Saturday at the precinct was noticeably quieter than when Carla had previously visited. She guessed detectives took the weekend off as in any regular job, with just a core team keeping things ticking over. One of the detectives on duty was Amy Perez. She was dressed in a blue trouser suit with a cotton shirt that was slightly too short in the body which she kept pulling down. Without her partner, she was less hostile, although she didn’t look like she wanted to let go of the clutch of files she was holding.
‘Lieutenant says you want to look at some photos. Hope you’ve a strong stomach. Here you go: Madison Knowles, Jessica Sherwood and Stella King. Maybe you want to leave Ms Knowles to the last.’ She handed over three pink folders.
‘Pink files because they’re women?’ asked Carla.
‘Pink files for homicides. Male or female, you get a pink folder.’
Feeling foolish, Carla nodded. ‘Thank you. Is there anywhere I can get some coffee?’
‘There’s a machine on the first floor. You can sit at that table over there. I need your mobile.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘No photos are to leave this building and that includes any you take yourself. The boss asked me to remove your mobile.’
With a sigh, Carla switched off her phone and handed it to Perez, who nodded. ‘I’ll be back in exactly one hour. You’re welcome to take notes.’ Perez stalked off, leaving Carla to take the files to the small office set aside for her.
She began with Jessica Sherwood, the retired teacher killed in her living room while her dog roamed outside. Carla had been anxious about looking at the images and had slept badly. To steady herself for the morning ahead, she’d needed to take some painkillers with a decent cup of coffee brewed by Patricia. Jessica’s photos, however, had nothing in them to give Carla nightmares. Jessica died in her living room that she’d also used for her quilting work. Perhaps she’d liked to work in front of the open fire. She could well believe that police attending the scene thought Jessica had dropped down dead from a heart attack. A few weeks after Dan’s death, Carla had fainted after a week of erratic eating and not enough sleep. She had come to on the floor of her sitting room, staring at the stain in the ceiling caused by a water leak from the flat above. Jessica lay in a similar position and there was an absence of violence at the scene. If Jessica had struggled, there should be signs of a disturbance, but she simply looked as if she’d fallen to the ground. There were no signs of staging when it came to the body.
Carla’s gaze cast around the living room. It was neat as a pin with evidence of the woman’s quilt-making skills on show. There was a bottle of red wine on the table with a glass next to it, suggesting Jessica had drunk a small glass of wine while she’d sewed. That was a little unusual. People, in Carla’s experience, didn’t sew and drink red wine. Quilt making was a long job and the fabric needed to be kept as clean as possible. A spill of red wine would be difficult to remove and heart-breaking to a dedicated sewer.
In the overstuffed room, sewing tools were piled onto one table and various mismatched ornaments crowded the mantelpiece. The fireplace had once been the focus of ritual house protection, representing a gap, like the door and window frame, where spirits could enter the house. Carla squinted at the ornaments but found nothing to suggest there was anything but a jumble of heirlooms and cheap knick-knacks. On the cream carpet, a spool of thread lay where it had fallen, possibly from when the woman had dropped to the ground. It had untangled a little and the end lay in a gathered mess. Another unwelcome splash of red.
Carla leant back in her chair and considered what she’d seen. Pins and nails were often found in witch bottles. The idea had been that urine would lure an evil spirit into the bottle, where it would become entrapped on the point of the pin. Carla wondered if red wine might suit the same purpose. Wine representing urine, needles and pins instead of iron nails. God, she was probably clutching at straws but, still, the crime scene chilled her. The innocuous setting alongside the devilish crime suggested a warped mind and emotions allowed to run unfettered by notions of natural justice or kindness. And, for her, that was a link to Tiffany Stoker’s death scene. Something evil at play.
The file bearing the name of Stella King was the slimmest. The photos were time stamped and began with a wide-angled view of the scene. The car park lots were at angles to each other, creating a fishbone pattern. The weird whiteness of the images indicated the photos had been taken at night with spotlights on the asphalt. Stella King was lying in one of the bays on her side and Carla flicked to a close-up of the body, wincing when she saw the image of the girl’s face. Dallas had been sure that Stella had been killed using a scarf; perhaps using your bare hands ran the risk of leaving a finger or thumb print on the skin. This was another strangulation – a link possibly to Jessica Sherwood – but this body had been dumped in the open air and Carla thought the detectives were right to have assumed the body had been rolled out of a vehicle. There was a disjointedness to Stella’s repose. She was not lying where she had fallen but from where she had been thrown from the vehicle. Bastard.
Carla scanned the scene but saw no coins, needles or other objects that could be construed as witch bottle material. Carla rubbed her aching head. She had expected Stella to have been desecrated given the job she worked. Misogyny was usually articulated through acts of violence intended to shame and destroy, but here the strangling looked more like an execution. At least the girl’s death would have been swift and relatively painless, unlike that of the burnt woman. Shit, no wonder the detectives weren’t taking her seriously. The crimes were completely dissimilar.
Carla put down the file and went in search of Perez, who was making a show of typing fast as she stared at the screen.
‘Can I trouble you for a moment?’
Perez sighed and lifted her hands from the keyboard. ‘What is it?’
‘Are you able to give me a list of the items found on Stella King’s body?’
Perez shook her head. ‘Wasn’t given permission to hand that over.’
