by Brant, Kylie
And that, Ramsey thought grimly, might have been another reason to travel so far into the woods to dump the body. Water was a great decomposer of evidence. What the fish left would have been unrecognizable after a day or so.
But the killer hadn’t been given days.
She looked at her watch. It was nearing midnight. But it would be a while before she’d sleep, especially with the woods still looming large in her mind. Slumber could take an experience like that and magnify it to nightmare proportions. Linking past and present together so realistically that she’d wake with her heart hammering in her chest, her pulse sprinting, and the taste of raw panic choking her. Leaving her feeling despicably weak and vulnerable.
Ramsey didn’t do weak or vulnerable. Not anymore. Not in a very long time.
Determinedly, she turned another page of the report. She was used to coming in later on a case and needing to play catch-up until she was as well-versed in the details of the investigation as the primaries were. And she preferred to look at the notes with a fresh eye, before anyone had told her too much, skewing her perception and perhaps blinding her to a novel direction.
The photos drew her attention once more. Strangulation was sometimes a crime of passion. But there were no fingerprints left on the body, meaning either its short stay in the water had erased them or the killer had worn gloves. Which would point to premeditation.
Ramsey turned her focus to the next page in the medical examiner’s findings. She skipped over the data revealing the weight and mass of the victim’s internal organs and found the part that reported the contents of her stomach.
A small amount of water and an unknown substance that was identified only as a “plant derivative” had been digested shortly before death. Cocking her head, she considered just what that term might mean.
A food item would have been easy to test and identify, but a plant derivative? Ramsey was at a loss. What else would fall into that category? Leaves? Tree bark? Roots?
Puzzled, she leaned back in her seat, threading her pen through her fingers. There were always those who experimented with new ways to get a buzz. And herbalists abounded who concocted nonpharmaceutical answers to disease. Even drug companies were experimenting with different types of tree bark for various medicines.
Reaching for her notepad, Ramsey jotted down stomach contents—plant derivative??, underlining it twice. She mentally crossed her fingers that the ME had saved the unknown substance for further testing.
Exhaustion was starting to gray the hem of her concentration. She’d already put in a long day. But she wanted to finish this report and mine it for leads she thought most relevant.
It would be interesting tomorrow morning to compare her conclusions with those of Powell and Matthews.
A vehicle sounded on the gravel on the drive out front. Ramsey didn’t look up until headlights flashed across the window. Then she rose, report still in her hand, and crossed to lift a corner of the shade. Even in the darkness, she recognized Matthews as one of the two figures getting out of a car and heading into a cabin two doors down.
Feeling like a voyeur, she dropped the shade and went back to her chair. It hadn’t taken the agent long to make friends tonight. She’d figure Powell to be on the other side of this room, which meant the younger man would be next to him. She wondered what the senior agent would think of his colleague’s extracurricular activity. She didn’t know him well enough to hazard a guess.
She continued reading the report until something in it made her sit straight up in her chair. Leaning forward, she grabbed the photos taken by the ME, flipping through them until she found the ones she was looking for.
The body had been found facedown in the water. One lower leg—foot to knee—had been exposed enough to catch the attention of the teenagers. And on the back of the ankle, the ME had found a substance he had been able to identify.
Bleach.
“I think identification of the victim should take precedence,” Ramsey stated firmly. “Once we know who she was, where she was from, we can narrow our search for her attacker.”
“Agreed, but we’ve got lots of different threads started on this investigation, and we need to follow up on all of them.” Powell was sipping from a glass of milk he must have picked up in the motel’s main office. “Startin’ with fully checkin’ out the witness accounts.”
“The sheriff told me the teenagers had been alibied for the night of the crime.”
“We haven’t talked to everyone who claims to have seen them that night. And a few we’ve tried to talk to haven’t been especially forthcomin’. We need to continue interviewin’ everyone who lives along that road closest to the woods. They might be able to identify a vehicle seen on it that night.”
“We could get a forensic artist to make a sketch of the victim,” Ramsey suggested. Matthews still had said nothing. He was seated at the table wolfing down his second doughnut with a cup of coffee. If he was feeling any effects from his late night, it didn’t show. “Send it to neighboring towns.”
“No one’s reported this woman missing.” The younger agent finally spoke in between bites. “It’s been all over the news, and none of the calls the sheriff’s office has fielded so far have matched the vic’s description.”
“All the more reason to get her face out there,” Ramsey pressed. “Maybe no one knows she’s missing. She could be a runaway. Homeless. Or someone who has been so isolated her loved ones don’t even know she’s gone.” Batterers regularly cut off their wives or girlfriends from their family and friends. Their Jane Doe could have died at the hands of a husband or boyfriend and not even be missed yet by those who cared about her.
