Prime Suspect

by A. W. Gray

  Captain Utley folded his hands and stuck out his narrow jaw. “We have our people.”

  Cole rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

  Mac Strange pointed a finger. “No more, Hardy, I’m not kidding.”

  “I ain’t kidding either,” Cole said. “All this fucking around these people are doing, they’re going to wind up with the FBI out here shoving their noses in. That’s the next step. You guys probably haven’t had the feds fucking with one of your investigations, but Mac and me been through it before.”

  “Hardy.’ Strange said.

  “Okay.” Cole said. He regarded his knee.

  “First things first,” Strange said. “Any ID on the victim?”

  “She was nude,” Detective Lewis said. “No belongings or anything. Blond, eighteen to twenty-five”—he took a small notepad from the pocket of his brown suit coat and looked at it— “right at five-six, around a hundred and twenty. Tattoo of a rose on her left cheek.”

  “Of her ass?” Strange said.

  “Yeah. Well-nourished female. Well-built,” Lewis said.

  “Well-built?” Cole said. “Who came up with that statistic?” He showed another shit-eating grin while Lewis did his best to stare the county investigator down. It didn’t work. Lewis dropped his gaze.

  Captain Utley leaned forward and said, “No positive identification as yet. We’re checking all the dorms to see what female students are missing, but that’s pretty much of a bitch. A whole bunch of „em are missing, all they have to do out there is sign out for the night. Plus a big portion of the student body lives off campus, in apartments.”

  “Things have changed since I went to college,” Strange said.

  “Haven’t they?” the University Park captain said. “Classes begin at eight, we can narrow it down better when we see who’s not in class. But that’s not easy, either, everybody doesn’t have an eight o’clock. Plus a lot of them cut, and classes don’t meet every day. It’ll be tomorrow before we get a full roll call.”

  “If she’s a student,” Cole said.

  Four heads swiveled as one to look at Cole.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “Just because you found her on a college campus don’t mean she’s a student. How about around the body? Any signs that maybe the guy did her someplace else and then dumped her?”

  The University Park officers exchanged more looks.

  “Well, how „bout this?” Cole said. “I guess somebody did bother to take some fingerprints.”

  “Hardy,” Strange said.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Mac.” Cole folded his arms and regarded the ceiling.

  “The prints are taken and already shot to Washington,” Lewis said. Utley gave Lewis a that’s-telling-’em nod.

  “Okay,” Strange said. “How „bout it, Shoesole?”

  Deputy Coroner Shoesole Traynor had a thick head of graying hair and a good-sized belly, which poked out against the front of his white shin-length smock. He had a Sherlock Holmes-style briar pipe clenched lightly between his teeth. The pipe wasn’t lit, but the bowl was filled with tobacco. He’d been listening to the proceedings with the barest hint of a smile. He sat forward, removed the pipe from his mouth, and cupped the bowl in his palm. “No autopsy yet, of course—maybe we’ll know more then. All appearances are like the last one, same bite marks, same cuts, same kind of mutilation. Like I said, nothing official till we can slice her open.” His smile broadened.

  “What mutilation are we talking about?” Cole said.

  “You mean there’s something you don’t know?” University Park detective Lewis said. Alongside him, Captain Utley snickered, then quickly regained his composure.

  “The worst one,” Traynor said, “that’s the peg. A sharpened four-inch hard maple spike, actually, driven into the pelvis bone through the wall of the vagina. On the last victim, the bruise patterns in the flesh show that the guy used a hammer, or something like it. Drove the peg in with series of sharp blows. Odds are we’ll find the same thing on this one.” He looked down at his pipe, then raised his gaze. “The peg wound on the last one was post mortem. Something like that would almost have to be, given that the victim would have to be lying still.”

  “I’d think so,” Cole said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Then there are the same cuts as the last one. Horizontal incisions bisecting the arteries on both sides of the throat. The cuts were made while the last victim was alive.” Traynor spoke in a monotone, as though he were speaking into a recorder.

  “What in hell killed her?” Cole said.

  “Hardy didn’t work the last one,” Strange said. “He was on vacation.”

  “Indirectly, it was the cuts,” Traynor said. “That last girl was missing almost three pints of blood.”

  Cole sat bolt upright, his eyebrows lifted. “Well, if she bled to death...How much blood was around her, where they found the body?”

  “None, or almost none,” Traynor said.

  “Well, Jesus, that means she got it someplace else,” Cole said.

  Traynor shook his head. Detective Lewis was grinning openly at Cole while Captain Utley looked as though he were trying not to grin. “Not necessarily,” Traynor said. “I said „indirectly.’ Indirectly, the cuts were the cause of death.”

  Cole frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Traynor put his pipe between his teeth and let it dangle from one corner of his mouth. “Teeth marks around the wounds,” he said, “plus the outward swelling of the surrounding tissue would indicate that whoever it was cut the arteries and sucked out the blood.”

  Cole searched the faces around him. They had to be putting him on.

  Finally, Strange nodded. “That’s right, Hardy. The guy probably drank it. It seems we got some kind of vampire here.”