by Chris Taylor
“Well, I guess we’ll know when the lab gets the results from Angelina Caruso. At least, we hope it’s DNA evidence they find. You shouldn’t have told Peterson we had it when we don’t know that for sure.”
Clayton flushed, but remained defiant. “That low-life woman hater doesn’t deserve procedural fairness.”
“That may be so, but it doesn’t mean—”
He lifted his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. I get your drift. I let him get under my skin. I shouldn’t have.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
A grin tugged at his lips. For all the money in the world, he wouldn’t feel sorry for scum like Peterson. His eyes lit on her face. “So, sue me.”
She returned his grin reluctantly. “You’re incorrigible.”
His smile widened. “Maybe so, but you like that in a man.”
She laughed out loud. “And here I thought I’d totally misjudged you as the arrogant, egotistical Fed I’d pegged you for the minute I laid eyes on you.”
“Funny, my first glimpse of you made me feel like I’d been run over by a Mack truck.”
The air was suddenly charged with emotion. Neither of them dared to breathe. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The pulse in her neck beat a frantic rhythm.
For a whole, long minute neither of them said a thing. Clayton was the first to break the taut silence.
“Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was out of line and I have no idea where it came from. I don’t even know what I was thinking. I—”
She turned away. “It’s okay, really. It’s okay.”
“But—”
The buzz of her phone silenced him and he turned to contemplate the view outside the window while she answered the call.
“Hi, Ben. What’s up?”
Although Clayton tried not to listen, it was impossible not to hear Ellie’s sudden intake of breath. He turned reflexively and caught the tension in her body. Her mouth went tight while she listened.
Clayton’s gut clenched. Christ, not another body.
Ellie ended the call and his heart sank at the sad resignation reflected in the shadowy depths of her eyes.
“That was Ben.” Her lips thinned into a grim line. “He thinks someone’s found Josie Ward.”
CHAPTER NINE
Even from a distance, Luke Baxter’s face looked grave. Ellie and Clayton made their way across the vacant lot on the outskirts of Penrith Lakes. The grass was winter dry, long and unkempt. Graffiti stained the sides of the forest-green colorbond fence that bordered the property. A new subdivision of recently completed rendered-brick houses in varying shades of gray and charcoal stood less than fifty yards away from where the body had been found. The area was now cordoned off by blue and white crime scene tape.
The light had already started to fade when Ellie reached the circle of uniforms. She greeted Luke with a brief hug. “Hey, partner. How are you holding up?” Her eyes searched his, knowing the pain in their light blue depths was reflected in her own.
Luke shrugged and looked away. “You know.”
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat. “It was good of you to come.”
He shrugged again and glanced toward Clayton, who stood off to one side. “I was at the station when Ben took the call. He’s taking it pretty hard, too.”
“I bet,” she murmured.
Clayton moved closer. “Has her family been told?”
Luke shook his head. “No, not yet. I wanted to—see her first. You know, so I could tell her mother she…she hadn’t suffered.”
Somebody had covered her with a blanket. The kind you might have on the back seat of a car. Bending down, Clayton peeled it back and revealed what was barely recognizable as Josie’s face. The girl’s sightless eyes stared back at him, her once-innocent features now frozen in a death mask of horror.
He dropped the blanket back into place and stood. “How did she die?”
Luke cleared his throat. “Strangulation, we think. The decay’s too advanced to show bruising, but there are no other signs of violence—apart from her arms.”
Ellie frowned at him. “Her arms?”
He swallowed. “Yeah. She’s ah… She’s missing both arms.”
“Christ.” Clayton shook his head. “What the hell are we dealing with?”
“She’s still wearing her uniform. No overt signs of sexual assault,” Luke added. “I guess we can be grateful for that.”
Ellie remained silent. They all knew the degree of decomposition made it impossible to tell whether she’d been raped. She looked up as a white van with the Westmead Morgue insignia painted in stark black across its sides came to a halt a short distance away.
“The morgue’s here,” she murmured.
They waited in silence as an unfamiliar forensic pathologist climbed out of the van, accompanied by two orderlies.
Ellie frowned as they approached. “Where’s Samantha?”
The FP stuck out his hand and she shook it. “Jack Simmons. You must be Ellie Cooper. Sam’s been held up with another case. She asked me to come out here and collect this one.” He looked at the body that lay on the cold, bare ground.
Ellie watched as they slid Josie Ward into a black body bag and loaded her onto a gurney. Dread built inside her at the thought of telling Evelyn Ward.
Knowing it had to be done, she closed her eyes briefly and gathered her courage. She looked across at Luke. “I’ll go and see her mother.”
Clayton stepped closer. “I’ll go with you.”
“Actually, you know, I think I’d rather tell her myself,” Luke interrupted. “Evelyn and I have been talking a bit on the phone. I want to offer to be there when she formally identifies Josie.”
Ellie looked at him, surprised. He shrugged uncomfortably.
“She called the station one day to see if we’d heard anything. The call was put through to me. It kind of became a regular thing. She’s been calling every few days since Josie disappeared.”
“Luke, I had no idea. That was very kind of you.”