“I’m not releasin’ her likeness to the press,” Powell said firmly. He was dressed in the same suit he’d worn yesterday, a nondescript dark color with another white shirt. Only the tie was different. “Jeffries would have my ass if I fed the media anythin’ else to keep their interest alive. My job is to handle them as quietly as possible.”
Before anything could be resolved, a knock sounded at the door. Powell opened it to a middle-aged man in a deputy’s uniform. “ ’Mornin’.” He uttered the obligatory greeting as he stepped inside, a sober expression on his face. “I’m Chief Deputy Phil Stratton. Sheriff Rollins had me stop on my way home from my shift. He’s handlin’ some distraught parents at the office.” His gaze traveled from one face to another. “Local folk, Jim and Linda Grayson. They just returned from a stay in Knoxville. They’re afraid the victim might be their daughter, Joanie Lyn.”
Ramsey doubted she was who Rollins had had in mind when he’d sent the deputy to have someone meet the parents at the Spring County morgue, located in the center of Buffalo Springs. But she’d volunteered for the duty, and neither of the agents had seemed inclined to argue with her. Dealing with heartbroken parents was a grim reality of the job, and not one that anyone relished.
But she’d wanted to see the victim. Wanted to talk to the ME who’d performed the autopsy. This would give her an opportunity to do both, and to take pictures to fax to the forensic artist, Alec Bledsoe, back at Raiker Forensics headquarters. Once she had a likeness of the victim in hand, Powell could hardly resist at least distributing it to nearby law enforcement agencies.
She’d discovered a new model silver Ford Escape left at the motel office in her name, and she found it fully equipped, complete with an in-dash GPS. Ramsey wasn’t surprised. Adam Raiker was a demanding employer, but she never had a complaint about the timeliness of the agency’s resources.
Armed with the deputy’s directions, she turned left out of the motel parking lot and headed into town. With just over two thousand residents, Buffalo Springs was the largest town in Spring County, a mostly rural area that included hills and parts of the Great Smoky Mountains. The mountain range had unexpectedly lovely valleys in between that marked eastern Tennessee. Buffalo Springs was located in one of those valleys. According to the map she’d consulted prior to her arrival here, the rest of the tow
ns dotting the county were less than half its size.
She wasn’t familiar with the area. Ramsey had worked for TBI seven years before joining Raiker Forensics three years ago, but she’d worked out of the Memphis office.
Ten minutes later she was pulling up to the one-story stone utilitarian-looking building that the deputy had directed her toward. She spotted Rollins’s car moving slowly up the street toward her, so she waited outside the building.
A man in the passenger’s seat got out and joined Mark before they approached Ramsey. He was on the wrong side of sixty, gray and balding, with clothes that hung slightly on his frame, as if he’d recently been sick. He shuffled rather than walked, and Ramsey knew she wasn’t the only one dreading the upcoming scene.
Mark made the introductions. “Ramsey, this here is Jim Grayson. Jim, Ms. Clark is a special consultant workin’ with TBI on this case.”
Ramsey surprised herself by laying a hand on the man’s arm. She was not normally a toucher. “I sincerely hope that’s not your daughter in there, Mr. Grayson. But you have my word we’ll do everything in our power to make sure justice is served in this case.”
He looked at her then. Really looked at her. And she revised her original estimation. This man wasn’t just sick. He was dying. She could see it in the yellow rims just inside his eyes. In the creases pain had carved into his face. He reached up to cover her hand with his. His palm was dry and papery. “I don’t know what to hope for anymore, Miss. I surely don’t.”
She trailed behind them as the sheriff led the man through the building’s lobby and down a long hallway to a doorway with a man in scrubs standing outside it.
“Here.” The stranger handed Mr. Grayson a mask. “You might want to put this on.” He offered nothing to Rollins or Ramsey, so she mentally steeled herself. A moment later, she walked into the morgue after them, and the familiar odors assaulted her senses. She had a moment to be grateful she hadn’t eaten that morning before following the trio to one of the small compartment doors that lined one wall.
The man grabbed a handle and pulled the steel gurney out. He took his time folding the sheet back to reveal the body, and Ramsey knew he was giving the man time to ready himself.
But a moment later, Grayson’s shoulders slumped forward, and he slowly swung his head from side to side. “Not her,” he croaked. “That’s not my Joanie Lyn.”
He turned away, his expression so shattered that Ramsey leaped to his side, certain he’d crumple. She and Mark assisted him out of the morgue, back down the hallway, and out to the street without the man saying another word.
Rollins left his side to open the car door for him, but before he got into the car, Grayson turned to Ramsey again. “Four times now.” Her gaze sought Rollins, uncomprehending, before the man continued. “Four times I’ve come to a place like this in the last six years. Sometimes hoping, God help me, that I’d see my daughter on that slab. At least then, we’d know.”
“It has to be the most agonizing task a parent can do,” she murmured, her throat tight.
