Chapter 3
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“Can you go over it for us again?”
Drake Banks knows how to turn on the gentle charm. He knows how to work with a witness, and he sure as fuck knows how to smile for the wife-half of a hiking pairing, especially since the husband-half still has a chunk of last night’s chicken stuck in his short beard.
“I know this is overwhelming,” he croons, standing by the back end of an open ambulance and shielding a shaky Emmaleigh Rhodes from the harsh glare of the sun. “I know you already talked to the officers, but if you could just tell us one more time for the record, it sure would help us out.”
“I-I don’t know what else to tell you.” Her cheeks are green, her eyes are glassy, and the stench of a dead woman already sits pungent in the air, so it’s not like I can even blame her.
“Ed and I come this way every other day, but we missed yesterday, so today is…” She shakes her head.
“If we followed our routine exactly, we wouldn’t even be here today. ”
“I think this change in routine was serendipitous,” Banks murmurs.
The sly prick. “I understand this is hard for you, Emmaleigh, but if you hadn’t come until tomorrow, she might’ve stayed out here all alone for an entire extra day.
It’s not fair you’re the one who found her, since this’ll stick with you for the rest of your life.
But for her sake,” he doesn’t say her name, and he doesn’t point twenty feet behind us to where Aubree and Minka are already working, “For that girl, I’m glad she was found today and not tomorrow.
So, you were walking from which direction? ”
Breathing noisily through her mouth, Emmaleigh pokes a thumb to her left. “That way.”
“Good, thank you,” Drake makes a note in his notebook. I make a note in mine. Fucked if I’ll rely on his documentation. “So you walked in from the west and… what?”
“W-we saw the taillights. I thought the car was on, because I thought the lights were on. But it was the sun.” Gulping, she dazedly studies her hands.
“The sun was hitting them exactly right to make my brain think that. Sometimes people park in these small clearings because they wanna hike, too, so we didn’t even think much of it.
We would’ve kept walking, but then I heard the…
” Her cheeks glisten with sickly sweat. “I heard the flies. It was like there was a whole swarm of bees or something nearby.”
“So you decided to look a little closer?” I ask.
“Yeah, I just…” She places her hand on her stomach.
“I smelled it almost as soon as my brain finished processing, from ‘the taillights are on’, to ‘are we about to be attacked by a swarm of bees?’, to ‘that smells so bad.’ Ed said we should just keep walking, but I…” She exhales a noisy breath.
“I looked before I even really thought it through. That’s when I saw all the blood. And then I saw her.”
“Did you touch her?” Drake questions. “Even by accident? Even just a little bit?”
“No, I—”
“You won’t get in trouble if you did. We just need to know, so we can account for that contact throughout our investigation.”
Still, she shakes her head. “We didn’t touch her. We got about…” She tries to show us by holding her palms apart. “We were about four or five feet from the car. That’s as close as we got. Then I screamed, and Ed…” She gulps.
Ed became a human vomit fountain.
“The police officer touched her,” she adds, tilting her chin toward a set of uniforms standing guard by the road.
“They asked us if we touched her, and when we said no, one of them went over to her and…” She presses two fingers to her neck.
“Here. To see if she was alive, maybe. Do you think…” She looks desperately from Drake to me.
“Is it possible she was alive earlier, but because I didn’t check and I didn’t help—”
“No.” Drake lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think you could’ve helped her today. Not the way you mean. But you helped her by calling the police, and by staying here with her until we arrived.”
“Detective Malone?” Minka’s soft voice draws my attention. Her professional detachment penetrates my senses second. “Do you have a moment?”
“Yeah.” I bring my eyes back to Emmaleigh and offer a small smile. “We really appreciate everything you’ve done today, Ms. Rhodes. We’ll need you to stay in contact for a little while yet, but you can lie down in the back of this ambulance for a while if you like. Try to get your bearings.”
She doesn’t respond verbally. Just a shaky jerk of her head and her eyes rolling high. Then she flops onto her back and lies on the steel floor instead of the perfectly good stretcher just six inches to her right.
Turning on my heels, I leave Banks behind and cross the dry, dusty clearing where cars have been parking consistently enough over the last few decades that none of the natural shrubbery grows here anymore.
