Field of Graves

by J. T. Ellison

  “Anything stand out from Chen’s interview?” she asked.

  “She was evasive about the possible boyfriend. We need to pursue that angle if at all possible. I think Shelby was seeing someone and didn’t want people to know. Her dad, especially.”

  She rewarded him with a big smile. “Excellent. Exactly right. So who was Shelby seeing when she was supposed to be studying at the library? And why was it so important to keep the relationship secret?”

  Before he could comment, her phone rang.

  “Jackson.”

  “It’s Fitz.”

  “Thanks for that. I do have caller ID on this thing. What’s up?”

  “We’re opening the park back up. Crime Scene got exactly squat, no trace, no worthwhile prints, no ID or clothes. She may well have flown there and landed on those steps.”

  Taylor laughed. “That’s about the best logic I’ve heard today. What’s Sam up to?”

  “She wrapped things up about an hour ago. She said she’s sending over the autopsy report. Everything’s square with Loughley, too.”

  “Hmm. Did you call him?”

  “Nope, she did it all by her pretty little self. Why?”

  “Nothing, just curious. We’re not getting too much over here either, other than the distinct impression Shelby Kincaid has a secret lover. We’re on our way. You need anything while I’m out?”

  “If you get by Jack’s Bar-B-Que, you could grab me some pulled pork, buns, and a Bud,” he said hopefully.

  “Mmm, sounds good. Skipping the beer, though. Sorry.” She clicked off her phone and snapped it back onto her waistband.

  “Okay, Marcus, let’s get some lunch and head back to the office.”

  Taylor took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it away into the bushes. Saw a figure over Marcus’s shoulder. Chief Graber was standing by Carmichael Towers. He wasn’t smiling. Taylor ignored him, turned her back, and they started walking back to their car.

  Taylor’s cell phone rang again as she touched the handle to the driver’s side door. “Yes?”

  “Hey, T, it’s Fitz again. You’re gonna have to skip the food. How about meeting me at the sidewalk behind the River Stages.”

  Taylor rolled her neck to the left with a loud pop. “And I’m hungry too. What’s so interesting behind the stage, Fitz?”

  “How’s about another dead girl?”

  Her heart sank.

  “Oh no. We’re on our way. Give us five minutes.” She clicked off, looked over at Marcus, who was lounging with his arms across the top of the car, watching the coeds.

  “Get in, slugger. We’ve got us another body.”

  12

  Taylor and Marcus drove back downtown in silence. Riverfront Park was only a few blocks from police headquarters. The body had conveniently washed up in their backyard. They parked and walked toward River Stages, a popular summer concert venue. Fitz waved cheerily at them.

  “Come on down and meet our next contestant.” He led them down to the river.

  Taylor shook her head and smoothed a stray hair behind her ear. As they neared the water, she saw the tarp over a lump on the riverbank. Marcus stayed a few feet behind her.

  “Okay, Fitz, what do you have?”

  He pointed unnecessarily at the body. “Well, there we have another dead girl. Boat passin’ by saw something in the weeds, came by for a closer look. She was facedown—they used a grappling hook to turn her over, called 911.”

  “Who got here first?”

  “Who else? Officer Wills. Happened to be on Second Avenue when the call came—he was here within a minute.”

  “Good, good. At least we know he didn’t screw anything up.”

  Marcus was shifting from the ball of one foot to another like a small child who needed to go to the bathroom. Taylor caught the movement.

  “Okay, Marcus?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Though two girls in two days is a little creepy for me.”

  “Yes, it is. But that’s what you get when you work Homicide. Let’s go take a look, shall we?”

  They made their way to the water’s edge. Taylor leaned in and pulled the tarp back from the body, grimacing at the smell. She hated floaters.

  A young woman’s ruined face stared back at her. “Damn,” she said softly. She pulled the tarp the rest of the way back, careful not to disturb anything lying beneath it. The girl was naked, bloated with the buildup of gases that had brought her to the surface. There were five distinct stab wounds on her torso. At least it would be a little simpler to determine what killed this one.

