Garcia was checking under the bed. “Me, too.”
She took down another photo. A landscape shot. It had a red sticker on the back shaped like a stop sign, with a local phone number running across the middle. Underneath the number it said “Suicide Stop Line.” Bernadette stared at it, then told herself it didn’t matter if Hammond had contemplated taking her own life. This wasn’t a suicide. She slipped the photo back under the frame.
“Anything?” asked Garcia, standing up.
“Nada.” Bernadette started opening vanity drawers and poking around the clothing inside them. “Could have been a guy she picked up in a club. One-night-stand sort of thing.”
“I don’t see any obvious signs of sexual activity,” he said, nodding at the perfectly made bed.
“Could be they did it on the floor because”—Bernadette’s voice trailed off as she thought back to her college years—“Shelby’s bed was noisy and she was afraid a roommate would come home and hear.”
Garcia, while pressing down on the mattress with one hand and listening to the squeak, said, “Roommates told the police that Hammond wasn’t into dating. Didn’t go out to bars.”
Bernadette held up a packaged condom. “Roommates don’t know everything.”
“Hmm.”
She dropped the condom back in the drawer and closed it. “Did you tell your college roommates everything?”
“We didn’t talk,” said Garcia. “We drank and watched television.”
“Nice.”
Garcia said, “ME will let us know if he finds any evidence of sexual activity. Sexual assault.”
Bernadette went over to the chest of drawers and started riffling through the contents. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“Minneapolis PD has already been through here.”
“Humor me,” she said, closing one drawer and opening the one below it.
He watched as she continued to dig. “What do you think?”
“I think she had a lot of pink clothes. I thought redheads couldn’t wear pink.”
Garcia went over to a closet, opened it, and stared with wide eyes. “Wow.”
Bernadette closed the drawer and looked over. The closet was jammed with pink dresses, blouses, shoes, and purses. “Was the wow for the pink or the mess?”
“Both,” said Garcia, shutting the door before something tumbled out. “If I have kids, I hope they’re all boys.”
“Something’s missing.” She put her hands on her hips and ran her eyes around the room. “Where are her textbooks?”
“Downstairs,” said Garcia. “Apparently the kitchen doubled as the study hall.”
“Laptop?”
“Computer forensics took it.”
“Cell?”
“Bagged. Cops are snagging phone records.”
“I don’t suppose they found anything juicy in her directory or on her redial.”
“Nope.”
Bernadette went back to the tub. Hammond was a small-breasted girl—her chest was as flat as a young boy’s—and her arms and legs were like toothpicks. Her hip bones practically poked through her skin. She looked thin in the photos, too. “Was she ill?”
“Why?”
“My arms are bigger than her legs.”
“And you’re pretty slender.”
“Thank you for not using the word skinny.”
“When the ME does his deal, that should uncover any illnesses,” said Garcia. “I know our people didn’t mention anything regarding an illness. Maybe the cops heard something. But like you said, she might not have told the other girls.”
“Have the parents been contacted?”
“They’re in Europe. Minneapolis Homicide is trying to track them down.”
Bernadette bent over the tub and brought her face close to that of the dead girl’s. “Maybe she was anorexic or bulimic. That wouldn’t be something she’d share with friends or family.” She peeled down the bottom lip of the open mouth. “Her teeth look funky.”
“From stomach acid?”
Bernadette stood straight. “The other victims, some of them had eating disorders, too.”
“They had a lot of problems, which is why the suicide rulings weren’t hard to swallow,” said Garcia.
“The angry villagers aren’t going to swallow this one,” she said. “They’re going to break out the torches.”
“We’re reviewing the earlier drownings,” Garcia said defensively.
“We’ve got to step it up,” she said. “People are going to freak. They’re going to say we let a maniac run around unchecked.”
“The police are taking action. We’re taking action.”
She walked back and forth along the side of the pink bed. “We’re passing out Prozac and telling people to take the ‘How to Tell You’re Depressed’ quiz.”
“The others could still be suicides.” He nodded toward the tub. “This could be completely unrelated.”
“All the victims have been young college women with problems. All drowned. In every case, there were no witnesses. These can’t be a string of coincidences. If that’s not enough, look at the rate. Since April, it’s been one a month. Clockwork.”
“If we count La Crosse, it’s one a month. If we don’t count La Crosse—”
“We’ve got to count La Crosse.” She leaned against the side of the bed.
“Do you think we’ve gone from the river to a tub?” asked Garcia.
“You know what that tells me? That tells me the killer needs a more intense experience, a more up-close-and-personal drowning. He could crank it up in other ways, too.”
“How?”
“The next killing might not be spaced so far apart.”
Garcia dragged his hand over his face. “What do you want from me?”
“What do you want from me?” she asked. “Minneapolis Homicide is all over it. Our Minneapolis office is all over it. Milwaukee sent an asshole and an agent. They’re tripping over each other interviewing roommates.”
“It’s Minneapolis PD’s case, first and foremost. I can’t do shit about that. It doesn’t become yours unless—”
“Unless I prove that we’ve got a serial killer.”
“What do you need to do that?”
She got up from the side of the bed. “The files, going all the way back to the first one.”
“The one in April? That was a suicide for sure.”
“Why?”
“There was a note.”
“I want the note. I want the file. Did notes come with any of the other ‘suicides’?”
Garcia’s brows knitted. “I think the second one … no … they found a scarf she’d dropped on the bridge. No note.”
“That’s right. I remember reading about the scarf. A convenient clue left for the cops. I want that scarf, too.”
“What’re you going to do with that thing? Think you might try using your—”
“I might.”
“Flag me beforehand. I’d like to be there, if that’s okay.”
Garcia was unlike any of her previous supervisors. While the others didn’t want to know exactly what she did or how she did it, Garcia wanted to watch. “I’ll flag you,” she assured him.
He stuck his head into the hallway and turned back to her. “Coast is clear. No one to bug you if you want to try a fast one right here.”
She surveyed the pink room. Since the bed was neatly made—with a pile of pink pillows resting in an artful arrangement against the headboard—Garcia was probably right that Hammond and her visitor hadn’t had sex on the mattress. Nothing to touch there. The woman had probably filled the tub herself. The killer had touched the porcelain at some point during the struggle, but after so many victims, she suspected he was clever enough to wear gloves. “I don’t know, Tony. I hate quickies. Let me wait for the scarf. I’ll bet the murderer left that scarf for the police to find.”
“You really think those river drownings were murders staged to look like suicides?” His eyes traveled to the leg dangling over the side of the tub. “There was no attempt to make this look like a suicide.”
“Could be he figures this is so outside his previous MO, we’d never tie it to the river deaths.” She pointed a finger at Garcia. “Let’s let him think that. Let him think we’ve made no connection between this and the river deaths. He’ll get cocky and make a mistake. Plus it’ll keep a lid on the rioting citizens. Tell the cops and the ME to talk like this thing is an isolated murder.”