He shrugged again and looked down at the ground. “What could I do? I couldn’t even imagine what she must have been going through, not knowing if her daughter was alive or dead.” He met her gaze. “It was the least I could do.”
“Well, I still think it’s a pretty wonderful thing you did. I’m sure it’s given her great comfort to be able to talk to someone about it.”
Luke’s face turned grim. “Fat lot of good it did.”
Clayton laid a hand on the other man’s arm, his eyes fierce. “We’ll find him, Luke. You make sure you tell her; we’re going to find him.”
The sound of the van’s rear doors closing snagged Ellie’s attention. She lifted her gaze to Clayton’s.
“We might tag along to the morgue then. Someone needs to be at the autopsy.” She looked back at Luke. “If that’s all right with you?”
“Yeah, go. I’ll ask one of the others to ride along with me.”
“Okay, then.” She glanced at Clayton. “We’d better get going.”
Striding back in the direction of her car, she turned to look over her shoulder. Luke still hadn’t moved. “I’ll see you back at the station,” she called out to him. “Good luck.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he muttered. “I’ll need it.”
* * *
“Well, if it isn’t Sydney’s hardest-working detective and her pin-up boy from the south.” Samantha Wolfe’s eyes were alight with mischief as she looked at them from behind the green surgical mask.
Ellie acknowledged her in silence. Someone who voluntarily chose to work among the dead was entitled to any kind of sense of humor they could hold onto.
She sure as hell couldn’t have done it. It was bad enough on days like this, when she had to go to the morgue while working on a case. And she wasn’t even the one picking up the scalpel.
Unlike their previous visit, the gurney where the now-naked body of Josie Ward lay was the only one occupied. The morgue
was silent save for the occasional noises made by Samantha as she performed the post-mortem.
Donning a plastic gown and tucking her short hair under a protective cap, Ellie pulled on a pair of latex gloves and moved closer to the stainless steel table.
Samantha had already made the Y incision and was in the process of dissecting and weighing the girl’s organs. Clayton stepped forward, similarly attired in protective plastic. “What have you found?”
“Not much, yet. Heart, liver and lungs are all within normal limits. No stab wounds, bullet wounds or any other signs of violence. Apart from the severed limbs, of course, but that’s not what killed her.”
His eyes were intent on her face. “So what do you think she died from?”
“I had her x-rayed when she was brought in. There’s a tiny bone at the base of her tongue that’s been snapped clean through. It’s called the hyoid bone. A fracture usually indicates strangulation.” She glanced back at the body. “The decomposition’s too far advanced to see bruises or other marks around the neck, but it looks to me like that’s what happened to this one.”
Ellie tried to block out the images. “What about the arms? What can you tell us about them?”
Samantha walked around to Josie’s left side. She turned the body and adjusted the light until the blackened wound at the girl’s shoulder could be clearly seen. Picking up a pair of tweezers, she leaned closer and pulled out various small pieces of vegetable matter. “It’s pretty dirty. There’s a large abrasion on her back where her skin’s been scraped away and there’s a ton of debris and other garbage in this wound. It’s the same on the other side.”
She lifted her gaze. “It looks like the killer had hold of her by the ankles and dragged her along on her back for a distance after she died. You’ll see there’s a substantial amount of debris and other rubbish also caught in her hair and another large abrasion on the back of her head.”
Ellie’s gaze moved to the young girl’s once-shiny brown hair. It was shorter and a little curlier than she remembered from the photos Evelyn Ward had given her, but then she recalled the woman had told them they’d both been to the hairdresser the day Josie disappeared.
She leaned closer to examine the material in the girl’s hair. “What do you think that is?” she murmured to Clayton, pointing to a tiny, curling sliver of debris caught amongst the strands.
He bent closer, his head only inches from hers. With a gloved finger, he touched the flake of material.
“Looks like a fine wood shaving. It’s pale and fine, so something like pine, perhaps. Maybe she collected it along the way?”
Her gaze moved over the girl’s head. When she looked closer, she could see more tiny slivers of wood shavings, some bigger than others, but all similar in color and shape and all caught in Josie’s hair.
She met his eyes. “Either that or she’s been on the floor of a carpenter’s workshop.”
Samantha sidled over for a look. “Whatever it is, there’s a fair amount of it. I’ll put it under the microscope, see what we can find out about it. Come and have a look at the shoulder wounds. I’ve flushed them out.”
Ellie straightened and moved further down the table until she stood close to Clayton where he’d stopped near Josie’s hips. Samantha tilted the body onto its side again so they both had a better view.
She pointed with the tip of her scalpel to the wound at the girl’s left shoulder, which was now clean and free of debris.
“If you have a look here, you can see clear striations from the teeth of a saw. It’s the same on the right. And both bones are still full of blood.”
Ellie’s heart sank. “You mean…?”
The doctor nodded, her expression grim. “Her heart was still beating when the arms were severed.”
“Christ, not again,” Clayton muttered, stepping back and running a hand through his hair.
Ellie swallowed against the bile that rose in her throat and tried not to imagine the horrors Josie Ward had endured in the moments before her death. She prayed the girl’s family never found out.
