by Lis Wiehl
“What’s the RP like?” he asked Kirk. They both looked over at the guy, who was blowing on his hands trying to warm them.
“For someone who probably drinks all day, he seems pretty with-it,” Kirk said. “He had to go about half a mile before he managed to find someone with a cell phone. Then he came back here and waited for me. There’re a couple of cars patrolling the neighborhood, looking for the guy he spooked. But I’m betting whoever did this is long gone.”
“Do you think he could ID him?”
Kirk twisted his lips. “You could try asking him, but I don’t think he was ever close enough.”
Pulling on vinyl gloves he took from his belt, Charlie ducked under the crime-scene tape. He turned on his flashlight and swept it back and forth over the tarmac. All he saw were a few pieces of windblown trash, which would still have to be collected in case they turned out to be evidence. Finally he reached the dead woman and let the flashlight play over her. She lay on her back next to a loading dock, her head only a few inches from the concrete ramp. She wore black high-heeled boots, skintight dark-wash jeans, and a tight red sweater that showed off both her outsize breasts and the two-inch hole over her heart. Judging by the pool of blood she was lying in, she hadn’t died right away. There was enough blood that the smell hung in the air and the coppery taste furred Charlie’s tongue.
No coat, even though it was too cold not to wear one. The coat that covered her head had to have come from the guy who found her. It was stained and matted with layers of food and dirt.
Her left hand drew Charlie’s eye. Three fingers bore a French manicure. The other two, the pinky and the ring, had been cut off at the first knuckle. He leaned down until he was a few inches away. White skin at the base where rings had been. Had the fingers been chopped off to make it easier to rob her? But even the intact fingers still showed the ghosts of rings. Whatever the reason, Kirk was right—there was very little blood. That meant the injuries had been inflicted after she was dead, or postmortem, as the medical examiner would phrase it.
Charlie scanned the ground but didn’t see the fingertips. A bloodstained pair of pruning shears lay on the asphalt next to a hammer. It was all too easy to imagine what was under the coat—a face smashed into pulp, teeth turned into chips of ivory.
But he wasn’t going to look. While the scene was Charlie’s to investigate, the body belonged to the medical examiner. Charlie wasn’t allowed to move it, take property from it, search its pockets for ID, or fingerprint it. Those tasks were the medical examiner’s.
Whoever she was, someone had hoped to make her anonymous. A few minutes more and he might have succeeded.
He dipped back under the tape and went up to the homeless guy. “I’m Charlie Carlson with the Seattle PD. Homicide.” He offered his hand.
“Hey, man. I’m Tom Lyle.” He was shivering in the brisk breeze, which smelled of diesel fumes.
“Can you tell me what you saw tonight?”
“I was walking around that corner”—Lyle pointed—“when I saw this dude bending over someone lying on the ground. He had something white clamped between his knees. His hands were bright yellow, like maybe he was wearing dishwashing gloves. And in one of them he had some kind of big pair of scissors. About then is when I realized he was cutting off someone’s finger.” He raised his eyebrows.
“What did you do then?”
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if the person was alive or dead. But I also figured that somebody who would cut off someone’s fingers probably wouldn’t care too much about hurting me. So I stepped back around the corner so he couldn’t see me, and I made my voice real deep and I said”—his voice dropped an octave—“ ‘Police! Stop right there!’ And when I looked again, he was booking the other way. After I was sure he was gone, I went over to see if I could help, but she was dead. At least she didn’t feel what he did to her.”
“Would you recognize the guy if you saw him again?”
Lyle blew air out of pursed lips. “He was white. That’s about all I know.”
“Big? Small?”
“Average.”
“What color was his hair?”
“He was wearing a black knit hat. All his clothes were black.”
Charlie was getting nowhere fast. “So you saw him run away? Was there anything distinctive about his run? A limp or anything?”
“Nah.”
“Did you see a vehicle?” Charlie asked. “Hear it?”
“Sorry.”
“Did you hear or see anyone else?”
Lyle shook his head.
“And why did you put your coat over her head?”
“I felt bad that somebody done her like that,” Lyle said. “It just seemed right to cover her face.”
“So her face is pretty messed up?”
“What?” Lyle looked surprised. “Nah. She’s a pretty thing. All he done to her was cut her two fingers off.”
So Lyle must have surprised the man just as he was beginning his work.
Charlie imagined Lyle shrugging out of his coat, laying it over the woman’s face as tenderly as a mother might cover a sleeping child. The charity of it surprised him. “We’re gonna need to keep your coat, I’m afraid. When we’re done here, I’ll see if one of the officers can run you over to a shelter, maybe get you another.”
“I’d appreciate that.” Lyle rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Not the shelter—I don’t like them—but a coat would be nice. It’s cold.”
Which was an understatement. Charlie made a note to ask if any of the officers might have an old blanket in the trunk that Lyle could use in the meantime. His old coat would go into a clean evidence bag. The girl would go in another. Locard’s Exchange Principle said that whenever there was contact between two items, there would always be an exchange, even if it might not be visible to the naked eye. So the coat would have left some fibers on the dead girl, and the dead girl must have left something on the coat, even if it was just a hair or two. They needed the coat to rule it out as the source of anything else they found on the body so they would know it hadn’t come from the killer. It was even possible that the killer had left some trace evidence on the girl, which had then been transferred to the coat. To help sort it out, the medical examiner would want Lyle’s fingerprints as well as a sample of his hair.