  She started to replace the tarp when she heard Sam a few yards away.

  “Go ahead and leave it off, Taylor. I need to take a look.” She tripped on some unidentifiable piece of trash and she fell into Marcus, cursing under her breath. He grabbed on for dear life to the first available appendage. It happened to be her left breast. She barked a laugh and gave him a smile that only deepened his blush.

  “God, Sam, I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s okay, cookie. Nice catch.” She winked and he recovered nicely, giving her a charming smile back.

  “Hey, T. You’re keeping me a little busy, ya know?”

  “Yep.” Taylor stepped back from the body to give Sam room to set up. She did so quickly, knelt next to the girl’s body, poking and prodding.

  “Stabbed a few times, huh? She hasn’t been in the water too terribly long, maybe a week.” She picked up one of the girl’s white, puffy, wrinkled hands. “Washerwoman’s hands. There’s probably enough skin left for prints. We’ll see. She’s not too old either—I’m guessing between eighteen and twenty-two.” She reached around and rolled the girl onto her left side, picking at the detritus stuck to the girl’s limp body. She scraped some of the dirt into a bag and stuck the bag into the pocket of her jacket. “Hmm.” She rolled her into her previous position carefully and stood up. “Was anything found with her?”

  Officer Wills tripped down the bank to join the party. “No, ma’am. We’ve been searching up and down the bank, and there’s nothing out of place.”

  “Okay. Let’s have one of the ’gators take a look around. Hey, Taylor?”

  “Yup?”

  “I’m going to get her back to the office, see if I can get anything to ID her with. And I’m going to post her now, instead of waiting until the morning. Come with?”

  “Guess I should. Marcus, head back to the office and tell Lincoln to start another round of database searches. Since she’s been dead awhile, there may be a missing persons report on her. If we get any prints, I’ll bring them over.”

  Marcus nodded and headed away purposefully. Taylor shot Sam a knowing look. Poor kid just didn’t like dead bodies. He’d have to get over it if he wanted to survive on her team.

  “Fitz, do me a favor, stick around in case they come up with anything.”

  “Righto. I’ll ring if anything shows up.”

  “Thank you, sir. Sam? Let’s do this.”

  Forty minutes later, Sam had the body zipped into a bag and loaded into the back of the unmarked ME van. A small crowd had formed at the top of the hill, and Officer Wills was roping the area off to keep out the curiosity seekers. Taylor followed Sam up the hill, got into her car, and moved out, lost in thought.

  Her cell phone rang. She was going to have to turn the thing off; she’d never get anything done if she spent all her time answering calls. She stifled the thought when she saw the caller ID. Sam’s personal number. She clicked on the Talk button.

  “I’m right behind you. What’s up?”

  “I didn’t want to announce it in front of everyone. I took samples of the muck on her back. Smelled it when I got into the car. There was no unique scent, but the composition looks similar to the herbs we picked off of Shelby.”
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  Taylor’s heart skipped once, then started again in a rush. “You’re telling me this is the same guy?”

  “I definitely don’t want to go there yet. I need to have this analyzed and do the post. But two girls in two days, with similar presentations? Taylor, this isn’t good.”

  “No kidding. I’ll see you in a minute.” She hung up the phone and looked at the car passing her on the left. A harried mom with three kids in the back, all laughing and making faces at her as they blew past. They had no idea what waited for them when they got older.

  Taylor felt the sadness well up inside her and tears prick her eyes. She shook it off and concentrated on an image of the dead girls.

  13

  Taylor patiently watched Sam gently slice and dice their floater. Once they had retrieved some messy but usable prints and sent them to Lincoln, she’d decided to stay out of the way. Sam was working fast, looking for any similarities inside the two dead girls while she went through the remaining steps of her post.

