Authors: Kylie Brant
Waking Evil 02 (6 page)
“Uh, no.” How did they go from discussing century-old legends and deaths to hair?
Leanne lifted one smoothly arched brow. “Lucky you. Like I say, stop in. I talked too much and didn’t get to hear a thing about you. We do manis and pedis, too.”
Ramsey must have looked as blank as she felt because the other woman went on. “Manicures and pedicures. We’re full service.”
Curling her fingers with their ragged nails into her palms, Ramsey decided it was time to take her leave. “I should get back to my . . . friends. It was nice meeting you, Leanne. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.” Although not, if she could help it, by making an appointment with the woman.
Rising, she glanced at Stryker, who was watching her with an amused glint in his eye. “Later,” she said shortly, her voice full of promise.
“Countin’ on it.” He picked up her glass, offered it to her. “Don’t forget your lemonade.”
Ramsey hesitated for a minute, then took it from him and walked back to her table, where the food had arrived.
“Sorry,” she said, slipping into her chair and unfolding a napkin across her lap. “That took longer than I expected.”
The two men were already eating. “How’d you meet Stryker already?” Powell cut off a piece of chicken and put it in his mouth, chewing with a resigned air of a man eating purely for fuel rather than enjoyment.
“He was at Ashton’s Pond when I got there with Rollins.” As she cut her steak, she gave them an abbreviated account of their first meeting.
“Don’t know what Rollins was thinking,” Matthews said when she was finished. “He knows better than to let a civilian tromp around in a crime scene.”
“We’re not going to find anythin’ else there,” Powell said flatly. “We’ve eliminated the area around the pond as the primary scene. Our best chance of solvin’ this thing is to discover where the victim was killed.”
“And to ID her,” Ramsey put in. Matthews had been right. The steak was better than average. She slathered her potato with butter until she caught Powell watching her and decided not to rub it in. “That woman Stryker introduced me to told me a little about the legend of the red mist. Have you heard about it?”
“Hard not to.” Powell speared rice into his mouth and then took a long drink of milk. “Every wit we interview goes on ’bout it. Just a bunch of superstitious nonsense.”
She didn’t disagree. “But what if someone is playing on that superstition with this homicide?” She was thinking out loud. “Get people this agitated, and it can cloud an investigation. Make it difficult for investigators to separate fact from fiction.”
“Right now we’ve got damn few facts,” Powell said grimly. He’d finished his meal and was eyeing her steak avariciously. “First thing in the mornin’ we’ll bring you up to date with what we do have and consider our next steps. Assign duties.”
And he was in charge of doing so. His message was clear. Ramsey didn’t mind. Eventually, though, she’d have a few ideas of her own for tracking down the identity of their Jane Doe.
She’d barely finished eating when Powell was shoving his chair back, reaching for his wallet. Ramsey got her purse and placed some bills on the table.
“I’m going to stay for a while,” Matthews surprised her by saying. “I’ll catch a ride later.”
Powell lifted a shoulder. “As long as you realize no matter what time you come draggin’ in, I’m getting you up at seven.”
The younger agent was already turned away, scanning the crowd. “I think I can handle it.”
Ramsey caught Stryker’s gaze on her before she turned away to follow the agent out of the tavern. The man was a bona fide pain in the ass. But tonight, at least, he’d at least been a somewhat useful one.
Chapter 3
They might not know the victim’s name, but it was evident that she’d died unhappily.
Ramsey held the autopsy report, with the crime scene photos arrayed on the table before her. Their Jane Doe hadn’t spent enough time in the water to bloat up the way a floater would have. Less than two hours, according to the medical examiner.
Flipping a page of the report, Ramsey continued reading. She still couldn’t believe their bad luck. They’d had teenage kids running all over those woods, and none so far admitted to having seen a car or stranger there that night. Given the timeline of when the kids were seen in town and how long the body had been in the water, they may have missed the killer by as little as forty-five minutes.
Assuming, of course, that the same person who killed the woman was the one who got rid of her body.
Ramsey lingered over the description of the Jane Doe. Five-six, one hundred thirty pounds. Between eighteen and twenty-five. Brown hair and eyes.
Settling back in her chair, she put her feet up on the supporting bar beneath the table and used the descriptors to work up a mental picture of the victim. Not as she was when her body was found, broken and violated. But of whom she may have been before she’d met her killer.
Ramsey would need that in her brain, a visual of the woman as she had been alive. Young. Vibrant. With a future that had been snatched from her. Already that familiar burn had lodged in her chest. The one that wouldn’t go away until justice had been delivered for the unknown victim.
The next page revealed the woman had had her appendix removed no more than three years ago. Two small tattoos adorned the body. The TBI agents had run the vic through the state and national crime databases. Neither her fingerprints nor the tattoo identifiers had hit, so the woman didn’t have a record.
Ramsey reached forward for a handful of pictures. The body had been found facedown in the pond. The small amount of water in the lungs indicated the organs had just begun to passively fill. She’d been dead before she’d been dumped there.
She lingered over the photos showing the bruises to the woman’s throat. Death by manual strangulation. A very personal way to kill someone. The report indicated violent vaginal and anal sexual intercourse prior to death. Bruising to the vulva and upper thighs. Anal fissures and perineal lacerations. The extent of the trauma suggested possible multiple partners. If any trace evidence had transferred from one of her attackers to the body, the time in the water had destroyed it.