And speak of the devil. Here was the medical examiner, Doug Pietsch, his bald head gleaming in the lights that one of the CSIs was setting up. He and Charlie nodded at each other, then walked back together to look again at the corpse.
“Judging by the blood loss, I would say she was killed here.” Doug leaned down and wiggled her knee with his gloved hand. “Within the last two hours, maybe a little longer.” He started to straighten up, then stopped and pointed. “Hey, what’s that?”
Charlie lifted the beam of his flashlight and a chill went down his spine. There was blood on the wall. Not the fine mist from the gunshot. Not cast off from the amputations. No. This was deliberate. Someone had left a scrawled message behind. With gloved fingers, Charlie lifted the girl’s wrist and looked at her intact right hand. Like the left hand, tan lines at the base of every finger showed where rings had once rested. But it was her index finger that he focused on. It was a solid red to the second knuckle.
Before she died, the dead girl had written in her own blood, dipped her finger to the wound in her chest or to the puddle she lay in. Left behind a message so important that she had spent the last few seconds of her life writing it. In wavering letters three inches high, it read:
9370
The only problem was that Charlie had no idea what it meant.
CHAPTER 55
Ninety-three seventy,” Doug read aloud. “What do you think that means?”
Charlie stared at it, suddenly wishing he had a big cup of coffee. Ideally, with four shots of espresso. “I have no clue,” he told the medical examiner. “I guess it could be a house number. Or maybe a locker number.”
“Or the numbe
r of a safe-deposit box,” Doug contributed. “Or maybe the combination to a lock?” He leaned forward, his big head tilted to one side. He looked more interested than Charlie ever remembered him being. Dead bodies, even those missing two digits, were his workaday reality. But four numbers scrawled in blood? That was new. Or at least newish.
Each number was shakier than the last. Maybe the actual number was even longer but the victim hadn’t had the strength to finish. “Maybe it’s part of her Social Security number?” Charlie guessed.
“Or two of the winning Powerball numbers.” Doug grinned. “Maybe she’s trying to tell us we need to play them.”
“It’s got to have been pretty important for her to write it in her own blood.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of code, in case the guy noticed what she had done,” Doug said. “She might have figured that if he didn’t understand it, maybe he wouldn’t try to destroy it.”
“If every letter is a number, then ninety-three seventy would be”—Charlie counted on his fingers—“I, C, G, and I don’t know what zero would be. I guess that wouldn’t work anyway. Not with twenty-six letters and only ten numbers.” An idea teased him, then faded when he tried to pin it down. “If it is a code, it won’t do us much good if we can’t figure it out.”
While they were speaking, two Seattle PD criminalists—a man and a woman—drove up and parked outside the perimeter of the crime-scene tape. They got out of their car and began to put on shoe coverings, hairnets, and white Tyvek suits they took from the trunk. The white suits would keep them from leaving trace evidence, as well as protect them from any biohazards, which was what they called all the liquids that leaked out of dead people. Although as scenes went, this one wasn’t bad.
It was going to be a long day. In his head, Charlie ran through everything he would need to do. He needed to walk around the scene again, picking out what he wanted the criminalists to photograph or process. He would note places where they should look for fingerprints, maybe even shoe impressions if there were any patches of dirt.
When it came to photos, his rule was to document everything, even things that didn’t seem important. You only had one chance to work a scene. A photograph might offer the only clues they would ever have. It wasn’t like a lab sample that could be tested again as long as you hadn’t used it up. Once the photographs were done, Doug would bag the woman’s hands—or what remained of them—to preserve any trace evidence. He would then place the coat and the corpse in clean body bags.
Meanwhile, Charlie would be assigning officers to search nearby Dumpsters and the warehouse itself, even though it looked like it had been shuttered for years. Closed didn’t necessarily mean empty. Empty spaces attracted human pests just as much as animal and insect ones. He also needed to re-interview Tom Lyle in more detail.
It might be hard to figure out what was trash and what might be evidence. When in doubt, take it all, was Charlie’s motto. But his gut told him they would be lucky to find anything. In many ways, this felt like the work of a professional. Whoever it was had come prepared with gloves and tools. Most people would have had to work their way up to snipping off fingers, but Charlie had seen no hesitation marks on the girl’s hand. And there was no sign of his shell casings or the girl’s fingers, so he must have taken them away. What kind of man could slip two fingers in his pocket as if they were as commonplace as coins?
Then again, if this had been planned, why hadn’t the killer taken the victim to some isolated place where she might never have been found and killed her there? Even if he had planned on dumping the body once he was finished obliterating any easy way to identify her, he would still be leaving behind a big pool of blood that would surely draw questions if anyone noticed it before the rain washed it away.
