He would send four pics in all. Each pic would be encrypted and require a password to open. Dark Moondancer would have the baby ducks, but he would not have the real picture underneath until Musicman got his payment. Only then would he send back the encrypted password.
He pictured Dark Moondancer looking at the little duckies, wishing he could see what was underneath.
“Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” Musicman intoned. He hit the SEND button, consigning the ducklings and their invisible cargo into the ether.
13
“Her hyoid was broken,” Cochise County ME Carmen Sotomayor said as she snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a BIOHAZARD container.
The smell of sawed bone clung to Laura’s nostrils, almost as bad as the odor of death. The last thing Carmen Sotomayor had done before sewing Jessica Parris back up was to use an electric saw to open up her cranium to examine her brain.
Laura thought the killer had been crafty, but now she knew to what extremes he had gone to avoid detection. He’d bathed the girl’s body and washed her hair, clipped her fingernails, even given her a douche.
The douche was necessary. He had sexually assaulted his victim after death, not before. Postmortem sex was another indication that the killer didn’t want to risk abrasions to Jessica and to himself. Whoever he was, he knew something about the collection of evidence.
She looked at Jessica Parris, small and forlorn on the stainless steel autopsy table. Gutters running around the edge of the table gleamed in the light, still holding the residue of blood from the autopsy. The girl who had reminded her yesterday of a Victorian doll now looked more like Raggedy Ann, big ugly stitches forming a Y down the length of her body.
“When you measured her—you said she was small for her age?” Laura asked.
“And underdeveloped.”
“You mean more like a little girl than a teenager, anatomically?”
“There’s a phenomenon we’re just beginning to see in the physical development in girls. They’re maturing at a faster rate than, say, when you and I were their age. But this girl is on the immature side, although it appears she had enough pubic hair for him to shave.”
“He shaved her so he could think of her as younger,” Laura said.
“And to destroy evidence—her pubic hair and his.” Carmen Sotomayor stared at the girl, her eyes sad. Laura noticed she had bitten her lip, a little gash, dark lipstick edging her teeth.
Carmen added, “If he did it to make her seem younger, it wasn’t too much of a leap—she’s pretty flat up top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. You’d think a fourteen-year-old girl would wear a bra, whether she needed to or not.”
Laura thought of the bras in the top drawer of Jessica’s dresser. “He took it.”
“But he left the bikini underwear.”
Laura said, “I wonder if he had a replacement pair and they didn’t fit.”
“What would he replace them with?”
“Maybe something more modest.”
Two vertical lines appeared between Carmen’s dark brows. “You think so?”
“Who knows? It was just something that occurred to me.” Laura divested herself of the paper booties, gown, the gloves.
She knew not to jump to any conclusions. Her method had always been to disprove a theory, rather than prove it. That way, she avoided making leaps in logic just to bolster a theory that might not pan out. She liked to look at evidence as if it were a disassembled car spread out on a tarp, making damn sure that whatever parts connected weren’t forced into place.
Something didn’t fit here. Maybe it was the girl herself. She seemed out of place, although Laura couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was her age; maybe it was more than that.
“That dress is homemade,” Carmen Sotomayor said. “No tag anywhere, and those darts looked like they were from a pretty simple pattern. So that ought to narrow it down.”
By the time Laura left the ME’s office in the Sierra Vista Community Hospital, it was going on six o’clock and looked like it would storm. She rolled down the window, inhaling the scent of the impending rain on the dense air. The area had greened up a lot since she’d been down here a couple of weeks ago—johnsongrass lined both sides of the road, lush and green, soaking up the runoff. Ocotillo on the hills looked like dark green pipe cleaners.
The evidence for the DPS Crime Lab resided in the back of the 4runner, each piece packaged separately and bearing her initials: head and pubic hair samples from Jessica, fingernail clippings, scrapings from under her fingernails, swabs from her body, and her clothing. And of course the tire tread moulage and the matchbook in its paper evidence envelope.
He had been pretty sure of himself to go back and leave the matchbook—another taunt. He was playing with them. In a way, that was good. Laura knew that when you got cocky you made mistakes, and she intended to be there when he did.
The dress intrigued her, the idea of it having been run up on a sewing machine from a pattern. Did that mean he could sew, like Ted Olsen? Did he have someone in his life who sewed for him—a girlfriend, wife or mother? He’d tried to buy a dress that would fit a fourteen-year-old girl because his own dress didn’t fit.
It would be time-consuming to locate the company that produced the pattern and backtrack from there to the outlets. Laura was even less optimistic about tracing the material, the zipper, the thread, the lace, and the ribbon.
If he didn’t purchase those in the area, you could forget about that.
The storm hit just as she reached Tucson. She took the Valencia Road exit and drove west to the Department of Public Safety on Tucson Boulevard down the street from the Tucson International Airport.
Lightning sizzled across the sky as she turned into the parking lot. Built in the sixties, the DPS building reminded her of a grain elevator. In the blowing rain, the concrete building darkened to the same slate color as the sky. US and Arizona flags whipped in a wind-driven frenzy, their chains rattling. Laura waited for the automatic gate to roll back and drove in, taking note of the cars in the inside lot. Victor’s truck wasn’t there. She doubted she’d see anyone at this hour.
She booked the tire moulage, the matchbook, Jessica’s clothes, and other items from the autopsy into evidence, filled out the paperwork, and requested the types of tests she wanted from the crime lab. On her way to the squad bay, she passed Mike Galaz’s office and noticed something new—two rows of photos on the wall by his door. Mostly of the Tucson social scene, Let’s Go People! and his wife standing in groups of three or four at various fundraising events. Expensive coifs, more expensive smiles.
Laura had never been part of that social circle, and knew by now she never would be. Fortunately, she didn’t need an expensive evening gown to send her check to the Hermitage No-kill Cat Shelter.
Everybody had gone home except for Todd Rees, the youngest and newest member of the squad. His desk was catty-corner to hers, facing the other direction. She liked that, because it kept their interaction to a minimum. He looked up and then back at his computer.
Her plant was looking a little dry. She prodded it, filled a coffee cup with water from the bathroom sink, and gave it a drink before checking her messages and her voice mail.
One message had been placed on the center of her desk in Rich Lockhart’s handwriting: “Call Myra Maynes at the medical examiner’s office.”
“My remains. Very funny,” she muttered, tossing the note into the wastebasket.
A California detective named Barry Endicott of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had left a message on her voicemail, “regarding your child homicide in Bisbee.”