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  I take Parks’s cold hand in my own to examine the fingers and the cut of each nail. Sometimes killers will cut the victim’s fingernails very short in order to get rid of any DNA evidence. It’s hard not to be aware of these tricks in our CSI television culture. Her nails and hands, though, are a haphazard collection of ripped nails, scrapes, and torn fingertips that indicate she fought her killer. I gently place her hand on the table and lean in closer to her face. She looks so young with her long red-blond hair thrown over one shoulder. Parks turned twenty only a few weeks ago.

  “The previous victims had their nails cut and filed after death,” Mitchell says.

  I nod. “Part of the killer’s process of posing.” I run my fingertip along Parks’s jawline to a large swollen area that had been in the process of bruising at death. “This one ruined his plans when she got away.”

  Parks, according to the report Sanders sent, had been jogging last evening and was brutally attacked inside the limestone quarry. Somehow she got away from her attacker and gathered the strength to walk out of the forest and into the path of oncoming traffic on the bordering highway. It must have been like a scene out of a slasher horror film for the motorist who slammed on his brakes for the young, naked, staggering woman at three in the morning in subzero weather. He helped Parks into his car and drove her to the ER. She was taken immediately into surgery and had been resuscitated twice, but eventually she died in surgery. I make a note of the tiny pinprick on her jugular, a possible needle entry point.

  “Toxicology came back with strong traces of benzodiazepine,” Mitchell says.

  “Roofies.”

  Mitchell nods. “Our killer mixed the drug with saline and injected it into the jugular for fast results,” Mitchell explains. “He used minimal amounts so that the victims would be aware of what was happening but couldn’t fight. He wanted to hear these girls scream—the sadistic fuck.”

  I let my open hands hover along Parks’s body and move slowly over her shoulders and breasts. When I was in the academy, I was told I look like I’m reading braille. In a way, I guess I am reading the victim and her story. Rowan always says I am unconsciously evaluating the body’s field, pulling information and clues from the residual energy that lingers around the corpse. I’m not sure about all that. All I know is it works for me and I rarely forget a mark on a body because of it.

  “He had to have been very close,” I mumble as I inspect a wound on her rib cage with my fingertips. “She trusted him. No other needle entry points?”

  Davis shakes his head.

  I scan back up to the entry point on the neck. Parks has a relatively thick neck for a young female. It would have been difficult in the rush and the panic of the attack to find the exact location of her jugular. Such precision on a flailing victim in the center of a forest would be difficult at best.

  Roofies are a man’s drug. Forensic psychiatrists have found that some male killers prefer this drug because it makes them feel all-powerful against a woman. She becomes the damsel in distress, making him the prince who must save her. Twisted, but it mirrors our culture’s beliefs that women are physically weak and need a strong hero of a man for protection.

  “No DNA found on the body? No semen?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” Mitchell rolls the white sheet down to Parks’s kneecaps. “The cause of death was exsanguination. She bled out from the wounds to her genitals.”

  Before I can catch myself, I step back from the body. Parks’s vagina looks like it has burst open. Her genitals have been not only stabbed, but sliced lengthwise.

  “It looks to us like he was not able to finish with Parks for whatever reason. He started the mutilation and we think he intended to do what he’s done to the other girls.” He opens a file and places autopsy photographs of the other two victims’ vaginas. “Looks like a flower to us.”

  Mitchell points to Hannerting’s vagina where it has been cut into six quadrants. Each piece of skin has been pulled back and splayed out like the petals of a blooming flower, with the labia in the center. A long cut below the base of the vagina runs to the rectum as if to replicate a stem. Within each incision are the flashes of white bone. The breath catches in my throat. Although I read about this wound in the chart, nothing could have prepared me for the reality. I’ve never heard of such a severe wound to the female genitalia before. Sanders has worked on cases where the male victim’s penis has been removed, but never one with such severe mutilation to a female.

  “The other victim has this cutting to the genitals?”

