must be really difficult after what happened to your grandpa.”
Rhys nodded. His eyes dropped to the phone in his hand, but he didn’t type anything immediately.
Until the drug therapy that Rhys had reacted to, they had all assumed that what had happened to Grandpa Clarence when Rhys was just five was long forgotten, or at least very murky in Rhys’s memory. But the MDMA had made Rhys voluble, overcoming his usual mutism, and he had related the images to them over and over again.
His grandfather murdered before his eyes. Shot in the head, like the man in the picture.
It wasn’t that Rhys was afraid that the same murderer might have come back, that she had killed a second time and he might be in danger.
Because Rhys knew who the murderer was. He had always known, and he had lived with her for years after Grandpa Clarence’s death. Because it had been his aunt Robin. She had since passed. so they all knew that it wasn’t the same killer. Just the same cause of death.
Kenzie saw Rhys’s lips moving. The same mantra repeated over and over again. Even though he didn’t voice the words, she still recognized them.
Stop it. Just stop it.
Robin’s words, the night she had killed her father.
“I know,” Kenzie said softly. She leaned forward and put her hand over Rhys’s briefly, unsure how he would respond to the physical contact. “This is terrible for you. Are you having a lot of flashbacks?”
After remaining unfocused for a few long seconds, Rhys’s gaze finally returned to Kenzie’s face. He cocked his head slightly as if he knew that Kenzie had said something but wasn’t sure what it was or what she meant.
“I asked if you’re having flashbacks,” Kenzie said slowly, “If you keep remembering what you saw and felt the night that your grandpa was killed, there are things that you can do to try to reduce the impact of the flashbacks, to… get back to the present.”
He held out one hand, palm out, inviting her to go on, eyebrows raised curiously.
“One method that helps Zachary is called anchoring.” Kenzie looked at Zachary.
He nodded but didn’t explain. His flashbacks were better than they had been, but he wasn’t over them. The fire that had destroyed his childhood home and precipitated the rift in his family was still ever-present in his mind. Even if he wasn’t having flashbacks, he was still aware of it. And although he could stand to be around a lit candle or small campfire now without being thrown back to that experience, other things still triggered flashbacks for him.
“You concentrate on your senses,” she told Rhys, since Zachary didn’t seem inclined to explain. “You name five things that you see, five things that you hear, five things that you smell or feel. Focusing on those things, on your senses and surroundings, helps minimize the flashback and anchor you to the present.”
Rhys nodded slowly. He couldn’t name the things he saw out loud and probably couldn’t type them on his phone when he was in the throes of a flashback, but he could still focus on them and hopefully get himself out of a flashback faster.
“Maybe you could tell Vera about anchoring, too,” Zachary suggested. “She can help talk Rhys through it.”
Kenzie nodded. “You should probably talk to her rather than me.”
Kenzie wasn’t exactly in Vera’s good books these days. Kenzie had been vocal about Rhys not going to Persons, the private psychiatric facility that had done the experimental drug protocol, for treatment. Kenzie had tried to tell Vera that it was too dangerous, that what they were doing there was not ethical, and that MDMA therapy was too risky for Rhys.
But Vera had been desperate. After years of not hearing Rhys’s voice more than just a word or two here and there, and then his falling into the fugue state where he was completely uncommunicative, not even acknowledging that they were speaking to him, let alone trying to respond, she had been willing to risk anything for the miracle cure Persons had dangled in front of her.
Kenzie had been right. The fact did not endear her to Vera. Kenzie was sure Vera would feel awkward and embarrassed that she had gone ahead and done what Kenzie had warned her about and that the result had been negative, just as Kenzie had feared it would be. Kenzie being right about the therapy would be harder for Vera to forgive than being wrong would have been.
Zachary looked at Kenzie for a few seconds, reading this in her face, and eventually nodded. “I’ll talk to her about anchoring,” he agreed. “Walk her through how to do it.” He looked at Rhys. “It does help. It doesn’t make them go away completely, but it helps you to… not drown in the flashbacks.”
Rhys gave a thumbs-up. He was all for anything that might help.