And that, Ramsey thought grimly, might have been another reason to travel so far into the woods to dump the body. Water was a great decomposer of evidence. What the fish left would have been unrecognizable after a day or so.
But the killer hadn’t been given days.
She looked at her watch. It was nearing midnight. But it would be a while before she’d sleep, especially with the woods still looming large in her mind. Slumber could take an experience like that and magnify it to nightmare proportions. Linking past and present together so realistically that she’d wake with her heart hammering in her chest, her pulse sprinting, and the taste of raw panic choking her. Leaving her feeling despicably weak and vulnerable.
Ramsey didn’t do weak or vulnerable. Not anymore. Not in a very long time.
Determinedly, she turned another page of the report. She was used to coming in later on a case and needing to play catch-up until she was as well-versed in the details of the investigation as the primaries were. And she preferred to look at the notes with a fresh eye, before anyone had told her too much, skewing her perception and perhaps blinding her to a novel direction.
The photos drew her attention once more. Strangulation was sometimes a crime of passion. But there were no fingerprints left on the body, meaning either its short stay in the water had erased them or the killer had worn gloves. Which would point to premeditation.
Ramsey turned her focus to the next page in the medical examiner’s findings. She skipped over the data revealing the weight and mass of the victim’s internal organs and found the part that reported the contents of her stomach.
A small amount of water and an unknown substance that was identified only as a “plant derivative” had been digested shortly before death. Cocking her head, she considered just what that term might mean.
A food item would have been easy to test and identify, but a plant derivative? Ramsey was at a loss. What else would fall into that category? Leaves? Tree bark? Roots?
Puzzled, she leaned back in her seat, threading her pen through her fingers. There were always those who experimented with new ways to get a buzz. And herbalists abounded who concocted nonpharmaceutical answers to disease. Even drug companies were experimenting with different types of tree bark for various medicines.
Reaching for her notepad, Ramsey jotted down
stomach contents—plant derivative??
, underlining it twice. She mentally crossed her fingers that the ME had saved the unknown substance for further testing.
stomach contents—plant derivative??
, underlining it twice. She mentally crossed her fingers that the ME had saved the unknown substance for further testing.
Exhaustion was starting to gray the hem of her concentration. She’d already put in a long day. But she wanted to finish this report and mine it for leads she thought most relevant.
It would be interesting tomorrow morning to compare her conclusions with those of Powell and Matthews.
A vehicle sounded on the gravel on the drive out front. Ramsey didn’t look up until headlights flashed across the window. Then she rose, report still in her hand, and crossed to lift a corner of the shade. Even in the darkness, she recognized Matthews as one of the two figures getting out of a car and heading into a cabin two doors down.
Feeling like a voyeur, she dropped the shade and went back to her chair. It hadn’t taken the agent long to make friends tonight. She’d figure Powell to be on the other side of this room, which meant the younger man would be next to him. She wondered what the senior agent would think of his colleague’s extracurricular activity. She didn’t know him well enough to hazard a guess.
She continued reading the report until something in it made her sit straight up in her chair. Leaning forward, she grabbed the photos taken by the ME, flipping through them until she found the ones she was looking for.
The body had been found facedown in the water. One lower leg—foot to knee—had been exposed enough to catch the attention of the teenagers. And on the back of the ankle, the ME had found a substance he had been able to identify.
Bleach.
“I think identification of the victim should take precedence,” Ramsey stated firmly. “Once we know who she was, where she was from, we can narrow our search for her attacker.”
“Agreed, but we’ve got lots of different threads started on this investigation, and we need to follow up on all of them.” Powell was sipping from a glass of milk he must have picked up in the motel’s main office. “Startin’ with fully checkin’ out the witness accounts.”
“The sheriff told me the teenagers had been alibied for the night of the crime.”
“We haven’t talked to everyone who claims to have seen them that night. And a few we’ve tried to talk to haven’t been especially forthcomin’. We need to continue interviewin’ everyone who lives along that road closest to the woods. They might be able to identify a vehicle seen on it that night.”
“We could get a forensic artist to make a sketch of the victim,” Ramsey suggested. Matthews still had said nothing. He was seated at the table wolfing down his second doughnut with a cup of coffee. If he was feeling any effects from his late night, it didn’t show. “Send it to neighboring towns.”
“No one’s reported this woman missing.” The younger agent finally spoke in between bites. “It’s been all over the news, and none of the calls the sheriff’s office has fielded so far have matched the vic’s description.”
“All the more reason to get her face out there,” Ramsey pressed. “Maybe no one knows she’s missing. She could be a runaway. Homeless. Or someone who has been so isolated her loved ones don’t even know she’s gone.” Batterers regularly cut off their wives or girlfriends from their family and friends. Their Jane Doe could have died at the hands of a husband or boyfriend and not even be missed yet by those who cared about her.
“I’m not releasin’ her likeness to the press,” Powell said firmly. He was dressed in the same suit he’d worn yesterday, a nondescript dark color with another white shirt. Only the tie was different. “Jeffries would have my ass if I fed the media anythin’ else to keep their interest alive. My job is to handle them as quietly as possible.”
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