CHAPTER EIGHT
One of the many bizarre friendships Avery had made over the course of her career as a detective with the A1 division was with a man named Charlie Tatum. Charlie worked as one of the coroners for the city of Boston, supervised under the city’s chief medical examiner. She knew a few other guys in the office, but she’d always had something of a banter-based friendship with Charlie. If she could manage to get alone with him, even if for only five minutes, she was pretty sure she’d get what she needed.
When the cab pulled up in front of the building, she scrolled through the contacts on her phone and called Charlie.
He answered on the third ring with a bored-sounding “Hello?”
“Charlie, it’s Avery Black. How are you?”
“Living on the edge, I guess,” he said. “We have been instr