Her eyes burned into Samantha’s. “Do we know if it’s the same one?”
“The same saw you mean?”
“Yes, if it’s the same one used on Angelina Caruso.”
“I’ll have to make up some slides and compare them microscopically, but I’m hoping there aren’t two madmen out there cutting limbs off women while they’re still breathing.”
Clayton pulled viciously at the expensive tie around his neck in an effort to loosen it as he paced back and forth across the room. Ellie could see he was struggling to keep his anger under control.
He swung around and pinned Samantha with eyes that were dark with emotion. “How soon can we have the results?”
“The slides can be prepared overnight. The wood shavings might take a little longer to identify.”
Impatience and irritation flared in the blue depths. “What about the material found under Angelina’s fingernails? Do you have any results back from that?”
Her brow creased in a frown. “Not yet. We had to outsource it. Our budget’s tight and—”
“We need those results.” His tone brooked no argument.
“I’ll chase it up.”
“Yesterday isn’t soon enough.” He turned and strode out of the room.
* * *
The sun’s orange-red glow had completely disappeared over the horizon and the night’s winter chill had set in when Ellie caught up with Clayton outside the morgue. The tension in his body was still evident as he leaned against the squad car and waited for her. Despite the dimness, designer sunglasses shaded his eyes from her view.
“It’s not her fault, you know.” She frowned at him as she unlocked the car with the remote and climbed in.
A moment later, he slid in beside her, pulled off his shades and sighed. “I know. I guess I should go back in there and apologize. It’s just that I feel so responsible. And at the moment, I’ve been about as useful as tits on a bull.”
His eyes were bleak when he turned to her. “I’m being paid the big bucks, as you so eloquently put it, to find this monster. All I’ve managed to do since I got here is to count the bodies.”
His frustration and feelings of inadequacy became almost a tangible presence between them. A wave of sympathy washed over her. She wondered briefly about his past. Had someone he’d loved met with a violent end? Was that the driving force behind him?
He interrupted her musings with a hard stare. “Don’t go feeling sorry for me, Ellie. That’s not what I need. Chew me out, tell me what an incompetent, ineffectual, over-paid bastard I am, but don’t feel sorry for me.”
Her eyes narrowed on his face. “All right, but remember, you asked for it. “You’re one of the most incompetent, ineffectual, inadequate, completely over-paid, arrogant, egotistical Feds I’ve ever met.”
A reluctant grin tugged at his lips. “You don’t hold back, do you?”
She offered an unrepentant shrug. “Why should I? You’ve been here nearly a month and as you just admitted, all you’ve really done is help with the body count.”
She turned on the ignition and put the car into gear, checking her mirrors before pulling out into the heavy, peak-hour traffic. Flicking him a glance, she continued.
“You offered a reasonable possibility in the guise of Wayne Peterson, but after ten minutes with him, even I could tell he wasn’t our man. Stewart Boston’s still at the top of your list and by this time tomorrow, maybe we’ll have all the answers we need.”
She drew in a breath. “In the meantime, I don’t want to hear you bemoaning the fact that you’ve ridden in on your white charger and in all the time you’ve been here, you still haven’t managed to solve the mystery or win the girl.”
His gaze slid over her in a slow inspection, paying extra attention to her heaving chest. The heat rose in Ellie’s cheeks. “Um, that was meant in the metaphoric sense, not the literal one.”
His grin was lascivious. “I know
what you meant.”
She turned away and kept her concentration firmly on the road in front of her. She needed something to keep herself occupied. If the conversation continued in its current vein, things could turn dangerous. She had no arsenal against those emotion-filled eyes. Not to mention the broad shoulders, narrow hips and impressively taut butt.
Oh, yes. Even through his tailored suit pants, she’d noticed his butt.
“What do you say we go and grab a bite to eat? It’s been a long time since that bagel and coffee I had for breakfast.”
She shot him a look of disbelief. “Breakfast?”
He grimaced. “Yeah, I got busy reviewing the case material and forgot about lunch. Then with the house call we made and the call out…” He shrugged.
She mulled over his suggestion, buying some time by concentrating on the passing traffic around them. Sharing a meal with him was probably not the wisest thing she could do right now. Her hormones were reminding her it had been way too long since she’d been in the company of an attractive man and everyone knew it was suicide to get involved with a work colleague.
Was she really contemplating an on-the-job fling? Because of course, that’s all that it would be. He lived in Canberra. It would never work. It couldn’t work. And yet…
“It’s just dinner, Ellie.”
Fire seared her cheeks. She bit her lip, grateful that the night had settled in enough to conceal her burning face. For goodness sake, what was she? A teenager?
“I know that,” she managed. “I was thinking about the case.”
“Liar.” His voice was soft, caressing in the darkness.
She stole a peek and fell into the teasing light of his blue eyes. Her heart picked up its rhythm and suddenly oxygen was in short supply.
He was so close.
Too close.
Not close enough.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
His eyebrows rose and she blushed again.
“W-what I mean is, let’s have dinner. We’ve got to eat, right? We might as well do it together and we can go over things for tomorrow. Boston lands a little after ten in the morning. It wouldn’t hurt to review our game plan.”