A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  Mia sighed, frustrated. “It’s just, I don’t know, a feeling I get when I look at the evidence. Like the crimes feel the same, you know? The same kind of impulse behind them or something.”

  Ric just stared at her.

  “Don’t you ever follow your instincts?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “That’s all I’m asking you to do here.”

  Hell, what could it hurt? If nothing else, it would keep his best contact at the Delphi Center in his corner. “All right, I’ll check into it,” he told her.

  She looked relieved, as if he’d lifted a weight off her shoulders.

  “Thank you.” She stood and collected her purse. “You have something to write on? I’ll tell you the case number.”

  “You’ve got it in your head? From six years ago?”

  “I told you, it made an impression on me.”

  Ric pulled out the notebook he kept in his jacket pocket and jotted down the number she recited. Six years ago. As cold cases went, this one was in deep freeze.

  “You need to compartmentalize,” he said, tucking the notebook away. “Trust me, you let yourself get emotional about this stuff, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “I compartmentalize fine,” she said defensively. “And I’m not emotional, I’m just sharing a potential lead.” She glanced at the door, and he knew she wanted to escape before he gave her any more advice.

  “Lemme walk you out.” Ric steered her back through the bar and out to the parking lot, where he spotted her subcompact pulled up beside his pickup. The white Aveo could have fit into his truck bed.

  “They couldn’t rent you a real car?”

  She opened the driver’s-side door and slid in. “It’s from their Green Collection.” She shot a disapproving look at his F-250. “Gets good gas mileage.”

  “Cheapest one they had, huh?”

  “That, too.”

  “Your Jeep’s been on the hot list for three days now. Chances aren’t good we’re going to recover it. You should go ahead and talk to your insurance company.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Ric scanned the parking lot. There was a guy sitting in his SUV talking on the phone, but Ric saw the SMPD sticker on the back of his car and dismissed him as a threat.

  His gaze settled again on Mia and the turtleneck sweater that covered everything up to her chin. He had the sudden urge to warm his hands under it.

  “Want me to follow you home?” he asked.

  “That’s not necessary. I’m armed and dangerous.”

  “Seriously? You’re packing?”

  She’d told him once that she hated guns, which must still be true, because she reached under her seat and pulled out a can of Mace that could fell a grizzly bear.

  Ric whistled. “Damn, you don’t fool around.” He’d do a drive-by anyway, same as he’d done every night since her attack. He wasn’t sure when her safety had become his personal responsibility, but he intended to keep an eye on her until they figured out who was behind Thursday’s shooting.

  He leaned an arm on the roof of her car and gazed down at her and suddenly wanted nothing more than to follow her home and get her out of that sweater.

  “Call me if you need anything,” he said.

  She started the car and smiled ruefully, as if she’d read his thoughts. “How about I call you when I get those DNA results back? And guess what—you don’t even have to buy me coffee this time.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Mia navigated her way through the scrub brush, keeping a sharp eye out for body parts. Cadaver sites were supposed to be marked off with caution tape, but coyotes and other scavengers had been known to ignore the signs.

  She found Kelsey Quinn on her knees beside a dead pig. Mia counted herself lucky to catch her working on animal remains instead of human. Mia pulled a pink bandanna out of her lab-coat pocket and held it over her mouth and nose, pretty sure she was the only participant in the cancer walkathon to be using the souvenir for this particular purpose.

  “That’s a big pig. What is it, a hundred pounds?”

  Kelsey glanced up from the carcass. “One-twenty.” With a gloved hand, she lifted the animal’s foreleg and picked up something from beneath it with a pair of tweezers.

  “Fly cases?”

  Kelsey dropped the item into a glass jar, then removed the baseball cap she wore over her long auburn hair and wiped her brow with her forearm. “It’s for my graduate seminar this afternoon. Postmortem interval.” She replaced the cap on her head and gave Mia an up-and-down look. “Are panty hose making a comeback? Think I missed the memo.”

