Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
The autopsy photos were spread out across the table like a gruesome memory game.
Leanne was a visual person, which was both a blessing and a curse.
Seeing details up close would sometimes spark a new direction in her investigation.
The downside was that staring at death pictures for hours on end was guaranteed to give her insomnia.
Leanne closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.
She’d been sifting through paperwork for hours and still had more to go.
After a hectic morning, she’d slipped away from the station house and driven to the university to pay another visit to Jen Sayers.
She wanted more information about the cold cases.
Now Leanne was holed up in the reading room of the science library, where she was isolated from interruptions and better able to concentrate on the reports that she needed to analyze.
Buried somewhere in the thick stack of papers might be an overlooked clue that could provide a fresh lead. Leanne was determined to find it.
Downing her last sip of lukewarm coffee from the student center, she returned her attention to her primary case, focusing on the part of the Jane Doe autopsy report where Dr. Korbin described the victim’s injuries.
Right hand: fractured scaphoid, fractured trapezium. Fractured fifth proximal phalanx.
Leanne had consulted her phone to translate all the jargon. The victim had a broken wrist and broken pinkie, along with a torn fingernail, all on her right hand. That sounded like she’d put up a fight.
The torn fingernail was potentially explosive. DNA was the gold standard in terms of identifying a perpetrator. If the victim had scratched her attacker during a struggle, maybe his DNA had ended up under her fingernail, which would be analyzed as part of the rape kit.
When the rape kit got analyzed, which could take months. It might not get looked at until investigators zeroed in on a suspect and attempted to link him to the crime.
Investigators. Right.
Leanne was pretty much flying solo at this point. And despite her best efforts, she still hadn’t been able to identify the victim yet. Zeroing in on a suspect seemed like a distant fantasy.
The sticky scrap of duct tape found near the body could be a source of DNA, too, but getting that tested presented a whole different challenge.
Because the tape had been found on the bushes near the body, and not on the body itself, it was considered part of the crime scene, and not something the ME handled.
Leanne would have to get McBride’s approval to send it in separately, and he’d made it clear he wasn’t keen to waste valuable resources on a Jane Doe.
Leanne flipped to the ME’s diagram—a simple line drawing surrounded by notes that had probably been dictated by Korbin and jotted down by his assistant during the exam. Since Leanne had missed the autopsy—thanks again, Chief—she could only speculate as to how it all played out.
Fractured hyoid. The words were scribbled in the margin, with a line pointing to the victim’s neck.
Leanne was familiar with the injury, which occurred in many strangulation deaths.
Fractured right parietal was written beside the skull.
ZMC fracture.
Fractured mandible.
Korbin had said these injuries happened postmortem. So, the perpetrator had choked this woman to death and then beaten her. What kind of person strangles the life out of someone and then lets loose on the corpse? That was some kind of rage. Some kind of…next-level crazy, really.
Leanne slid the autopsy report aside and pulled her legal pad closer.
Like her dad, she had a fondness for notepads, and writing down her thoughts helped her to clarify them.
She reread her notes and then examined the map she’d printed out of the tri-county area, complete with X’s showing where bodies had been recovered.
The X’s were scattered up and down the highway between Fort Stockton and Marfa.
Four sets of remains, all recovered along the same stretch of highway, as Jen had said. And that wasn’t even counting the stray jawbone or the femur.
It wasn’t only the location that was interesting. Leanne shifted focus to the stack of reports Jen had submitted to various law enforcement agencies in the region.
The similarities were jarring.
All of the intact skeletal remains showed injuries remarkably similar to Leanne’s current homicide.
Fractured skulls. Fractured wrists. Broken fingers.
Two victims had a broken hyoid bone, indicating they’d been strangled.
Two sets of remains included duct tape. In one case a strip was wrapped around the victim’s head.
In another case, a strip was tangled in her hair.
Leanne flipped a page and skimmed through her detailed notes. Beating, strangulation, duct tape. An MO was starting to emerge, and it was hideous.
