“YEAH, HORATIO.”
“You’re driving, Horatio?” Calleigh asked.
“I am. Heading back to the lab. We’ve identified the victim from this morning and notified his family.”
“I’m glad to hear it, and I won’t keep you,” she said. She was riding, with Ryan Wolfe behind the wheel, and she knew that talking on a cell phone distracted a driver just as much as a few drinks did. “Two things I wanted to tell you. One, the fibers Ryan and Eric found at Bicentennial Park are dyed hundred-percent cotton denim. The dye matches a proprietary color used in Wrangler jeans.”
“So there are only tens of thousands of pair sold worldwide every year,” Horatio said, grasping her point. She liked the fact that her boss rarely required much in the way of elucidation. “If not hundreds of thousands.”
“It’s safe to say that the fibers don’t help us much, unless we find someone with a pair of jeans we can try to compare. The other thing is that I wanted you to know that Ryan and I are rolling to a new crime scene.”
“Tell me more.”
“It’s a homicide,” she said. “Out on Leonard Highway.”
“That’s off the Tamiami Trail, right?”
“On the way out to the ’Glades, yes. Here’s the worst part, Horatio. The first patrol officer on the scene identified the victim.”
“And?”
“She’s Wendy Greenfield.”
“As in the wife of Sidney Greenfield?”
“The pro golfer, right.” You didn’t have to follow golf to recognize his name. She had known it right away, and she didn’t follow golf. But she knew the names of Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. During the past couple of years, Sidney Greenfield’s performance had demonstrated that he would soon be breaking into that exalted company. And he was a local, too, who had started out golfing on Miami’s public courses and graduated from Miami University.
“We’ll change course and see you there, Calleigh.”
She ended the call and put away her phone. “He and Eric are on their way over.”
“We’ll get there first,” Ryan said. “But with a high-profile victim like Wendy Greenfield, I’m glad the LT will be on hand to deal with the media.”
Calleigh had to agree. Ryan had experienced some rough times at the hands of the press—specifically, being used by WFOR-TV reporter Erica Sikes, of the local CBS affiliate, who he had also dated for a time—and had been instructed not to comment publicly on police matters. This case would have a much higher profile than the young gangbanger they had found in Bicentennial Park this morning, and she sure didn’t want to be the lab’s public face on it.
Ryan didn’t pay undue attention to speed limit signs, and they made good time. When they reached the Leonard Highway turnoff from the Tamiami Trail, Ryan made a left turn, taking them south. While the road had the name “highway” attached to it, in truth it was more of a byway with very little traffic. Tall trees and thick brush hemmed it in on both sides, masking farm fields beyond that. After a couple of miles, they spotted the flashing lights of the patrol cars and ambulance already on the scene, and Ryan pulled in behind them. The closest car to the scene, so probably the first responder, was a Highway Patrol Camaro, mostly black but with a white roof and trunk. Those were fast, Calleigh knew, and looked like sharks as they cruised the state’s roadways.
Ryan would no doubt prefer one of those to the lab’s H3.
“Ryan, how many speeding tickets have you paid since you got your license?” she asked. Needling him had proven to be an amusing pastime. Calleigh was a good Southern girl raised with three brothers in a traditional Southern lawyer’s home (so traditional that the old joke describing a Southern breakfast as a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a steak, and a hound dog—give the steak to the hound dog—unfortunately applied to her father, Kenwall Duquesne), so the streak of dark humor that provided defense against the stresses of the job came naturally to her. Emerging from beneath the veneer of good manners and her fierce intelligence, it often took people by surprise, even after they thought they knew her.
“All of them.” He took his kit from the backseat.
“Any more questions?”
“Not just now, thanks.” She got her own kit and joined him, Ryan walking—almost as fast as he had driven—toward the scene.
Inside the yellow tape perimeter, sitting on the narrow shoulder just off the road, was a white Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible. In the convertible, Calleigh could see platinum blond hair, even lighter than her own, on a still form occupying the passenger seat. That had to be Wendy Greenfield.