  Mia’s legs felt like icicles despite the hosiery. She typically wore pants to work, but today was an exception. “I’ve got to be in court this afternoon.”

  “Bummer.” Kelsey screwed the lid onto the jar. Evidently satisfied with her collection of specimens, she stood up. She looked Mia over, and her expression softened. “I heard about Thursday. How are you doing?”

  “Six stitches.” Mia shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.” Mia looked out at the wintry landscape. She could have told Kelsey about the fear, the jumpiness. The inability to sleep. But she didn’t want to admit to anyone, maybe not even herself, how anxious she felt doing the most mundane activities now— walking down the grocery aisle, passing strangers in parking lots, taking a shower. Her irrational anxiety wasn’t something she wanted to share with people from work.

  Kelsey tucked the jar into a tote bag along with her tweezers, and they set off toward the building in silence. The Delphi Center occupied more than one hundred acres of rugged Texas Hill Country, a beautiful setting if you forgot the science projects littered about. Mia found them hard to forget, which was why she rarely ventured out onto the grounds.

  “What brings you out here? I know it’s not the fresh air.”

  “Dr. Heinz sent me,” Mia said. “He’s been examining some duct tape for me in connection with a murder case. He said you sent him something similar a while back that was recovered up near Lake Buchanan.”

  “How far back?”

  “Almost two years. I have the case number. Detective’s name was Sandinsky.”

  They passed a picnic table that looked desolate beneath a barren pecan tree. Not a lot of people opting to lunch outside in this weather.

  “Lake Buchanan,” Kelsey repeated. “Some kids found her near the lake. Spring, I think it was.”

  “March.” They hiked up the back steps to the building, and Mia swiped her card. “Heinz said he didn’t think we ever got an ID.”

  “We didn’t.” Kelsey stepped inside and unwound a purple chenille scarf from her neck as she wiped her boots on the mat. “Remains were fully skeletonized. Disarticulated. Scattered over a quarter-mile area.”

  “You were part of the recovery team?”

  “I was.” They headed down a gently sloping corridor to the Bones Unit. Kelsey pressed her palm against a panel. The sliding doors parted, and they entered a section of the building where the temperature hovered around sixty degrees.

  “We found almost everything,” Kelsey continued. “Only two phalanges missing, if I remember right.”

  Kelsey had an amazing memory. Mia’s was pretty good, but she made notes all the time. Kelsey simply absorbed things.

  She stopped at a cubicle in the osteology section and deposited the jar. “She should still be here. You have time to take a look?”

  “Sure.”

  Kelsey led her past the X-ray suite and into a spacious examining room with stainless-steel tables on either end of it. When they reached a storage area, Kelsey pressed her palm to a panel, and the door slid open.

  “Most morgues are short on square footage,” Kelsey said, “but we’re lucky here. They modeled this room after the Smithsonian. Oodles of drawer space.”

  They stepped into a narrow room lined on both sides with shallow drawers, each labeled with a number. T
he stacks reached well over Mia’s head.

  “Do you need the case number?” Mia asked, but Kelsey was already making her way to the far end of the long room. She stopped in front of a waist-high drawer and checked the label before pulling it out.

  “This is another way we’re lucky. So many places to store bones in plastic tubs or cardboard boxes. This way, we can keep them arranged properly.”

  Mia stared down at the bones of a woman who had been bound with duct tape, then killed and left to rot in some wilderness.

  Kelsey sighed. “I remember her.” She walked over to a nearby cart and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box. She handed a pair to Mia.

  Mia studied the skeleton as she pulled on the gloves. “Her leg was broken?”

  “Actually, no. That was me. I took a wedge out of the femoral shaft to get a DNA sample. One of your colleagues tested it. We entered her in the database, but as far as I know, we never got a hit.”

  “And you’re sure it’s a woman?”

