Test took photos. Break this case, she thought, and the promotion to senior detective is yours. She stifled the thought. Chastised her disrespect toward the victim for entertaining the notion, natural as it might be. Murder was not a career move.
Test took photos of the knot where the rope was tied to the tree. Forensics would determine how common, or rare, the rope was. And its knot. It appeared to be a rope like any found in a million hardware stores across America. What was not common was the sheathed metal cord squeezed around the girl’s neck. It had a latch of some sort, a swivel. It fed through its own loop.
With each raindrop, evidence eroded, the tracks now mere ghostly impressions in the leaves.
Test walked over to address the boy and his father, the son’s back pressed against his father’s hip as the father wrapped his arms around him.
“How you doing?” Test looked the boy in the eye.
“I want to go home,” the boy said.
“I understand. What did you see here the first time?” Test asked the father.
“What you saw in the photo. The body, on the ground.”
“You didn’t touch it?”
“No. I thought she was dead.”
“Why?”
“The way she was. And she didn’t answer when we spoke to her.”
“Why’d you take a picture of her?”
“So you’d believe us, not think we were crackpots.”
“And you saw no one else?”
“No.”
“How much snow has melted since you were here?”
“A lot.”
“Did you notice anything about the tracks around her, that there were another person’s tracks besides her own?”
“Not really.”
“Not really?”
“We were in shock. And I tried to keep him”—he nodded at his son—“from getting closer than we were when we spotted her.” He gazed at the hanged girl.
“You saw nothing? Heard nothing?” Test said.
“No.”
Test squatted before the boy. “Did you see anyone or anything weird, besides the girl, I mean?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Try to keep warm. I’ll get hold of dispatch and see if I can get the state police to bring food and something warm to drink. But you need to stay put to speak to them.”
Test walked to Jorgensen.
“Why hang a dead girl?” Test said.
“Maybe she wasn’t dead.”
“If she’d been alive, there’d be evidence of a struggle where he dragged her.”
“She might have been unconscious, or otherwise incapacitated,” Jorgensen said. “I’ll find out either way during the autopsy.”
“His plan was to hang her. Dead or alive. He was interrupted but came back to hang her. Why?”
“As a message. To study his work? Ritual. I don’t know. I’m not insane.”
“If he’d wanted her to be a message, he’d have left her someplace visible, not dragged her into the woods. That’s hard work done to seek privacy. And he didn’t just happen to have a rope on him, or whatever the hell that thing is around her neck. He didn’t get the idea on the fly to”—she was going to say “string her up” but the words were callous—“to do that. His tracks have all but melted, but by the impression, he stood here a long time pondering her. He saw the boy and the father, ran up there.” Test pointed up at the knoll. “Watched them.” A thought struck her.
“What?” Jorgensen said.
“If the perp thinks they saw him”—she glanced at the boy and the father—“they could be in danger.”
“If he thought that, he’d have done something then.”
“Not if he saw the father’s rifle and he wasn’t armed.”
“Why risk getting caught to come back to hang her?”
“Arrogance,” she said. “Foolishness. Ritual. Not to mention simple meanness.”