I duck under bright yellow police tape and switch from breathing through my nose to breathing through my mouth.
“Recorder’s on, Detective.” Minka peels a pair of white gloves off and drops them into a plastic baggie, while behind her, Aubree leans obsessively close to Sylvia Ryan’s car, since Josey Ryan lies in a bundled heap on the passenger side.
“Josephine Ryan is an eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate set to attend Copeland U in the fall.” Minka seals the small bag and sets it on top of a tarp already piled with evidence that’ll make its way back to the lab.
“I can confirm this is a homicide, detectives.”
Detectives?
I glance over my shoulder and find Banks a mere foot to my right.
“Already?” he questions. “Without even taking her out of the car?”
“We’ll get her out soon, but it’s clear she died from rapid exsanguination due to a laceration from here,” she points toward her own throat, all the way near the underside of her right ear, “to here.” She stops her finger an inch below her left ear.
“Carotid arteries were severed in one fast swipe.”
“So she bled out?” he presses. “Quickly.”
“No. Death in these cases is not from total blood loss, but from the physiological consequences of a massive, sudden drop in pressure. Severe hemorrhagic shock means her brain was deprived of necessary oxygen. It’s likely she lost consciousness within seconds.
Twenty to thirty, at the higher end. Come on.
” She turns toward the car and signals for us to follow.
“Vic was sitting in the driver’s seat, windows down, when her attacker approached her from the outside.
I think your perp is left-handed, and that they approached the car from behind.
I doubt she experienced more than a second or two of fear before it was all over.
Ironically, a complete severance, as opposed to an incomplete laceration or puncture wound, could’ve resulted in what we call vasospasm, which is where the artery retracts into the surrounding tissue and slows bleeding.
” She points to the steering wheel, sticky with thick blood.
“It appears Josey’s hands were on the wheel at the moment of severance, falling away when she became unconscious.
Inconsistent spray patterns prove this is where she began. ”
“But she’s curled in the passenger seat now,” Drake rumbles. “Which tells us… what?”
“That this is our secondary scene, not our death scene. Perp sliced her open, waited for her to die, unsnapped her seatbelt, and shoved her across to the passenger seat, then they climbed in and drove her out here.”
“Means they sat in Josey’s blood,” I grit out. “Not just a few stray drops, Chief. They sat in an entire puddle. Are there prints on the steering wheel?”
“You’ll need further testing for an official determination, but no.” She meets my eyes, bringing her hand up and shielding herself from the sun. “I see no obvious prints.”
“Gloves?”
She nods. Silent, sharp, to the point.
“Makes this premeditated,” Drake inserts. “Not just a crime of opportunity where a killer thought taking a swipe could be fun. They targeted her specifically.”
“I concur. When you speak to her loved ones and find out where she was meant to be at TOD, you might find your primary death scene.”
“Have you determined TOD?”
“Yes. Although outside temperatures, an overnight stay, and insect infestation make determining the time of death more difficult, I estimate she died between seven and nine o’clock last night. I’m leaning closer to seven.”
Frowning, Drake comes closer, his shoulder stopping in line with mine.
“If our perp hunted her down, slit her throat, pushed her into the passenger seat, and drove her out here to…” He trails off for a beat.
“Delay discovery, probably, that implies our primary scene is somewhere with much more foot or vehicular traffic. So, how’d they get back to town?
” He drops his gaze to the ground. “If someone picked them up, then we have co-conspirators. If they caught a cab, those records are easy enough to grab, and our killer’s blood-soaked clothes would’ve made them conspicuous as hell. ”
“Public buses don’t come this far out,” I add. “And I see no obvious skid marks leading away from here. Even if they walked back to town, they’d have left a trail of blood the whole way.”
“Unless they came prepared,” Drake counters.
“Spare clothes, and a garbage bag for a messy set. Officer Clay?” He twists on his heels and brings both Clay and Fletch around.
As they approach, he tips his chin toward the uniforms who first arrived on scene.
“We’re gonna need the road from here to town scoured.
Every single inch. We’re looking for the things our killer might’ve discarded: clothes, a knife, gloves, probably.
Shoes, maybe. If they were as organized as they seem, they might’ve already had a hidey hole set up. ”