“Two predators, one prey,” Nicole said, thinking aloud as they paced back to MacAulay and the dead girl. “If they didn’t know about each other, if they weren’t working together, then we have separate motives as well.” She gazed at the vic. MacAulay was wrapping tape around her wrists, securing her bagged hands. Her clothes were intact. Fitted jeans, a cami under the cashmere sweater. Nothing disturbed. “Our killer had an agenda.”
Lars nodded. “I think he missed his opportunity.”
“The girl caught on, or maybe they were interrupted and she ran.” From one of the more than a hundred homes that clustered around the lake. “That would explain the absence of her coat.”
“Not the first time roofie made an appearance at a party,” Lars agreed.
“But the prints, they never cross?”
“Never. For close to a hundred yards, they run parallel but are separated by thirty or forty yards.”
“But the soft soles, he’s on the vic from the beginning? Not the hiking boots?”
Lars nodded. “The hiking boot picks up the vic in the woods. He cut in from the lake road sooner. Could be they started out together and split up to corral our vic.”
“The third set of prints, the soft soles, what happens to him?”
“He stopped.” And Lars turned and pointed toward the crest of a slope that overlooked the lake. “He stood there, but it’s hard to tell for how long. Minutes is my guess. Long enough to watch the kill.” He turned back to Nicole. “He shifted his weight on his feet—the prints overlap. At one point, he took a single step forward.”
“Indecision,” she said.
“Maybe in the clutch, he wanted to help the vic.”
“Or the perp.”
Either way, a witness to murder. The thought put an irritating tic in her blood.
She turned and focused on MacAulay’s progress. Slow and methodical. But the man never made a mistake.
In a murder investigation, that was never enough.
“Make sure you cross-reference the snow with anatomy.” A tech would scoop the drift and preserve it in a cooler chest for slowmelt once it was brought back to the lab. If there were epithelials, hairs, fibers under the vic’s nails, there was a possibility some could be recovered in the snow.
“Of course,” MacAulay agreed, unruffled. The man didn’t know urgency. He had one frequency, but it was stable. It was predictable. It was even long-range. So what if his engine never kicked into high gear? MacAulay was reliable.
She turned back to Lars. His hands were at his sides, the evidence bag clutched in one.
“There a name on the prescription bottle?” she asked.
“Beatrice Esparza,” Lars confirmed. “Augmentin, five hundred milligrams, twice daily.”
Doc whistled through his teeth. “That’s a heavy dose. A kid her age and weight, I’d prescribe half that.”
“What for?” Nicole asked.
“Could be she had a bad case of bronchitis. Maybe walking pneumonia. Urinary tract infection, a stubborn skin infection. Those are the most common uses for the drug. But five hundred milligrams?” His frown deepened as he considered it. “No.”
Lars shook the bag, and they listened to the rattle of pills. “That’s not penicillin.”
“Can I take a look?” Doc asked.
Lars opened the baggie and removed the bottle. Gloved, he twisted open the cap and warned the doctor to look and not touch. MacAulay obliged.
“You’re right. That’s not Augmentin.”
“But is it Rohypnol?” Nicole pressed.
“That or cold tabs,” Lars returned. “You know where my money is.” He replaced the bottle and zipped the bag and held it up for Nicole to take a good look, though she didn’t need to. Lars was right. The pills and condom packet led them down an obvious path.
Date-rapers were smooth and deceptive. They were violent offenders who spun lies that looked like gold.
Lars peered over her shoulder, into the darkness beyond the halogen lamps.
“Two perps. We need to know if they worked together,” she said. “Right now it’s just best guess they didn’t.”
“We need motive for the soft-soled guy. He was after something.”
“It bothers me,” Nicole said. “The two perps. It makes this more than a date rape gone wrong.”
“Something else is at play,” Lars agreed.
“And the roofie,” Nicole said. “It has more than one use.” Of course it did. The drug wasn’t manufactured to facilitate sex crimes. Though illegal in the United States, it was widely used in Mexico and Europe to treat anxiety and insomnia. “It makes a victim agreeable. It wipes out memory. But sex isn’t always the prize.”
“The condom makes it the go-to.”