  Taylor’s phone rang again, and she decided to take a breather and answer it outside. It was Lincoln.

  “Hey, Taylor, how’s it going over there?” The scratch of a match and a quick breath out gave her away. “Smoking again?”

  “Let me worry about my own lungs. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got an ID on the floater.”

  “Whoa, you are good. I didn’t know if the prints were going to be usable at all. So who is she?”

  “Her name is Jordan Blake. But I don’t think you’re going to want to hear the rest.”

  Taylor sank down on the steps, pulling hard on the cigarette, as if a lungful of carbon monoxide would lessen the blow from whatever bad news Lincoln was about to spring. “Shoot.”

  “I played a hunch, started with our local AFIS database. It kicked back several possible matches. I eyeballed them to see if we were close. One was.”

  “Oh, God no, don’t tell me.”

  “She’s a junior at Vanderbilt, Taylor. We have a serious problem on our hands.”

  Taylor began to pace the sidewalk in front of Sam’s building, her mind churning. Two girls dead, both murdered, both from the biggest local college campus? This was going to bring everyone out of the woodwork.

  “Lincoln, get your butt into Price’s office. Let him know what you’ve got. Has anyone filed a missing persons report on her?”

  “I haven’t found one yet. When Sam gives me a solid time line, I’ll be able to get more specific, but I’ve gone through the past month’s reports and haven’t found any matches, which is totally bizarre. I mean, a Vandy student not being reported missing for this long, by anyone? Something’s not jibin’ here, LT.”

  “None of this is jibin’, Lincoln. Go on and tell Price what’s up, let him decide how to proceed. Sam should be done with the post soon, so I’ll come in the minute I have the preliminaries. And, Lincoln? Don’t tell anyone about this. Fitz and Marcus are fine, but no one else. Price is going to call the shots from here, okay? We’re going to have media crawling all over us, and we don’t want to make a misstep.”

  “You think it’s the same guy?”

  “I don’t know. Until Sam finishes the post and we run all the evidence, there’s no way to know. But the posing, the staging, the sexual assault—we may be dealing with more than a simple predator.”

  “A serial,” he said, and she heard the teeniest bit of excitement in his voice.

  “Possibly. And that, my friend, is top secret information. I’ll be there shortly. Be good.”

  “You, too. Oh, hey. There’s a big front headed our way. We’re supposed to have bad weather for the next few days. Be careful.”

  Taylor clicked off the phone, tossed the cigarette under the wheel of a relatively new Mustang convertible. Lincoln wasn’t kidding. The sky was darkening, and she could smell the storm; the dry tang of rain getting stronger by the minute. She looked to the west, saw the first lightning strike. Maybe the storm would improve her mood; she always loved a good rain.

  Knowing she could put it off no longer, she headed back in to give Sam the bad news.

  14

  Sam was stripping off her gloves and shield when Taylor walked back in. Her heart reached out to her friend. Taylor was exhausted—that much was readily apparent. Her hair was spilling down from her ponytail, her shoulders were slumped, and there was no bounce in her step. Her eyes were so gray Sam thought rain could pour out of them at any moment, and the smudges underneath were getting worse. She looked as if she had a cold starting on top of it all; she’d been sniffing for most of the afternoon. Sam went to her and surprised her with a quick hug. Taylor hugged her back, quick and hard.

  “You look like crap, Taylor. You need to get some sleep and some sinus medicine.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” She gave her a halfhearted smile. “I don’t have good news.”

  “Neither do I. You want to go first?”

  “You go on ahead.”

  “Well, this one’s cause of death was definitely from the stab wounds. There were two deep ones, got right into her heart. She didn’t suffer long. The other wounds are perimortem, and different. They’re vicious, ragged wounds with notches, two more in her chest and one right in the gut. Just missed her liver. From the clean stabs, it looks like he used a regular knife with a serrated blade; the flesh on one side of the wound is torn.”

  “And the others?”