Charlie needed to walk the neighborhood, looking for evidence and witnesses. Stop to talk to laborers and forklift drivers. The victim’s lack of a coat pointed to her coming here in some kind of vehicle. His mental to-do list got longer. Check with taxi companies. Check the registration of any parked cars in the area to see if they belonged to her. Seek out nearby security cams to see if they had any relevant footage. Send out a notice to law enforcement agencies. Check with missing persons.
With luck, once Doug got her back to the morgue, the fingerprints on her remaining fingers would match someone in the system. If she was a prostitute—and the inflated breasts, high heels, and missing rings made him think she was—she had probably been picked up before.
Whoever she was, once the victim had been identified, Charlie would learn everything he could about her. It was like a spiral, the beginning of the yellow brick road. You started at the center, with the victim, then worked your way out in a logical order, making wider and wider circles. And somewhere along the path you figured out the why, even if it really only made sense to the killer. Then you figured out the who.
He and Doug backed off while one of the criminalists took establishing photographs of the body, Lyle’s coat still across the head. Then she took midrange photos, close-ups, and finally more close-ups of the bullet wound and the mutilated hand with a paper ruler laid down for scale. When she was finished, she called Doug over to lift up the coat so she could take photos of the woman’s face. After Doug moved her, they would take photos of the ground where she had lain.
But when Doug slowly peeled back the coat with his gloved hands, Charlie sucked in his breath. “Wait a minute.” He leaned closer.
He’d seen her only in pictures, but he was sure of it, even though her hair was now a brighter blond that looked nearly brassy in the bright lights the criminalists had set up. Even though the painted lips were no longer curved up in a smile.
“I know this girl.”
Doug and the criminalist were watching him curiously. “Who is it?”
“Her name’s Betty Eastman.” The girl Scott had been having an affair with. The girl Jared said had disappeared the same night Scott was killed. “Her boyfriend told me that he hadn’t seen her since April fourteenth.”
But this body was fresh. Clearly she hadn’t died that night seven months ago.
Charlie tilted his head as he regarded Betty’s slack mouth and half-open eyes. Where had she been for the last seven months?
Even if Betty had once been Scott’s killer, now she was someone else’s victim.
CHAPTER 56
Eli got to the Tilikum Place Café before Mia. Even though they only liked to seat complete parties, he talked the waitress into letting him snag the last table. While the restaurant wasn’t very big and every seat was now taken, the high ceilings and front wall of windows made the space feel larger than it really was.
Five minutes later Mia walked in, cheeks pink from the cold. Under a long black North Face raincoat, she wore black pants and a turquoise sweater that set off her blue eyes.
Eli stood up and stepped around the table to pull out her chair for her. As she sat down, she turned to smile over her shoulder at him. He was close enough to smell her hair.
“What are you going to get?” he asked as she perused the menu. He poured her coffee from the carafe he had ordered.
“A Dutch Baby.” It was the specialty of the house, cooked in its own individual frying pan. Eli had been considering ordering it, but then the waitress arrived and described the special: a house-made biscuit split open and filled with Beecher’s flagship cheddar, arugula, an over-easy egg, and bacon. And it came with home fries.
“I’ll have that,” he said. “And she’ll have the Dutch Baby.” He looked at Mia. “Do you want orange juice?” When she nodded, he added, “And two large orange juices.”
“So has there been a lot of fallout from your decision not to charge them as adults?” Eli asked once the waitress had left. His hope was to get Jackson the help that he so clearly needed. The boy still had a spark of promise inside him.
Mia looked around and then leaned close. “Oh, you mean besides Dominic Raines saying this was the proof the voters needed to kick Frank out of o
ffice?” Her voice was so low that Eli leaned in too. “I think people at the office are worried I’ve just pushed more votes Dominic’s way.”
“Is Frank D’Amato one of those people?” Just the thought made Eli angry.
“He said it was my decision and he would stand by it. But he didn’t look very happy.” Mia sighed. “The thing is, the public doesn’t understand how our office functions. Raines is saying we’re letting criminals off lightly. A lot of people have the misconception that offenders have been pled away. They think a plea is a reduction, but in King County a lot of people plead as charged. So that saves everyone time and money. But Raines talks about plea bargains like they’re bad things.”
“What will you do if he wins?”
“I don’t know. Even if Raines is elected, I’d still have a few months before he was actually sworn in. And I doubt he’d push me out the first week.” She gave him a crooked smile. “But maybe by the second.”
He thanked his lucky stars that in Washington public defenders were appointed, not elected.
Their food came, and for a minute they were too busy eating to say much. Eli’s sandwich was amazing: salty, savory, crunchy, chewy, cheesy, and delicious. Judging by the way she was closing her eyes and smiling while she chewed, Mia’s food was equally good.
He spoke around a second mouthful. “Would you ever think of going into private practice?” Many a former prosecutor had, touting their insider knowledge of what it was like on the other side. “Maybe corporate law?”
“One thing I know I couldn’t do is civil law.” She made a face and Eli mirrored it.
Civil cases could last years, with hours devoted to the finer points of civil procedure. The rest of the time went to the process known as “discovery,” where lawyers got into huge fights over inherently uninteresting documents like tax returns. Once they finally obtained these documents, they then spent days, weeks, or months reading them—but most would never find their way into a trial.