Chapter Fourteen
Eric
The body was female. Curvy. Late twenties, early thirties. Long brown hair. He knew he was imagining the resemblance to Bree; the dead woman’s face was bloated and mottled as death and water took their tolls.
Something about the scene wasn’t sitting right. “How long until we get cause of death?” he asked.
“She’ll be first on the table tomorrow,” Jordan Wu, the medical examiner, told him. He stood from his crouch, stretching out until he was as tall as Adam. The techs popped the gurney to full height and rolled the body toward the van. “Are you expecting something besides drowning?” Wu asked.
Adam joined them on the riverbank. “It’s the wrong time of month. We just found Rayna Nash. It would be a mistake to assume it’s him. Lots of women fit the profile.”
Adam was right. On several accounts. The woman matched the description of the four victims they’d already had this year, but the details were wrong. Assuming it was anything other than an accident biased Eric’s thinking and could lead him to avoid other avenues. “What are you doing here anyway, Adam? You aren’t on call,” Eric said.
“I thought you’d call me in to cover so you didn’t have to leave your date early. You disappointed me. Did something happen with Bree? Something bad?” Adam specified. “I don’t want the nasty details if things went well.”
“Good, because I am not discussing your sister.” Eric understood Adam wanted his sister back, but he could make his own apologies. “Although she did share some interesting tidbits you might find interesting,” he added.
“Do I want to know?”
“She recognized the tattoo on Jane Doe.”
“You’re shitting me.” Adam rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Tell me she doesn’t know who it is. We’ll never sell that as a coincidence to Dutch.”
“Not the tattoo itself. She recognized the quote. It’s from Twilight. The movies, Bree says.”
“Well, that’s both good to know and completely unhelpful. We’ll add it to the description.”
Thunder rumbled overhead. The wind picked up, ripping early apple blossom petals off the trees. “We got lucky. In another hour, it would have been full dark, and the storm would have washed the body further downriver. It might not have come to us at all,” Eric said.
A flash of lightning lit the dark clouds, and thunder rolled immediately afterwards. Fat rain drops began to fall. “At least we got the body out before the rain. There’s nothing else we can do here. See you in the morning?”
“Bright and early.”
It ended up being even earlier than Eric anticipated. At first, he couldn’t fall asleep. Thoughts of what he and Bree could have been doing if he hadn’t been called away kept him awake long after the clock on his dresser fell into single digit hours. Then, when he finally did fall asleep, he dreamt. The first nightmare found him pulling Bree from the water instead of the woman they’d discovered. The second one found Bree lying on a slab in Wu’s morgue. There was a third one too. Thankfully he didn’t remember it. Waking up yelling was enough of a clue it was beyond bad.
He arrived at the station before Adam. It would be a few hours before the coroner sent up his findings on the cause of death, so Eric parked himself in front of his computer and began searching for Twilight tattoos and missing women. Mackie had worked the Jane Doe case when it was still a sex crime, so Eric shot him a text to inform him about their new lead.
Twilight tattoos were much more common than he imagined. Eric got rid of the minors in his data search, then everyone under the age of twenty-three. The doctors had estimated Jane Doe’s age as thirty, give or take a couple years, but Eric wanted to give himself plenty of leeway. Then he cut the few women over thirty-eight. He had no idea the movie was so popular with the older crowd.
It still left far too many possibilities. Mackie arrived clutching a massive coffee mug and what was left of a fast food breakfast burrito. The barrel-chested sergeant stole a chair from the desk beside Eric’s and joined him facing the computer screen. “How the fuck did they miss a tattoo?” he demanded.
“She was so badly bruised they couldn’t see it. You said it yourself, Mackie. She was basically a big purple blob with limbs. We’re lucky the hospital kept her alive long enough for them to fade. Do any of these women look familiar?” Eric asked.
Mackie scrolled through the faces. “I already ran the search parameters for women in that age group, with and without tattoos. I gave the ones with tattoos a once-over, but nothing jumped out at me. I concentrated on the ones without tats.” He hesitated when the cursor moved to a woman from Ontario, then shook his head. “This one, maybe? Her face was hamburger. Even after the swelling went down, she didn’t look much like anything, and the doctors didn’t have an image to work from when they pieced her back together.”
Neither man mentioned the woman was missing parts when she’d been found in a ditch close to a perimeter overpass. If it hadn’t been for a SUV’s flat tire and a dog that escaped from the backseat, she would have been long dead before she was found. Their unsub had taken his time with a very big knife, and he had taken souvenirs. It might have been a good thing that Jane Doe had never woken to the agony she would have been in for the rest of her life.
Adam burst through the door before the clock hit eight, cursing a blue streak despite the civilian speaking to the receptionist. His partner was usually the first to demand protocol in front of the public. The fact he was so far gone was dangerous.
“Collingswood? What?”
“I just got off the phone with Forrester. His ma, Wilson—the one whose cousin I’m supposed to meet today—called Forrester to tell him the cousin went missing yesterday. I have a really bad feeling that Doc Wu is going to find her this morning on his table,” Adam informed them
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Mackie exclaimed.
“Not even a little bit.”
“I thought you were supposed to see her yesterday afternoon,” Eric said.
“I was. She didn’t show. I called the number she left and left a message. I told her she could come in today instead if that was more convenient for her. I was going to follow up this morning,” Adam insisted.
“Forrester is going to go nuclear. He already said straight out he thought we were fucking around when it came to this case,” Eric said.
“Let’s get last night’s Jane Doe identified first,” Adam said.
He was right. There was no use in borrowing trouble. Besides, they had preparations to make. Right now Forrester’s only link to the men in Homicide was Bree. If their newest victim was tied to the Warriors, though, Forrester was going to be looking for retribution and wouldn’t be too particular about how he delivered the message; he couldn’t afford to be if he wanted to maintain his reputation in and out of the club.
Eric was going to have to cut Forrester off at the pass, and he needed time to figure out how to do it.
