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“His alibi checks out. Someone else parked that girl in his Caddy. How’s it going over there?”
I turned, saw Claire and Bobby wrapping the victim tamale-style in the second of two sheets before inserting her into a body bag. The chalk-on-board sound of that six-foot-long zipper closing, the finality of encasing the victim in an airproof sack, feels like a gut-punch no matter how many times you’ve witnessed it.
My voice sounded sad to my own ears as I said to Jacobi, “We’re wrapping things up now.”
Chapter 12
IT WAS ALMOST 6:00 that night, ten hours after we’d found Caddy Girl’s body.
The sheaf of paper in the center of my desk was a list of the 762 cars that had gone through the Opera Plaza Garage last night.
Since morning, we’d run the plates and registrations of those cars through the database, and no red flags had popped up, nothing even remotely promising.
We’d also struck out on Caddy Girl’s prints.
She’d never been arrested, or taught school, or joined the military, or worked for any government agency.
A half hour ago, we’d gotten a digital picture of her likeness out to the press, and depending on what else was happening in the world, she’d be in all the newspapers tomorrow.
I pulled the rubber band out of my hair, shook out my ponytail, threw a breathy sigh that riffled the papers in front of me.
Then I called Claire, who was still downstairs in the morgue.
I asked her if she was hungry.
“Meet me downstairs in ten,” she said.
I greeted Claire at her private parking spot on McAllister. She unlocked the car, and I opened the passenger-side door of her Pathfinder. Claire’s scene kit was on the seat, along with a pair of hip waders, a hard hat, a map of California, and her ancient 35mm Minolta.
I transferred the tools of her trade from the front into the back and wearily slid onto the passenger seat. Claire gave me an appraising look, then burst out laughing.
“What’s the joke, Butterfly?”
“You’ve got that third-degree look on your puss,” she told me. “And you don’t have to work me over, baby girl. I’ve got what you want right here.”
Claire waved some papers at me, then shoved them into her cowhide handbag.
Some people think Claire’s nickname is Butterfly because, like Muhammad Ali, she “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.”
Not so.
Claire Washburn has a bright golden Monarch butterfly tattooed on her left hip. Now I pinned her with my eyes.
“I’m sooooo ready to hear your verdict,” I said.
Claire gave it up at last.
“It’s a homicide, definitely,” she told me. “Lividity was inconsistent with a sitting position, so she was moved. And I found faint bruising across the tops of her arms, chest, and on her rib cage.”
“So the manner and cause of death?”
“I’m gonna say she was burked,” Claire told me.
I was familiar with the term.
In the 1820s, a couple of sweethearts named Burke and Hare were in the cadaver procurement business. For a while, they dug up bodies for sale to Edinburgh’s medical schools—until they realized how easy it was to produce fresh corpses by grabbing live victims and sitting on their chests until they died.
Burking was still in good standing today. Postpartum mommies do it to their kids more often than you’d ever want to know. Slip the child between the mattress and box spring, sit on the bed.