She agreed, but there were too many players on the board. And the UGG boot—more women wore those than men.
“We’re missing something.” Nicole said. “Find it.” She turned to MacAulay. “Bag the body. A thorough exam,” she reminded him. “Make sure you look for bruising around the thighs and hips, inside her mouth.”
“I know how to confirm rape,” he said, but his voice was tight, and when Nicole looked into his face she found what he never tried to hide: his humanity.
“But you don’t know how to think like a cop—or even an ME,” Nicole pointed out. Brutal, and she was sorry for it, but sorrier that it was necessary. “Someone killed this girl. It’s our job to speak for her now.”
“Agreed,” he said. “I want him caught as much as you do.”
Nicole held his gaze and took a breath. Then she nodded, because she knew his words were true. MacAulay cared. “Was she wearing underwear?”
Because sometimes, especially in cases of date rape, the victim’s clothing was restored after the crime was committed, and the underwear almost always forgotten.
He bent and peeled back the waistband of Beatrice Esparza’s jeans, exposing a strip of pink cotton.
“Sheriff?”
A deputy approached, wrapped head to toe in Gore-Tex and down. He held up a sealed evidence bag. The gloves. They were insulated, lined with fleece, and looked new.
“Maybe,” Doc said. He took the bag and flattened it between his hands. MacAulay was a big man with hands the size of oven mitts. By comparison, the gloves were ridiculously small. “The hands that fit these gloves could also fit the bruise markings on Beatrice’s neck.”
“Who are we looking for, MacAulay? A kid or an adult, small or medium?”
He looked beyond her, his eyes focused as he thought. “I’ll know better after I’ve measured the markings and completed some comparisons. But without the forensic backup?”
“For now,” she assured him.
“Aged fourteen to seventy. Small to medium stature. During strangulation, it’s the pads of the fingers that dig in, leave their mark.” He nodded toward the body. “These hands were thin but average in length. The killer was taller than the vic by maybe seven or eight inches. I can tell that by the angle of the bruises. What does all this mean? Small to average size for a man, taller for a woman.” He hesitated. “If it was a juvenile?” he posed. “Tall and thin. But this is all guesswork.”
“That’s good,” Lars said, and the surprise was evident in his tone. MacAulay wasn’t known for extrapolating, and they were rarely able to get him to manipulate facts for direction. Nicole chewed on it for a moment as she began to profile the perp.
“The impressions in the snow—are the castings finished?” she asked.
She loved impression analysis. One hundred percent factual. Castings were tangible evidence that the DA often lined up on a table in front of a jury, next to each the shoe that matched the print. It was a solid link between perpetrator and crime. It was like building a stone wall in an open field. Obvious. Small but unmistakable, even in satellite photos.
Lars nodded. “Until we hear from Arty, I’d say our killer is somewhere between a hundred fifteen and a hundred and fifty pounds. The other guy, the soft-soled boots, he weighs in between one twenty and one hundred, sixty-five pounds.”
Jordan, at eleven years old, weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. But he was small. Nicole wanted a probable age range. She was building a profile of their most likely suspect. Rarely was murder committed by a person under fourteen years of age.
“How much does the average fifteen-year-old boy weigh, Doc?”
MacAulay shrugged. “Current guidelines, about one hundred twenty-six pounds. That gives us a range of one nineteen to one hundred thirty-two pounds.”
He pulled up his hood and stepped closer to the body. He raised an arm and waved the attendants over. Nicole noticed that his limbs had stiffened and knew the cold wasn’t to blame for it. MacAulay took death personally, and it was even more offensive when it was murder. Talk of kids harming kids wasn’t just disturbing for the doctor. It was unnatural.
Nicole was stuck with a temperamental family doc for an ME, and at this point she doubted that she would change that.
“He’s a healer,” Lars said, and Nicole noticed that some of the past complaint was absent from his tone.
“Lucky for us.” Nicole watched MacAulay hunker down next to the body and slide his hands under her shoulders. The girl’s head settled into the cradle of his arms. He nodded his readiness, and the forensic tech lifted her feet. Together they tucked Beatrice Esparza into a body bag.