A Florida Highway Patrol officer she never had met kept an eye on the perimeter. He studied their badges as they approached, and she scanned the name tag on his muscular chest. Briscoe. “Thank you, Officer Briscoe.”
“Glad to see you guys,” Briscoe said, handing over the security log. A handful of officers and EMTs had already signed it. “The scene’s all yours.”
“Who was first on the scene?” Calleigh asked as she signed her name. She handed the log to Ryan. Everyone who entered the scene had to document their presence.
“My partner and I.”
“Was there a suspect at the scene?”
“It was just like you see it now. We were patrolling the road and saw her parked there. Thought maybe she’d had a mechanical problem. We pulled over behind her, approached the vehicle, and”—he paused, staring hard at the grassy shoulder of the road—“well, you’ll see what we found. I called in a 187, and we didn’t touch the car, just set up the perimeter. The EMTs took a look, but backed off when they saw her.”
“How did you identify the victim?” Ryan asked.
“I follow the pro tour,” Briscoe replied. “Wendy Greenfield is always at the eighteenth when Sidney finishes a round, and she’s a beautiful woman, so the cameras always kind of linger on her. Plus I’ve attended the PGA Ford Championship at Doral and seen her in person. I didn’t check her purse or anything, but I’m sure it’s her.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “The ME’s on the way, and we’ll go ahead and get started processing the scene.”
Calleigh and Ryan both set their kits down outside the tape and gloved up. Briscoe held the tape for them, and when they were ready they passed beneath it.
Ryan started by photographing the scene, getting wide shots that encompassed the car and the area around it. After capturing the overall scene, he began moving in for closer shots. While he did that, Calleigh took a sketchbook and pencil from her kit and made a quick sketch of the scene, showing the relative position of the car, the road, and the trees and brush beside it.
“I’ve got footprints and tire tracks,” Ryan said as he drew closer to the convertible. He took more photos of the tracks he had found. “The tire tracks are not from this car, and the prints aren’t from Wendy Greenfield. Definitely male, maybe size ten or eleven. They look like they head from the convertible to where the other car was waiting.”
“Easier to get away from here in another vehicle than on foot,” Calleigh observed. “We’re a long way from anything.”
Her curiosity burned to look inside the car, especially because of the way Briscoe had talked about it. She was a professional, though, and knew that taking things in the right order led to criminals being convicted.
After this overview, she would get a look at the dead body. Then they would work backward in even more orderly fashion, spiraling away from the car and inspecting every square inch of the ground in case the killer or killers had left evidence behind. They would make castings of the impressions the tires and shoes had made in the soft earth. They would view the area without the blinders of prejudice or initial opinions, and they would find whatever was there to be found.
After about twenty minutes of studying the scene, she and Ryan converged at the Mitsubishi.
The woman Briscoe had identified as Wendy Greenfield had, in fact, been a beautiful woman.
That beauty was marred somewhat now by the fact that her throat had been sliced open. Her head tilted back against the seat at an angle it couldn’t have in life. Her white blouse and pants had been drenched in blood, which had also soaked the windshield and dashboard. Almost as if she had known what would happen to her and wanted to remain color coordinated, she wore a crimson leather belt and matching pumps, and the convertible was white with a red interior.
“That’s definitely Wendy Greenfield,” Ryan said.
“You recognize her?”
“I catch the occasional golf game on TV.”
“Apparently she had an enemy,” Calleigh said.
“Or maybe a friend who turned into an enemy. This looks personal to me.” She bent forward, still not touching the car, for a closer look. “Wound is short and angled, dropping toward the right.”
“So her assailant wasn’t sitting behind her,” Ryan observed. “Which would have been more of a sweep, up on both ends.”
“The second smile. Not this time. I’m guessing that the killer was in the driver’s seat. No question that she was sitting right there when it happened.” She pointed to the blood drops on the inside of the windshield, which had impacted and made satellite spatters where smaller, secondary droplets had hit the glass after splashing from the bigger initial drops. The blood was still wet, trickling slowly down, streaking as it went. “Projection spatters,” she said. “From her arterial pulse.”