  Kelsey pointed to the pelvis. “The pelvic aperture is wide and round in females, like this, but narrow for males. And it looks as though she never gave birth. Estimated age early to mid-twenties based on the partially fused epiphyseal plates—those are the growth plates near the ends of the long bones.”

  So young. Mia gazed down at the bones and felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Her DNA profile wasn’t in the Missing Persons Index, which meant her family hadn’t submitted a sample. Maybe she didn’t have a family. Or maybe she did, but they didn’t care. The woman might be a runaway. An illegal immigrant. A homeless person who’d lost touch with her life.

  Mia gazed down the endless row of drawers. “What a terrible place to end up.”

  “Yep.”

  She returned her attention to the bones, which were arranged as if the ligaments were still there to link everything.

  Kelsey picked up the skull and pointed to a depressed fracture. “Blunt-force trauma. It’s hard to say for sure, but based on the size, I’m guessing she was hit with a heavy tool, maybe a wrench or something similar.”

  Mia shuddered. “Is that why you remember her?”

  Kelsey pulled a loupe from her pocket and handed it to Mia. “Actually, what stood out to me at the time were the knife marks.” She pointed to the rib cage. “Twelve marks, all made with a serrated blade.”

  Mia peered down at the ribs and the gouges Kelsey pointed out with her gloved finger.

  “Under microscopic examination, you see the striations,” Kelsey said. “It’s a distinctive pattern. I confirmed it with our tool-mark examiner upstairs. We concluded it was most likely a steak knife. Twelve of the wounds were deep enough to penetrate bone, but there could have been more that only penetrated the soft tissue.”

  Mia handed back the loupe. Their gazes met across the bones, and Mia felt that kinship she sometimes had with others who worked at the Delphi Center.

  “Someone’s reopening this case, aren’t they?”

  “I’m hoping,” Mia said. “There’s a similar case out of San Marcos.”

  “Similar how?”

  “Duct tape, blunt-force trauma, piquerism.”

  Kelsey shook her head.

  “Good news is, this latest victim was recovered not too long after death,” Mia said. It always amazed her what passed for good news in her profession.

  “Semen?”

  “No, but we’ve got her clothes, her shoes. The attack was very violent. Looks like she fought hard. We’ve got an abundance of blood, and I’d be very surprised if the perpetrator managed to get away without leaving a DNA sample.”

  “Good.” Kelsey snapped off her gloves. “I hope you nail him with it.”

  Ric watched the white roller skate of a car coast into the driveway. Mia climbed out and clutched the strap of her computer bag to her chest while the wind whipped her coat around her bare legs. He got out of his truck as she picked her way over the sidewalk in three-inch heels.

  “Careful, it’s slick tonight.”

  She whirled around, clearly surprised to see him. Her cheeks were tinged pink from the cold.

  “Not the best weather for stilettos.”

  “These aren’t stilettos. And since when are you a fashion consultant?” She looked him up and down, taking in his jeans and T-shirt, which had been through the wash about five hundred times each. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and stopped in front of her.

  “You look hungry.”

  Her eyebrows tipped up. Whatever she’d been expecting him to say, that hadn’t been it.

  “Ever been to Klein’s?” he asked.

  “The grease pit just around the corner?”

  “Best barbecue in three counties.”

  She glanced at her house, which was dark except for the porch light. “I’m supposed to work tonight.”

  “You work too much.”

  “Says someone who spent his weekend at the cop shop.” The second the words were out, she looked as if she wanted them back. How had she known where he spent his weekend? She must have called the station looking for him and chatted up the receptionist. The idea of her checking up on him probably should have bugged him, but instead it made him feel good.

  Another glance at the door. “I need to drop off my computer.”

  Ric tugged the bag off her shoulder and hiked up the steps. “What’s in this thing? Bricks?”

  “My laptop. And a few reference books. And about six weeks’ worth of reports I need to finish.”