  “Same knife, I think, but he turned it after it went in. Spun it around. A little extra to make it hurt worse. There’s no way to know for certain which were first, but there was a lot of bleeding. She was alive for the torture, unfortunately.”

  Taylor blew out a breath. “You’re saying ‘he’ a lot.”

  “She was raped, repeatedly, over a length of time. There was enough tissue left to show healed tears on both her vagina and anus. There were also fresh tears. Couldn’t get any semen—it was washed away by the river—but she was being roughed up for a while before she died. And...”

  “And?”

  “She may have been poisoned as well. She looks a lot like Shelby on the inside. Her liver has the same characteristics. I took all the samples and had them run over to Simon. I asked him to drop everything and analyze them.”

  “Sam, this isn’t good. Same guy, same point of origin? I’m praying we don’t have a serial on our hands.”

  “You had news to share, too. What was it?”

  “Lincoln got an ID. Her name is Jordan Blake. She’s a junior at Vanderbilt.”

  Sam was quiet for a moment, then whispered under her breath, “Damn.”

  “Yeah, damn is right. Do you have any idea when she was killed?”

  “She hadn’t been in the river for more than a week. Four or five days would be my guess. He could have tossed her in anywhere south along the Cumberland, and it took her this long to float upstream, or she was weighted and broke free. My bet is the latter. He threw her away like a piece of trash, Taylor. There wasn’t any of the reverence or—” She paused, bit her lip. “I don’t want to say gentleness of the other kill. But Shelby’s death didn’t seem as careless. This one—Jordan—she pissed him off.”

  “Was she killed before Shelby?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, not with the water damage.”

  “What about the herbs?”

  “Like I said, I can’t be sure whether they were herbs, though the stuff I scraped off looked similar to what we got off Shelby. The thing is, if the composition is the same, he was with the body after she washed up on shore. Further proof he weighted her, then let her come to the surface to be found.”

  “Or...wherever he had her, he unweighted her, scattered the herbs on her back, and let her float in.”

  Sam thought about that for a minute. “Okay, that works for me,
too. If he had spread them after she was on the bank, they wouldn’t have been wet, and these were definitely mucky. But recent, the water would wash them away quickly. He was right there, Taylor.”

  Sam watched Taylor fiddle nervously with a ring on her right ring finger. It was a thin silver band, very plain. She’d picked it up in Hawaii on a brief vacation and hadn’t bothered to take it off since. It held some symbolic meaning to her. One night, when they’d been very drunk, she told her it was a circle of life and a circle of death. Sam was aghast when Taylor said she didn’t want to take it off, that it was a constant reminder of her failings. Sam had to resist the impulse to reach over and wrench the ring right off Taylor’s finger and throw it in the trash. Taylor Jackson had no failings that Sam could see, other than caring too damn much about her job.

  “Taylor, there’s one other thing.”

  “More? What?”

  “She was pregnant. About six weeks along.”

  Taylor could do nothing but stare. The thoughts were flying, bouncing off each other like bumper cars. None were coming together.

  Sam continued. “It’s possible some of the tearing and damage I found could have been inflicted that long ago. It’s possible that whoever killed her was the father of the child.”

  “You’re reaching there, Sam.”

  “I know. But it could be. You can’t rule it out. If he was the father, it’s possible he didn’t know about the child.”

  “Or he did, and that’s why she ended up in the river, viciously stabbed. Ah, hell, Sam, this is just too much. Can you run the DNA you collected from Shelby against the fetus?”

  “I can, yes, but it isn’t going to happen as fast as you’d like. Simon’s already dumped a couple of high-profile private cases he’s working on—he’s not going to want to jump through this hoop again immediately. Besides, I’m only bringing it to your attention. It’s possible we have two different killers, despite the similarities.”

  Taylor stood for a long moment, staring at her best friend. Tapped a finger along her leg. “I understand, but I want it done. Please ask Simon to drop everything and work on this, okay?”