  “Yes,” Davis says. “We believe it’s some sort of signature.”

  “Were the victims conscious for the abuse?” I ask.

  Mitchell shrugs. “We can’t be sure. Most likely they were in and out. Given the level of benzodiazepine, they were certainly groggy and powerless against their attacker. Parks and the others knew something terrible was happening to them.”

  Davis hands me an evidence bag. “Doctors found this clutched in Parks’s fist when she arrived at the hospital.”

  A gold-colored cross fills my open hand. It is heavy, certainly not pure gold, but some sort of brushed metal. I hold the cross up to the light. The back reads: May the Lord be the savior of your soul.

  “We found a similar cross with each of the victims.” Davis hands me the evidence report. No prints or DNA were found on this cross or the others.

  I flip the bagged cross over to study the front of it. Engraved in the lower end of the cross: Vatican ’98.

  “The land of the pope.” The cross thumps against the steel table as I lay it down.

  “The cross could indicate the killer felt remorse for the murders,” Davis says. “He possibly offered a prayer or a final good-bye for each of the victims.”

  “How generous of our killer,” I say. Only Mitchell laughs.

  “What do you make of the posed bodies?” Davis asks.

  I fall back into professional mode. “Posing usually indicates some sort of ritual that the killer does in order to pay homage to someone or something. He’s very precise, a perfectionist. The crosses suggest a possible religious motivation.”

  Mitchell hands me the other two files. “We may not be in the Bible Belt,” he says, “but we have more than our fair share of churches around here.”

  “There was no sign of recent sexual intercourse on any of the bodies?”

  Mitchell shakes his head and then ghosts Parks’s body with the white sheet.

  “These might not have been sexually motivated killings,” I say, “but there are sexual components. The killer might not have raped these young women with his penis, but he used other methods of penetration: the needle to inject the roofies, the knife to the vagina. This suggests possible sexual dysfunction in the killer.”

  Mitchell chuckles. “Our man can’t get it up.”

  “And he’s pissed.” It takes a lot of uncontrolled rage to destroy a human body in this manner, years and years of pent-up anger.

  One of the files on the stack is filled with notes on the first victim, Vivian Hannerting, whose case has since gone cold. She was killed in December, about thirteen months ago. Hannerting, twenty-three at the time of her death, was a second-year student at the community college about thirty miles from Willow’s Ridge. She was last seen by her roommate leaving their rental house on foot to meet some friends at a nearby bar and grill. She never arrived. Hannerting’s body was found three days later by a sanitation worker inside the Willow’s Ridge limestone quarry, near the eastern edge of the town. The crime-scene photos show her posed in a seated position, her back against a stone wall inside the quarry, with her arms fully extended and draped over tree branches. Her pale, naked skin gleams against the snow that surrounds her. Hannerting’s head is rolled to her right shoulder and tilted down, her eyes wide open as though death had sneaked up on her.

  Davis hands me a second file for the next victim, Chandler Jones. “We knew the cases had to be connected, but there’s close to a year between the murders
. We thought this one might be a copycat.”

  “Because of the genital wounds?”

  Davis nods. “They are very different.”

  Chandler Jones disappeared a week before Christmas and was found by a jogger with his dog inside the Willow’s Ridge limestone quarry on Boxing Day. She was an active member of her Baptist church and was last seen leaving the church parking lot with her car loaded full of food for members of the church who were shut-ins. No one received the food. Her car was found on Christmas Eve in the Miller’s Grocery parking lot.

  The first crime-scene photograph haunts me: her abandoned car with the backseat of the sedan neatly lined with pink and green plastic containers of food, plastic silverware wrapped in the same colors, along with a crate full of individual milk cartons. The next photograph shows Jones’s naked body sprawled out on a snowy wooded patch along the shoulder of the highway near the limestone quarry. Jones’s body pose looks like a person placed inside a coffin, flat on her back with her hands crossed at the belly button. Her intertwined fingers aim down at her genitals. Rather than flowering the skin, Jones’s genitals were cut out, leaving a gaping hole in her body. Her long hair had been spread away from her scalp in long red waves, a halo surrounding her face. The coroner found a small cross embedded deep inside her uterus.