“You’re here late.”
She glanced up to see Jen in the doorway. The white lab coat was gone now, and she had a set of keys in her hand.
Leanne checked her phone. It was after five, and she’d been in here almost four hours.
“Damn, I lost track of time,” Leanne said.
“You’re in the zone.” Jen looked at the photographs lined up on the table, and her expression turned worried. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just…a lot.”
“I know.” She gave a sympathetic smile. “Don’t stay too long. It helps to get a break.”
After she was gone, Leanne checked the time again and decided on a deadline. One more hour, and then she was calling it a day. She’d been so absorbed with this homicide, she’d started to neglect the rest of her workload, and it wouldn’t be long before McBride took notice.
She slid aside the legal pad and shuffled through the stack of reports from Jen until she found the one about the jawbone. This report was the shortest because the lone mandible had yielded little information.
Leanne scanned the summary, focusing on the bone’s location in western Chisos County near the county line.
Like one of the other sets of remains, the jawbone had been discovered by a hunter.
Unfortunately, instead of leaving the bone where he found it, he’d collected it and taken it to the sheriff’s office himself.
The original police report was attached, and Leanne thumbed through it.
There wasn’t much there beyond the hunter’s account of finding the bone when he’d pulled off the highway to relieve himself and him saying he was pretty sure the bone wasn’t human, but that he’d decided to turn it over to the sheriff’s office “just to be sure.” The police report was dated the day after the finding, which further compromised the chain of custody.
Leanne figured the hunter had been drinking leading up to his discovery and didn’t want to talk to police until he’d had a chance to sober up.
The one bit of good news was that the report included GPS coordinates of the bone’s location.
Leanne entered the coordinates into her phone, and a pin appeared on her mapping app.
Her pulse quickened. She zoomed in on the pin. The jawbone was found on the north side of Long Canyon Road, less than a mile away from the juncture of Long Canyon Road and Highway 67.
The location fit.
Leanne stared at the map, and the silence of the reading room closed in on her. What had been a shadowy feeling for the last few days was now as bright and clear as the West Texas sky.
Jane Doe was part of a pattern.
She was part of a string of murders that no one had solved, or even tried to, really. And why hadn’t they? Leanne had a creeping suspicion it was because no one cared.
Since the moment she had pulled up to that crime scene and spotted Will Akers looking pale and shaken, Leanne had been dogged by a feeling of dread.
From an investigative standpoint, everything about this case was terrible.
They were dealing with an outdoor scene that was exposed to the elements.
The victim had no ID on her. Her description didn’t match any missing person report Leanne had been able to dig up, so five days into the investigation, the victim was still anonymous.
Given those factors, the probability of solving this case was low.
Barring a surprise lead, such as an eyewitness coming forward, the Jane Doe murder was exactly the sort of crime that was likely to slip through the cracks and remain forever unsolved.
Leanne wasn’t naive; she knew this. And she could admit—if only to herself—that part of her longed to drop the case like a hot potato.
But another part of her was furious. This was her jurisdiction, her home. How dare someone commit murder here and think they could get away with it?
The question answered itself. Someone dared to do it because they had done it before. They had gotten away with it for years. Who was stopping them from doing it again?
Outrage festered inside her as she stared down at the map.
Now that the pattern had emerged, it was like one of those Magic Eye pictures.
She couldn’t unsee it. These crimes were connected, and they were dealing with a repeat offender who was getting bolder and bolder as he committed crimes with impunity. He had to be stopped.
As she studied the map, something inside her shifted. Regardless of the odds, or the chief’s resistance to approving the resources she needed, or the jurisdictional issues she was up against, Leanne was all in. These were her cases to solve, and there was no going back now.
She read the report again, looking for any more details that might help her, but that was it. Maybe she could track down this hunter and interview him. Or talk to the deputy who’d taken the report. She scanned the page for names and found one she recognized right there at the bottom.
“No freaking way.”