“Be hard to use those,” Ryan said, “because of the streaking and running.”
“Fortunately we don’t have to rely on them. We have the arterial spatter on the dash that’s easier to read. And the lower-velocity spatter on her clothing and seat, as her heart weakened. It’s all here, like an open book.” Even as Calleigh talked and studied the dash, she noticed something else.
“And look here,” she added, pointing to a spot on the dashboard where there wasn’t as much blood spatter as there was around it. The space was just to the left of where Wendy Greenfield sat.
“It’s hard to make out because there’s a little spatter, but there’s a void pattern here. The droplets of blood that did impact this area came after the first, heaviest gush.”
“Which means blood ended up on some other surface.”
“Probably the killer’s arm. Assuming he was right-handed, which I think we can based on the angle of the cut, it would have been an awkward reach for him to slice her throat from the driver’s seat. He would have had to turn and face her. She probably turned as well, toward him, which would have made his task a little easier. Maybe she thought he wanted a kiss. Then he cut her, with little or no warning, and the first spray hit the windshield, dashboard, and his arm. She fell back into the seat, and that’s when the blood sprayed the area in front of her, gradually slowing and soaking her clothing.”
Calleigh knew Ryan could figure out the same scenario by looking at the spatter patterns, but talking it through as she studied it helped her keep things straight in her own head. She might eventually have to explain her thought processes to a jury. If she made sense to herself from the start, it would be easier to make sense to them.
“If he was driving, then you’re right, chances are good that he knew her,” Ryan said. “And I don’t see any other signs of struggle.”
“No,” Calleigh said. “But there is one strange thing.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a woman’s purse in the driver’s-side foot well. Red leather, matching Wendy’s shoes and belt. It has to be hers, but if she wasn’t driving, why didn’t she have it on the passenger side with her?”
“That, Calleigh, is an excellent question.”
She walked around to the driver’s side of the car. Before touching anything, she put on two more pairs of latex gloves. This was going to be a bloody scene, and if she had to write anything down or answer a phone or just hope not to contaminate other parts of the car with blood she had already touched, she would need clean gloves. It would be easier and quicker to remove or cut away additional pairs rather than stop and switch.
Ryan did the same, she noticed, but if he held true to form he would avoid touching the DB if at all possible. His OCD didn’t keep him from doing his job—and he was good at his job—but he didn’t like getting down and dirty when he could avoid it.
Triple-gloved, she reached into the car (supporting herself with one hand on the edge of the door, the steel burning hot even through the triple layers of latex) and took out the purse. Kate Spade. Pricey, but Sidney Greenfield had finished in the money several times last year and could afford to buy nice things for his wife. As far as Calleigh knew, Wendy’s only job was being a PGA Tour wife.
She opened it and found a leather wallet inside. A Florida driver’s license confirmed what they already knew: the victim was Wendy Greenfield, who lived on Hibiscus Island. Also pricey. The wallet contained seven hundred dollars and change, and all her credit cards seemed to be there, judging by the way they fit into the leather grooves. “It doesn’t appear that she was robbed,” Calleigh said.
“Which points back to the idea that there was a personal element to the attack.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“The backseat is empty. Pop the trunk, Calleigh, and let’s see if there’s anything interesting in there.”
Calleigh, still standing by the driver’s door, reached in again and pulled the trunk release. The rear hatch opened and Ryan pushed it up. “More than interesting, I’d say.”
“What is it, Ryan?” Calleigh walked to the rear of the car and looked inside.
Ryan had found two shotguns, a Mossberg and an Ithaca, both 12-gauge. Tucked in with them were several boxes of buckshot shells. Ryan opened a plastic bag that one of the guns rested on. “Men’s clothes,” he said. “New. Size XL Hanes T-shirt, Levi’s jeans with a thirty-six-inch waist and thirty-four-inch inseam. No shoes, socks, or underwear.”
“You’re right, Ryan. This is more than just interesting. This looks like someone’s planning to go to war.”