  I lay out the posed Hannerting and Jones crime-scene photographs beside Parks’s body. All three victims were killed around the holiday season, maybe some sort of trigger for the killer.

  “The killer’s pattern has been broken.”

  “Meaning?” Davis asks.

  I turn away from the body and lean up against the wall. “The killer doesn’t know exactly when Parks died, right?”

  Davis nods. His long, ropey arms cross over his chest as he rocks forward and back on the balls of his feet. Davis strikes me as athletic, as if always on the cusp of working out.

  “He only knows what the media has reported, that Parks managed to flag down a motorist who rushed her to the hospital, and later she died in surgery. He has no idea if Parks was conscious and able to make a statement before her death. We need to use this to our advantage.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “The media is our strongest ally right now,” I say. “We need to craft statements that suggest we know more than we do. We need the media to inflame him with regular reports and statements about the case.”

  Davis nods again, the furrow of his thick brow knotted in thought. “He is very particular in the way he leaves his crime scenes. The mistakes he made last night must be driving him crazy.”

  “He’ll need to fix it,” I tell Davis and Mitchell. “He’ll kill again and soon. Let’s hope the added pressure of the media causes him to make more errors.” Time to start the legwork, so I shift from the killer to his victims. “Are there any indications the women knew each other or are connected in some way?”

  Davis shrugs. “Willow’s Ridge is a small town. These young women must have crossed paths at some point, but they didn’t seem to know each other well. They weren’t friends or any of the other social connections that we usually see.”

  The parents had supplied the police with high school graduation pictures. All three look out at me from their files: smiling, competent young women on the verge of life. Were these women selected at random? Could it be as simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time? My gut tells me nothing about this case will be that simple.

  “Catch me up to speed on the investigation.”

  Davis says, “Two men have been questioned. Both had alibis at the time of the crimes.” He turns to me and rests his hands on the thick belt around his slim waist. “One we’re still looking at pretty hard—Nicholas Sambino. He’s an embalmer at Eldridge Funeral Home here in Willow’s Ridge.”

  “Why Sambino?”

  Davis rubs the corner of a bloodshot eye; it’s clear he hasn’t slept. “Sambino has had a number of interactions with us, disturbance calls and speeding, you know, minor arrests. Except for one. We like him for this based on a rape charge from last year. He was arrested for sexual assault of a fourteen-year-old female. The victim had numerous injuries and was attacked while jogging inside the limestone quarry. Based on the high publicity of the case and the young woman’s unstable mental health, the family dropped the charges against Sambino. He walked.”

  I lean into the wall again, reading Davis’s body language closely. My shoulder holster pulls tight against my back. I hate wearing one, but I’ve got the hips of a twelve-year-old. There’s nothing there to hold up the weight of my service weapon. The only cop bling my low-slung waist holds is a badge looped through the belt. “You’re not convinced he’s our killer.”

  Captain Davis gives me a quick smile. “You’re good,” he says. “There are other circumstances to consider.”

  “Such as?”

  He riffles through the stack of files and pulls one from the bottom. It is worn and splitting, thick with notes and crime-scene information. The very first photograph grabs my heart; it is of the navy eyes of my past. The depth of those eyes strikes me first, an old soul so wise and crippled with sadness. The clarity of those eyes beneath the dark lashes that once seemed to understand everything and knew me much better than I knew myself. I’ve been trained not to reveal emotions in a case, and I’ve mastered the ability to stuff them down with my poker face intact. I turn away with a fake cough.

  “You all right?” Davis asks.

