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“Tell me about it.”
Jacobi brought me up to date as we cut through the crowd, working our way toward the rear of the hall.
“White female, eighteen to twenty, blond, a hundred pounds soaking wet, ligature mark around the neck, parked inside a Ferrari.”
“My God. These freaks. What audacity, craziness. What nerve to do this in public. Look at all these kids at the auto show!”
“They’re messing with us, Boxer,” Jacobi said. “Thumbing their noses and laughing their asses off. That’s my read.”
He pointed out a couple of cops and CSU techs standing between the fast-food concessions and the European sports cars. A measly cordon of yellow crime scene tape circled a hinged partition of fiberboard.
As if sixty square feet could contain a murder scene.
I stepped behind the partition and saw a vignette that shocked me to the bone. The victim had been dressed, coiffed, and displayed as a still life: Blond Woman in Slick Silver Car. It was gallows humor, a sly inside joke, another pretty young girl, killed for someone’s sick pleasure.
“Get the manager,” I said to Jacobi. “I’m shutting this place down.”
I got the chief on my cell, asked him to assign every available cop to the convention center and to give a heads-up to the mayor. Soon there’d be satellite vans on Howard Street and news choppers overhead, no doubt about it.
Charlie Clapper stopped shooting the scene long enough to hand me a pair of latex gloves.
“We’re doing the best we can, Lindsay, but I’m going to take this car back to the lab. Give it our special detailing.”
“Any ID on the victim?”
“No wallet, no handbag, no nothing.”
I reached through the driver’s-side window, touched the girl’s cheek with the back of my wrist. She was still warm. The ambient temperature was about 68 degrees and dry.
I had an idea. If we moved fast, it might work.
“Charlie? Let’s superglue her right here.”
CSU was setting up a fuming tent, when a portly man, red-faced and furious, pushed through the mob and got into my face.
His name tag identified him as “Patrick Leroy, Show Manager,” and he was yelling, “You can’t shut us down. Are you insane?”
Spit flew as he shouted questions without answers: did I know how much revenue was going to go down the crapper? How I was turning great publicity into dog crap? How much shit was going to rain down on me personally because of it?
It was one long, scatological rant, and I didn’t like any part of it.
“Someone’s been murdered, Mr. Leroy, understand? I have to preserve what’s left of the crime scene and catch a killer. So while you act like a jackass, people are stampeding up and down the stairwells and spreading DNA around the bathrooms.
“The quicker your security staff helps us empty this place out and submits to interviews, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.”
“And when do you think that will be?” he asked, breathing hard.
“We’ll be done when we’re done.”
“Give me a break! I have to tell people something.”
I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“Figure at least twelve hours,” I said.
“An entire day? You’re canceling out Saturday? Millions of dollars shit-canned. Millions,” he said, stabbing the buttons on his cell phone. “You have no idea.”
“There’s a dead woman in that Ferrari,” I said.
