In summer, by now, her flesh would be purplish, bloated, beginning to slip and smell very bad, but the winter cold had slowed decomposition to a crawl. The body began to break down from the inside out, causing a darkening under the bluish-white skin, but the outer shell remained intact. The kinds of animals who wouldn’t mind gnawing on dead flesh were all hibernating or staying deeper in the woods, away from the icy winds, near easier sources of food such as garbage cans. Jillian Perry didn’t exactly resemble Sleeping Beauty, but she could have looked a lot worse.
And it was Jillian. If the color and the length of the hair didn’t convince Theresa, the necklace spelling out JILLIAN in gold wire would have. It rested on the sweatshirt’s neckband; the short chain had been pulled free of the pink collar and the sweatshirt. Jillian had been left there like a piece of luggage, the tag turned outward for easy identification.
A faint smell made its way to Theresa’s nostrils as she grew closer, the unmistakable sign that organic cells had succumbed to entropy.
Why did she assume that someone had left Jillian there? The aqua sweatshirt and jeans had no blemish, no sign that she had been shot or stabbed. No blood stained the blond hair. Theresa pulled at the collar. The neck, with its telltale necklace, had not been throttled or even bruised. There was no reason to think that Jillian hadn’t walked out into the woods under her own power, to purposely end her life. Freezing to death was supposedly painless and, perhaps important to a model, not disfiguring. Shooting or stabbing would tear the flesh, hanging would distort it to grotesque shapes. Even overdoses produced messy vomiting. But this left the victim looking, aside from the skin color, serene.
Jillian had probably killed herself. Case closed. At least the body had been recovered, so her family wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives wondering. All Theresa had to do now was finish her photos, call the body snatchers to collect the remains, get a cup of hot coffee, and call it a day.
Except she didn’t believe it. Not because Jillian, a beautiful, married mother of a baby girl, had everything to live for. That hadn’t stopped others before and wouldn’t again. They were only a three-mile walk from Jillian’s apartment and the girl was in good shape. She could easily have done that-but not without a coat or hat, not without getting frostbite, and her ears and nose showed no sign of it. Theresa’s cheeks were already tingling.
It also seemed odd that Jillian would leave her necklace in view but not carry any ID-if she wanted to be identified, why not keep her driver’s license in her pocket? And freezing might not immediately disfigure her, but if her body remained undiscovered, a thaw or two would reduce it to soup. But mostly, Theresa didn’t believe it because she had felt the effects of overexposure at too many northern Ohio bus stops, football games, and sled rides. The last few minutes of freezing to death might be painless, but the hour or so leading up to it would be sheer agony. Jillian would have really wanted to die, which didn’t quite jibe with the image of some flighty, selfish, pretty girl.
Either there was much more to Jillian than Theresa knew, or someone else had helped the woman to die, to abandon both her own life and that of her infant daughter’s.
After the first battery of photographs, Theresa donned gloves and turned Jillian Perry’s right wrist outward. The nails were unbroken, perfectly manicured, without blood or even dirt underneath them. The left hand matched the right, an impressive diamond solitaire winking from the fourth finger. Theresa sheathed each in a brown paper bag, pulling it tight around the wrist with red evidence tape. Her toes had gone numb.
Twigs snapped behind her as Frank approached along their set route. “What do you think? The setup has some similarities to the other hooker, but I didn’t see a mark on this one. You find anything?”
“No. Of course she could have a syringe sticking out of her arm, for all I know, but we’ll have to wait until she’s undressed. I doubt it, though. I’ve seen a lot of overdoses, and she hasn’t got the look.” She pulled up the bottom of the sweatshirt, just enough for a peek at the pink pullover beneath it. Sections had begun to darken as decomposition fluid seeped from the body, but she saw no defects from bullets or knives. At least in the front.
“So you think pretty Jillian decided to end it all?” Frank asked. He sounded disappointed, either in Jillian’s abandonment of her family or the loss of a reason to arrest George Panapoulos.
“I think I’m going to treat her as a homicide until I decide she’s not.”
Frank digested this as Theresa taped the front surfaces of Jillian’s sweatshirt and jeans. The cold lessened the adhesive qualities of the tape and, in light of the fact that the body had been exposed to the elements for days, made it enormously unlikely that any useful trace evidence would be found, but the process was quick, cheap, and nondestructive. Without a table or work area handy, she didn’t bother pasting the pieces of tape to sheets of clear acetate paper, merely folded the pieces back on themselves and dropped each into a hastily labeled manila envelope.
“She hasn’t got a mark on her,” Frank repeated. “Unlike Sarah Taylor. But one was a prostitute and one’s an escort.”
“Sarah was malnourished and poor. Jillian had found her way to a different world.” She combed her fingers through the detritus around the body, lumbering around in short hops, like a short sumo wrestler; ungraceful in the extreme, but she could not kneel or she’d have wet pants as well as cold feet. She had even clipped a few branches from the blackberry bush-if it had caught on her clothes, it might have snatched at someone else’s. She found only a crushed Coke can that appeared to have been there since the last millennium, a gray plastic ring about an inch in diameter, and a broken piece of red rubber, the same width as a heavy-duty rubber band. She bagged and tagged these items, doubting that they would relate to Jillian’s death. They were not on a remote mountaintop; over two and a half million people called Cleveland home, and the Edgewater beach and park were popular, even in the winter months. She could probably find debris from human beings in every square inch of the wooded area if she looked long enough.
When she had searched the ground with reasonable thoroughness-reasonable defined as longer than she wanted to but not so long that she shrieked with boredom-she turned Jillian Perry onto her side. Frank helped her, but it was not difficult given Jillian’s slender frame and the assistance of gravity. Theresa quickly taped the back surface of the clothing as well. Another peek under the clothes-not difficult since the pink polo-type shirt had not been tucked into the jeans-confirmed their suspicions: Jillian Perry had not been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned.
Frank stood up, rubbing his arms, his mustache framed by red cheeks. “Damn, it’s cold.”
“I’d still rather be here. A brilliant forensic scientist hired by the defense for their poor railroaded client is visiting our lab as we speak.”
“I take it he’s not a buddy of yours. She could have gotten here on foot from her place,” Frank thought aloud. “It’s not even three miles by car. Less if she walked along the train tracks.”
“I know.”
“She disappeared Monday afternoon. The high that day was six degrees. How long does it take someone to freeze to death?”
“A long time. Overnight would be enough. But if she came here in the afternoon, why didn’t she go farther into the woods? She’s visible from the path. Someone could have found her, even on a cold day. You said yourself there’s always some crazy hiker around.”
“She is visible from the path, and still it took five days for someone to notice her.”
“But it’s a risk.”
“Maybe she wasn’t very good at thinking things through. Maybe she was too drunk or high to think clearly.”