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A sour taste rose up from Cole’s stomach. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a body in High Ridge. There certainly hadn’t been one since he’d taken office.
“Identified?” he asked.
“It’s Leanne Pritchard.” Grace’s voice was tight, laced with a mixture of sadness and anger. “Cole, it looks as if she was beaten and raped before she was killed.”
“Shit.” Bile rose up in his mouth, sudden and unbidden.
Leanne Pritchard was just sixteen years old, with her entire life ahead of her. She was a sweet, friendly girl who loved life. Who the hell could do something like this to someone like her?
“Who’s on the spot?” he asked.
“Mickey Garcia and Andi Lowell.”
Cole relaxed a fraction. Mickey and Andi were pros. They wouldn’t panic like some of his rookies might. They could handle whatever came up until he got there.
“All right, Grace. Get the coroner and the crime scene folks down there. I’m on the way.”
“Already done,” she told him. “Call back when you’re on site.”
Cole thanked God Grace was an old, experienced hand who’d seen just about everything. Including the gruesome attacks on the children Dana Moretti was determined to write about. Grace would keep her head no matter what. But she and Leanne’s mother were good friends, so this was personal to her, and he knew it.
Hell, what wasn’t personal in a town of five thousand souls?
Chapter Ten
The scene, not more than a quarter mile from the park’s entrance gate, was easy to spot from the road, but only because of the portable spotlights. Everything seemed to be located within a thick copse of trees. When Cole pulled his truck into the park, he saw the coroner’s wagon parked to one side, the crime scene van next to it, and two cruisers pulled in at an angle to them. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung around the entire area.
Off to the left, beyond the taped off area, a group of teenagers crowded against a large pickup. Partygoers. He was forever chasing kids out of the park. Now, one of them had gone and gotten herself killed.
The girls were jumbled against each other, crying, and the boys were doing their teenage best to both comfort them and look invisible. Other cars had pulled up beside the truck and adults with worried faces strained to see what was happening.
He spotted the Pritchards huddled together against a tree, surrounded by some of their friends. In a minute, he’d have to talk to them, an unpleasant burden that always fell to the man in charge. He could feel their pain spreading through the air. The loss of a child was one of the most difficult to deal with. He ought to know.
Scanning the area again, Cole saw his two deputies quietly keeping the crowd under control. He climbed out of his truck and ducked under the tape, threaded his way through the trees, and came up next to Andi and Mickey. His eyes were drawn at once to the body of the young girl sprawled under the merciless glare of the portable spotlights.
She was lying in an open space in a small copse of trees, hidden from casual view. Cole was struck by the awkward angle of her body, legs bent, arms flung to either side of her head, as if someone had just dropped her carelessly in that spot. Her head was bent at an unnatural angle, and the muscles of her face were frozen in an expression of pain and fear. She still wore her blouse and her sandals, but Cole saw her shorts lying beside her, a pile of shredded material.
Nita Sanchez, the coroner, was working with the body. Having attended to the most necessary areas first, she’d tactfully covered the exposed area with a protective sheet. Bad enough for him to have to see this. He didn’t want the parents having this image stuck in their heads.
“Got anything for me yet, Nita?”
She looked up as he moved closer, rage flashing in her eyes. “You mean besides the fact that she was brutally raped?” She shook her head. “It’s a mess, Cole. You can tell she fought like a tiger. This didn’t go down easy. She’s got scratches and scrapes on her thighs and a fair amount of blood.” Her hands tightened involuntarily. “It’s obvious she was a virgin.”
The coroner lifted the small canvas sheet to let the sheriff see the blood smeared on Leanne’s thighs. When she gently rolled Leanne’s body to the side, she exposed more blood between the cheeks of her buttocks, a sign of more damage to the young body. The surrounding area and her lower back were also covered in little marks, which, if he had to guess, looked like pinch marks.
He scrubbed a hand down his face, whether to erase the images from his mind or to give himself time to think, he couldn’t say. “Shit. Anything else?”
“I can tell you she was strangled, her neck was broken, and her mouth was taped shut.” She drew a line around the girl’s lips with a gloved finger. “See the lines where the tape was, the reddening of the skin where it was ripped off postmortem?”
“Damn. I hate knowing we’ve got some kind of monster out there.”
“Don’t we all?” Nita’s sigh was heavy with grief.
He scrubbed a hand against his cheek. “Yeah, well, the sooner you get the post done the better. You know that.”
“I’ll get her back to Drowdy’s as quick as I can and get to work.”
Elvin Drowdy owned the largest funeral home in the county. Because there was so little crime requiring a morgue, he had set aside a space in his prep room for the coroner to work when necessary, which until tonight she’d only used for accident victims.