“Find out who she is, Miss Clark.” His brown gaze traveled back to the building, lingered. “That’s all I ask. Find out that girl’s name so her daddy don’t have to go to his grave without ever knowin’ what happened to his li’l girl.”
“We’ll do our best.” She knew better than to issue promises. But once Grayson was in the sheriff’s car, as it pulled away from the curb, she made the promise silently anyway. Because she knew herself well enough to know she wouldn’t rest until she’d done just that.
“You’ve got the report.” The medical examiner, Don Wilson, the man in scrubs she’d seen earlier, pulled out the gurney of the victim one more time, this time with less grace. “I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
Ramsey took out her camera and began snapping photos of the bloodless face of the victim. “I’m interested in the stomach contents. I was wondering if you saved them for testing.”
“Turned it over to those TBI guys. Figured they sent it up to the Knoxville lab where the test will, given their schedule, sit there until sometime next year.”
She suppressed a sigh of relief. So the substance had been saved. Powell had mentioned the physical evidence from the scene and the fingerprints had been sent to Knoxville. Everything else was probably being kept at the sheriff’s office until the mobile lab arrived. Including the stomach contents. There was no way of knowing if further testing could be done on it but the scientist Raiker was sending was a whiz, if a bit on the bizarre side. If there was more to be learned, Jonesy would find it.
She stepped closer to the corpse and angled the camera for a closer photo of the marks on the corpse’s neck. “The report said the hyoid bone was broken.”
“I also found fractures to the cartilage of the windpipe and larynx. See this?” He reached past her to point at the victim’s eyes.
“Pinpoint hemorrhages.”
“That’s right. Death was by manual strangulation prior to her bein’ dumped in the water.”
“I agree. But your findings were in the report. I’m interested in things that weren’t included in it.”
“Everythin’ was in the report,” insisted Wilson. “I know the regs. Whatever we’re required to include was there.”
Ramsey lowered the camera. “I’m not talking about what you’re required to include. I’m interested in what you couldn’t add to the report because you lacked the evidence. Impressions that occurred to you while you were conducting the autopsy.”
He was silent for a moment, regarding her from midnight dark eyes. “My job isn’t to . . .”
She gave a mental sigh. “You’re human, aren’t you?” Human enough to begin to be irritating. “You start to form opinions as you work. Some are validated, some aren’t. And some you just don’t have enough information to be sure whether you were right or wrong.”
“That’s what you want to hear?”
“That’s what I want to hear.” The camera clicked again as she took another shot.
“Because you like opinions unsubstantiated by fact.”
Lowering the camera, she eyed him. “I still believe the Cubs can win the World Series.”
His raised brows showed the words had done the trick. “That’s not just unsubstantiated, that’s pure fantasy.” Convinced, he stepped closer, the smell obviously not bothering him. Ramsey had long suspected that MEs early on lost the use of their olfactory senses altogether.
“Okay, there were a few things. For instance, take a look at the hands.” He pulled the sheet back to the body’s waist. “See the length of the nails?”
She blinked, surprised. Most of the time the ME or investigating detective clipped the nails of a homicide victim close and bagged them for evidence. No one had bothered doing so with the Jane Doe. But that wasn’t what Wilson was talking about. “You didn’t find anything beneath them.” She recalled that fact from his report.
“Not a speck. Violent assault like this, she didn’t strike her assailant?”
Ramsey eyed the hands he was holding up. The nails were medium length, badly broken in spots. “Even though it appears she may have broken them defending herself.” Or perhaps she’d been held somewhere and had been trying to claw her way out. In either scenario, there should have been evidence beneath the nails.
He nodded. “Exactly. Which then makes you wonder if the nails had been scrubbed before the body was dumped. No way to be sure, so I didn’t put it in the report. Just put down that nothin’ was found.”
But something else was bothering Ramsey about the nails. “I can see the clear polish on them.” It was a little embarrassing to admit her ignorance of manicures. “But what do they call it when they put that white stuff along the tips like that?”
Wilson looked at her like she was crazy. “Out of my area of expertise.” But he held the hands up so she could take several pictures of them.
When she’d finished, she rubbed at the lacerations on the back of the victim’s wrists
. “If she’d been restrained by rope or cuffs, I’d expect to see abrasions around the entire wrist, not just here.” The wounds made her wonder if the assailant had held the victim’s wrists down as he assaulted her, rubbing them raw as they were pressed against something hard and rough.
The ME just lifted a shoulder. “With the bleach I found on the back of one foot and the lack of any evidence beneath her nails, it’s plausible to guess that the entire body had been scrubbed down. Of course,” he hastened to add, “I can’t prove . . .”
“I know, I got that.” Satisfaction flashed through her. Because the same thing had occurred to her. She thought for a minute. “I’d expect some sort of evidence beneath her nails around each break. Is it possible that her time in the water would have destroyed all of it?”