Daniel Rios, the medical examiner, determined that the murderer was left-handed, and that automatically disqualified Tommy Bishop and Tom Malkovich, but left the door open for Matt White, among other potential suspects, not that White was under suspicion, at least until Rios, Belinda Bradley, and Luke Hodgson, Gene Reid, and Perry Shepherd entered the scene.
Rios was chronologically the earliest to finger White in the murder of Kate Meadows. Normally medical examiners aren’t investigators, but then, neither are writers of fiction, much less parish priests, although in this particular case the latter wouldn’t be involved, at least not officially; Hodgson had resigned years earlier.
Rios, however, found himself compelled, not so much because the case had become so high profile, but that he found himself so appalled by what had happened to Meadows. He’d never seen anything like it in his twenty years in Cumberland County.
He counted twenty slash wounds, in fact. She’d been raped, beforehand, beaten savagely. Starved. The days accounting for the kidnapping had been brutal. This had been, as these tend to go, personal. This hadn’t been a stranger. That was why Rios listened to Priscilla Foster. But Tyler Salazar was no southpaw.
He considered whether Bishop or Malkovich might’ve thrown off suspicion, hidden a secret ambidextrous talent, and in his interviews with them devised clever methods to catch them out. With Bishop he outright had the man juggle condiments at the diner. With Malkovich, whom he’d learned had played in a bambino league as a boy, Rios poured over old newspaper clippings in the Berlin Library. He discovered Malkovich had in fact grown up in town before moving away, then returning. Most townsfolk had considered him a traitor. But he could only write with his right hand. That’s as close as Rios could confirm.
Rios, and his son (Rios was aging; part of his interest might simply have been that he found time finally catching up with him), had to wait until Reid appeared on the scene. They compared notes with Bradley, the eccentric dog walker.
They waited to see if justice would prevail.
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