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“Convenient,” Laura remarked. “Is this a recent development?”
Blackford shook his head. “Hard to say,” he replied. “The files aren’t preserved for long. Overwritten. Time we got to check them, everything was just blank. No way of knowing when that happened. Course, the security firm are claiming they knew nothing about it.”
“No backups, no records?” Laura asked.
“Nope.” Blackford tapped his knuckles against the glass of the window in a short, staccato pattern. “Ask me, the firm’s been ripping off the landowners. Not doing their jobs. What it boils down to for us is a whole lack of evidence when there could have been plenty available.”
“What about the victim?” Nate asked. “Our notes say she was found in pretty similar circumstances to the scene we’ve just left.”
“That’s right,” Blackford nodded. Laura noted that he seemed to hold the same level of disdain for both of them, from the tone of his voice and the way every word seemed forced. At least it was good to know he wasn’t just a misogynist, though it wasn’t much of an improvement. “She was strung up on a platform, same mechanism as the one you just saw. She had the clock round her neck and the ropes, all the rest of it. Looks as though the timer was set for twelve hours again, and went off at midnight.”
“How do you know the exact time of death?” Laura asked.
“The clocks stop when the timer hits zero,” Blackford said. After a brief pause, he shrugged. “Well, it could be the clocks weren’t accurate. But the coroner says the window for the time of death is around midnight. It stacks up. From what we can gather, the clock starts at exactly twelve noon and gives them twelve hours before they drop.”
“Why?” Laura said. It was the obvious question. More of a rhetorical one right now, but one they were going to have to answer if they were ever going to get to the bottom of this case. It was a huge part of the MO, and therefore clearly very important to the killer.
“Who knows?” Blackford shrugged. “Maybe the sick bastard just wants them to suffer. To know they’re going to die.”
“There’s no way for them to escape, you don’t think?” Nate asked. “It’s not some kind of sick test? Like those movies that were going around a few years back – trying to force them to do what it takes to survive?”
Blackford made a noise in the back of his throat. “You’ll see in a minute,” he says. “Pull in on the left here. This is the coroner’s office.”
His ominous words hung in Laura’s ears as she parked the car, feeling that crawling sensation on her skin that came with the knowledge she was about to go and purposefully look at a dead body.
There hadn’t been any photographs of this scene in their briefing notes. And she wondered, given Blackford’s hint, what exactly they were about to find.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Laura walked into the cold underground room first. It was like diving into the deep end of a pool. If you knew you were going to have to get wet, sometimes it was better to just get it over with and do it all at once. Not to linger back, dipping a toe first, letting others go ahead of you.
You had to take charge of your fear, put your head forwards, and just go.
The coroner turned out to be a middle-aged little man in a white coat with wiry hair, and a half-stooped back, no doubt from years of bending over corpses without proper posture correction. He turned as they entered, frowning at Laura but then brightening as soon as he saw Blackford.
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “You must be here to see the Marchall and Rowse bodies. I heard the FBI were being drafted in.”
Blackford had stepped forward, keeping level with Laura after passing through the doorway. She saw his jawline tense out of the corner of her eye. He really wasn’t happy with this, was he?
“Just show them the bodies, if you could, Jerry.”
Jerry did so, nodding rapidly like one of those nodding figurines people put in their cars. He led them over to the far side of the concrete and metal room, towards two steel tables which were covered with foreboding sheets.
It didn’t matter how many times you had to go into one of these chilled rooms, filled with bodies and silence. It was always creepy, every time. Sometimes even more so, when the coroner was weirdly cheerful and friendly – which, in Laura’s experience, a lot of them were.
But approaching those covered bodies, knowing you were going to have to take a very thorough look at what was under the sheets – there was nothing quite like it.
“This is our first victim,” Jerry was saying, gesturing to the furthest table. They all filed around it dutifully. Blackford held back a little, down by the feet, having clearly already seen what was to be seen. Jerry took up a position by the head, leaving Nate and Laura to gather side by side along the torso. “The cause of death was definitely hanging by the neck.” He flipped back the sheet with little ceremony, revealing the body of the woman who’d been listed in their briefing as Stephanie Marchall.
She was naked, already bearing the signs of several incisions that had been sewn back together. Her skin was sallow, almost a gray color, and her hair hung limp from the back of her head. Her eyes, thankfully, were closed.
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Laura tried to flip that switch in her mind, going from looking at the woman as a dead human to seeing her as an object to be studied. It wasn’t always possible to do it completely, but keeping evidence at the forefront of her mind helped. She needed to gather as much information as possible from what she could see here, rather than letting emotion enter the picture. The dead faces would haunt her later, when she tried to sleep – but no more than her visions of the living ones already did.
There was no wonder she’d turned to drink in the past. No wonder that many law enforcement officials ended up going down that path. But someone had to look – because this woman, and all the others like her, deserved justice. And all the living ones – they deserved to be safe. Which meant looking at this body and finding the clues which would catch her killer.
“Looks like rope burns around the wrist and mouth,” Laura said. Her eyes traced the familiar patterns of bruising, red raw burns, and raised welts on the skin. It was clear that not only had the victim been tied up, but she had fought. Tried to free her wrists. It would have been immensely painful, judging by the raw skin left behind. In a few spots, it had even given way, leaving behind scratch-like cuts across the surface of the skin that would have been terribly painful if the victim had survived.