  He watched her disable the alarm. Then he stowed the bag in the hallway beside a cardboard dish box. The smell of paint thinner hit him, and he noticed the cans stacked beside the bathroom.

  “Doing some redecorating?”

  “Just in the bathroom,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I thought I might as well. Do I have time to change?”

  “Not if we want to get a table,” Ric said. He liked her outfit, especially the shoes. “They get crowded by eight.”

  She locked up again, and they headed down the sidewalk with a chilly wind gusting around them. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat and inched closer.

  “You going tomorrow?” She was talking about the funeral.

  “Yeah, you?”

  “I was planning to, but it looks like I’m going to be tied up in court all morning.”

  “Which case?” he asked.

  “Miguel Sanchez.”

  “The gas-station shooting,” Ric said. “SMPD worked that case. I heard it’s a slam dunk. Didn’t the perp drop a glove at the scene or something?”

  “A hat. I recovered DNA from it, too, along with hair samples. But Russ Pickerton is running the defense.”

  “No kidding?” Ric had yet to meet a cop who could say the name Russ Pickerton without a string of curses tumbling out. Besides being a media whore, the guy would do anything to get a client off, including paying inconvenient witnesses to recant their stories. Or so people claimed. “How’d Mendoza manage that?” Ric asked her.

  “I think he’s doing it for the publicity. The whole racial-profiling angle generated some controversy. You guys pulled him over on a bum taillight or something.”

  “Yeah, we have a tendency to profile drivers who’re breaking the law.”

  Mia’s heel got hung up on a crack in the pavement. Ric caught her by the elbow.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He kept his hand on her arm and eased her closer. “Are you ready for him?”

  “Who, Pickerton?” She sneered. “What do you think? The man’s an eel. I can hardly stand to be in the same room with him.”

  “He’s pretty rough on expert witnesses.”

  “It’s not just that,” she said. “He’s got a mile-long list of liars for hire who will testify to damn near anything, no matter how scientifically improbable.”

  “I’ve seen him in action,” Ric said. “I once watched him persuade a jury to acquit a guy based on the idea that the fingerprints o
n the murder weapon had been planted there by the defendant’s twin brother.”

  “Twins don’t have the same fingerprints. Not even identical twins.”

  “The prosecution pointed that out,” Ric said. “But he had the jury so brainwashed they actually let this guy walk. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Mia huffed out a breath. “I’ve got my work cut out for me tomorrow.” She cast a worried look in his direction. “Any progress on the shooting?”

  “We’re waiting on ballistics.” Ric didn’t tell her the rest of what he’d learned that day.

  “What about my Jeep?”

  “Still no word.”

  The smoky scent of barbecue wafted toward them as they neared the weathered wooden building with neon beer signs blazing in the windows.

  “Like I said, you should try to get a check from your insurance company. I doubt you’ll get it back, at least not in one piece.”

  “I don’t care about that. I don’t think I could stand to drive it. I was thinking for the crime-scene techs.”

  Ric pulled the door open, and they stepped into a warm room filled with the scent of spice and hickory. He took her hand and pulled her past the empty hostess stand. Twangy country music drifted from the jukebox as they made their way through the dining room to one of the many vacant booths lining the back wall.

  Ric peeled off his jacket and hung it on a hook beside their booth as Mia stood there, looking annoyed. “You said they’d be crowded.”

  “I’m hungry. I didn’t want to wait for you to change.”

  She unbuttoned her black wool coat. He slid it off her shoulders, and her hair glided over his fingers as he got his first good look at what she’d worn to court: a pale blue blouse in some thin, silky fabric and a dark blue skirt that hugged her full hips. Ric felt a pang in his gut that had nothing to do with hunger.

  “Sit down. You’re gawking.” She slid into the booth and grabbed a menu.

  “Sorry.”

  A young waitress stopped by, and they ordered a couple of beers. When they were alone again, Mia looked down at her menu.

  “You know, I don’t get you,” she said.