Carla looked at her watch. It wasn’t even ten a.m. ‘I can call the lieutenant if that will make things easier. Is it particularly sensitive information?’
‘No.’ Perez exhaled. She found the file quickly, far more readily than Carla had expected. ‘Got a pen?’
‘Um. Yes.’
‘OK. Around two hundred dollars in cash, lipstick, tissues, hand gel, condoms, a horseshoe charm.’
‘A charm?’
‘You know, one of those nickel and dime keepsakes you can pick up at a beachfront store.’
‘And it belonged to Stella?’
Perez rolled her eyes. ‘It was in her purse.’
Carla put a large circle around the item. ‘Is that it? Anything else that might be worth noting?’
Perez shrugged. ‘She was wearing shoes two sizes too small. She’d had to jam her feet into them.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Maybe she borrowed them from another girl. Liked the colour – they were glittery silver – and didn’t care they didn’t fit.’
Shoes again. Carla nodded her thanks and went back to her office, conscience of Perez’s eyes boring into her back. It struck her that while there were plenty of instances when fetishist killers removed mementoes from their victims, here was someone who was possibly adding items to the scene, although how she could prove the horseshoe charm didn’t belong to Stella would be difficult.
Carla steeled herself to open the file of Madison Knowles. She’d expected a sea of red – Viv had been at pains to emphasise the gore of the room in the sorority house. However, the first photo was of a typical student room, its walls painted a fern green and covered in art posters. There was a table against the window that Madison had used as both a desk and dressing table. College papers fought for space with make-up and hairspray. It was the model of countless student rooms around the country. It was the second photo that revealed it as a space of two halves. The bed was opposite the window and the body lying on it unrecognisable.
As she’d done with the burnt woman, Carla gave the cadaver a quick glance, reflecting that in all her years of site excavation, she’d never seen anything so terrible. People’s lives left behind traces and it was for her to fill in the gaps by studying the scant evidence she was able to unearth. Here forensics must have been overwhelmed by the amount of material they had to sift through. It reinforced her belief that she was no expert in modern death and any secrets to be yielded up by a body was Erin’s territory, not hers. Complete desecration of a human. Carla sat back and closed her eyes, trying to put herself in the shoes of a killer. This is what she’d expect from the killer of a sex worker. It felt like there was a moral aspect the murderer was trying to convey. But poor Madison was a student with her life in front of her and, given the killer had already tried the door of another student, possibly not even the original intended victim. Viv said she had fought back. Carla could envisage how that might incense a killer, but to this extent?
The room, however, was where she was looking for clues. The spatter, as Viv had warned, was up the headboard and onto the wall behind and to the right of the single bed. There was a pine bedside table, a simple two-drawer unit with a single lamp and a book. Nothing else. Madison’s rucksack was on a chair nearby and the contents had been photographed. Hairbrush, wallet, EpiPen, lipstick, a scarf. Try as hard as she might like, Carla could make no connection to witch bottles.
She picked up the files and took them over to the detective.
‘Had your fill?’ asked Perez, not taking her eyes from the screen.
‘How do you cope? I mean, attending a scene like that. I haven’t been able to get the woman from Silent Brook out of my head and now this. It must have been horrendous having to look down at the body of Madison Knowles.’
Perez stopped typing but continued to stare at the screen. ‘You disengage. You’d never do your job otherwise. By the time we got to Madison Knowles’s room, the help she needed from us wasn’t sympathy but our forensic skills in trying to find her killer. Letting our emotions get in the way won’t help us achieve that.’
‘I can understand that.’
Perez swivelled in her seat. ‘Find anything?’
Carla shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’
She thought she detected a glimmer of sympathy in the detective’s eyes.
‘Try me.’
‘It strikes me that there’s no obvious connection between the victims except that they’re all women.’
‘We have male homicides too occasionally.’
‘Any unsolved?’
‘Nope.’
‘OK, so we have four unsolved murder cases involving females over the last four years.’
‘Correct. But, as you say, different ages, economic status. Jessica Sherwood never left Jericho and was comfortably off, Stella King had been here a matter of days and lived hand to mouth. She had no savings whatsoever.’
‘I’m wondering if the women aren’t the focus at all.’
‘We’ve considered that. We brought in your colleague to help us when it was clear the killer had tried the room of another student before he hit on Madison’s.’
‘I know. Did she tell you anything?’
Perez shrugged. ‘Not to us. For what it’s worth, I think you’re right about location being important for Madison. I’m not so sure about the others. If there’s a link, we’ve not found it. The lieutenant said you thought witch bottles might be a pattern for Tiffany. We’ve a couple of satanists in Jericho, but they’re law abiding. One runs the local organic cafe. Viv got Baros to pay him a visit.’
‘How did that go?’
‘He’s written a letter to the Mayor complaining of police harassment.’
Carla winced. ‘Sounds like I’m in trouble.’
‘Don’t stress yourself. The main thing is he’s been eliminated as a suspect. The lieutenant said you wanted to visit Madison’s house.’
‘Is that OK? I’d like to have a look at the scene myself. I’m wondering if I can find a connection in the setting.’
Perez reached for the phone. ‘The killing was nearly two years ago. The room’s been cleaned and rented to one, possibly more, students. New locks would have been fitted. What’s the point?’
The point, thought Carla, is that I don’t have anything else to do on a rainy day in Jericho.
‘I’d just like to take a look at the site.’