  Although I can’t breathe, I manage to nod. It’s that feeling again—I’m being pushed underwater, held down, and choked. I fight, kick, and claw at the hand forcing me down, to no avail. When I finally surrender to its strength and take my first breath, the water gushes in and my underwater grave grows silent. Safe. Sheltered. I’m cradled by the watery arms that hold me.

  “You don’t seem all right.” Davis’s words make their way to me through these cloudy depths.

  “Damn allergies,” I manage to say. Whether or not he believes such a sorry excuse, it gives us both an escape from this embarrassing moment.

  His words gurgle toward me. “Marci Tucker. Murdered in July of 1989. She is the piece I can’t place. Tucker was found bludgeoned inside the limestone quarry, though a different section of the park. She’d been killed near the caves and it looked like an attempted rape gone wrong. The case went cold almost immediately.”

  I hear the bubbles of oxygen float up as the water slips over the top of my head. I’m sinking deeper and deeper.

  “There are ties between Tucker and the present cases—age, gender, and location. As far as we know, there wasn’t a cross found on or near Tucker. Cause of death was multiple blows to the back of the head with some sort of pipe. A basic drug screen was run on Tucker and came up clear.”

  Mitchell says, “We didn’t routinely test for date-rape drugs in 1989, so it’s possible the victim could have been drugged with it. No needle entry points are listed on the autopsy.” The incessant click of Mitchell’s pen echoes inside the dead room and brings me rushing up through the water’s surface.

  To catch my breath, I look down at my feet—black boots that are as much a part of me as my left hand. They’re in need of resoling and who knows how many gold-tinted laces I’ve been through. I wiggle my toes and think of my father; the boots were a gift from him when I was accepted into the academy. They were the last gift he gave me. Thoughts of my father always have a way of grounding me and bringing me back to the case at hand.

  “If these cases are truly connected,” Davis says, “that knocks out Sambino as a suspect. He would have been about nine years old at the time of the Tucker killing.”

  “It could be someone he knows well,” I say, slowly returning to the game. “Sambino’s father. An uncle or an older cousin. Someone he had regular contact with who he admired and made him vow to keep the secret.”

  Mitchell rubs his temples that bloom neon. I don’t doubt his Irish descent and wonder if Mitchell has the temper to match as he pulls the white shee
t up over Parks’s head. “You mean that Sambino may be carrying on the crimes for someone else?”

  I shrug. “We can’t rule out any possibility at this point.”

  Work. It’s always been my refuge when my emotions erupt. The obsessive side of me takes over with any case, occupying all my thoughts, puzzling out the details and various crime scenarios in my mind. I’m like a pit bull that clamps down and locks its jaw on a Frisbee—you can pick the case up and swing it around all you want, but I won’t let go until it’s solved. It is the mystery of each case that hooks me in, all those unanswered questions. I want the answers. I want it all to make sense. Most of all, I want justice for those who can no longer speak for themselves. Victims just like Parks, Hannerting, Jones, and Tucker.

  Chapter Two

  My dad always told me that in order to have a successful career in law enforcement you have to be able to bend and not break. Until his fatal heart attack that came out of nowhere, he’d been the Chief of Police for Chesterton County, not more than ninety miles west of Willow’s Ridge. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who could bend, bend, bend, and then bend some more without shattering.

  Early on in my life, my dad was the one to define my strong instincts as a cop gut. “You’ve got a strong sensitivity to the truth,” he always told me during my training. “Remember, it’s all in the breath. When you’re calm in the midst of a crisis, you can see the opening into the chaos. Once you’re inside, everything begins to make sense.” I breathe deep, drive on, and hope that my dad knew what he was talking about. I’m taking him at his word as I step into the center of this chaos.

  The two-lane highway known as State Route 55 works as a thoroughfare for Willow’s Ridge and connects the small town to the outlying limestone quarry. The highway splits the forest and enormous trees canopy the road. During the summer, there is nothing quite like driving along the rolling hills of State Route 55. If you’re lucky enough to have a sunroof or convertible, it’s difficult to see anything above your head other than a sea of green foliage.