The Unremarkable Heart

horizon. The ambulance doors swung open. The EMTs cursed at the bitter cold as they rolled out the gurney. One of them had a pair of bolt cutters hefted over his shoulder. He slammed his hand on the hood of the coroner’s van, and Dan Brock startled, comically flailing his arms in the air. He gave the EMT a stern look, but stayed where he was. Lena couldn’t blame him for not wanting to rush into the rain. The victim wasn’t going anywhere except the morgue. There was no need for lights and sirens.
    Lena walked closer to the body, carefully folding the evidence bag containing the suicide note into her jacket pocket and taking out a pen and her spiral-bound notebook. Crooking her umbrella between her neck and shoulder, she wrote the time, date, weather, number of EMTs, number of divers, number of cars and cops, what the terrain was like, noted the solemnity of the scene, the absence of spectators – all the details that would need to be typed exactly into the report.
    The victim was around Lena’s height, five-four, but she was built much smaller. Her wrists were delicate, like a bird’s. The fingernails were uneven, bitten down to the quick. She had black hair and extremely white skin. She was probably in her early twenties. Her open eyes were clouded like cotton. Her mouth was closed. The lips looked ragged, as if she chewed them out of nervous habit. Or maybe a fish had gotten hungry.
    Her body was lighter without the drag of the water, and it only took three of the divers to heft her onto the waiting gurney. Muck from the bottom of the lake covered her head to toe. Water dripped from her clothes – blue jeans, a black fleece shirt, white socks, no sneakers, an unzipped, dark blue warm-up jacket with a Nike logo on the front. The gurney shifted, and her head turned away from Lena.
    Lena stopped writing. ‘Wait a minute,’ she called, knowing something was wrong. She put her notebook in her pocket as she took a step closer to the body. She had seen a flash of light at the back of the girl’s neck – something silver, maybe a necklace. Pondweed draped across the victim’s throat and shoulders like a shroud. Lena used the tip of her pen to push away the slippery green tendrils. Something was moving beneath the skin, rippling the flesh the same way the rain rippled the tide.
    The divers noticed the undulations, too. They all bent down for a better look. The skin fluttered like something out of a horror movie.
    One of them asked, ‘What the—’
    ‘Jesus!’ Lena jumped back quickly as a small minnow slithered out from a slit in the girl’s neck.
    The divers laughed the way men do when they don’t want to admit they’ve just soiled themselves. For her part, Lena put her hand to her chest, hoping no one noticed that her heart had practically exploded. She took a gulp of air. The minnow was floundering in the mud. One of the men picked it up and tossed it back into the lake. The dive captain made the inevitable joke about something being fishy.
    Lena shot him a hard look before leaning down toward the body. The slit where the fish had come out was at the back of the neck, just to the right of the spine. She guessed the wound was an inch wide, tops. The open flesh was puckered from the water, but at one point the injury had been clean, precise – the kind of incision that was made by a very sharp knife.
    ‘Somebody go wake up Brock,’ she said.
    This wasn’t a suicide investigation anymore.

Read on for an extract from Karin Slaughter’s new novel, coming soon …
Fallen
    On an ordinary spring day, Special Agent Faith Mitchell of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation returns home to a nightmare. Expecting to find her mother minding Faith’s new baby daughter Emma, she is horrified to discover Emma locked in the shed, her mother’s safe open, her gun missing and a trail of blood to the front door.
    Without waiting for backup, Faith enters the house to a scene of carnage. It has been torn apart and a man lies dead in a pool of blood. She stumbles across two more intruders, and within minutes they too are shot dead. And when the Atlanta police force turns up, Faith has some difficult questions to answer. But she has some desperate questions of her own. What were the killers searching for? Ex-Atlanta police chief Evelyn Mitchell was once under investigation by Faith’s partner Will Trent. Is her mother directly involved this time, and where is she now?
    With Faith suspended from duty, Will, together