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Lindsay had seen bodies pulled from the water before. They often looked intact until you touched them and flesh started to come away in your gloved hands. Water and dead bodies didn’t mix well, and nobody ever wanted to attendthem. Fishing suicides out of the LA River was something they made rookies do.
But this wasn’t suicide.
This was a cop.
A cop who had mysteriously come into possession of tens of thousands of dollars six months ago, and promptly disappeared.
‘Sorry,’ Lindsay said. ‘You know the drill. Federal case, they make me walk the crime scene before the body’s allowed to leave.’
Kathryn nodded, crouching again beside the body and motioning for Lindsay to do the same. Reluctantly, he squatted on his haunches, feeling the burn in his thighs from his weight training that morning. 6 a.m. now seemed like it had been years ago.
‘You okay there?’ Kathryn said, side-eyeing the way Lindsay’s legs were trembling.
He nodded. ‘Thanks for sticking around, Katie. I owe you hot coffee on the way back to the office.’
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘You owe me dinner at the Roosevelt and a night of mind-blowing sex, at the very least.’
Lindsay stifled the urge to laugh, only for the fact that there was a dead body about five inches from his leather shoe. He’d never slept with Kathryn. She was as dry-witted as they came, as inappropriate as a foul-mouthed teenage girl looking to get a reaction out of her parents. She possessed no filter. The thing about her job, though, was that she didn’t need one. It wasn’t as if the dead could take offence, much less speak back.
Luckily, she was damned good at her job. Lindsay had long since suspected that her sarcastic, inappropriate commentswere a way of trying to lighten the heavy film of death that covered her existence.
Kathryn launched into a long spiel of clinical observations and hypotheses about the body. She lifted one of Allie’s arms – gently, so it didn’t detach from her bloated corpse – and showed Lindsay just how advanced decomposition was.
Allie had been submerged, or floating along currents, for what looked like several months. It was a miracle she’d remained intact, what with the water and the weather, not to mention the sea creatures that were all looking for a free meal. As if on cue, a tiny crab crawled out of a neat hole in Allie’s chest and darted along her collarbone before disappearing underneath her ragged red hair.
Lindsay’s stomach turned at the thought the crab had just been eating whatever was left inside her.
After they’d examined the body, Kathryn and Lindsay walked the scene in a grid, starting on the shore and ending up barefoot and wading out into the shallows.
There was nothing, of course. Nothing to signal what had happened, or where. Allie could have been dumped in the water hundreds of miles away, or a few hundred feet. If this had been Florida, Lindsay’s last port of call, gators would have found Allie long before any human did. The sneaky fuckers found bodies and stashed them deep underwater, in small caves or under logs, macabre keepsakes until their hunger stirred again and they decided to eat their catch.
But they weren’t in Florida, and Allie Baxter had not been made into swamp feed, and now it was up to Lindsay to figure out how this young fellow officer had found her watery grave.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARIANA
‘Guillermo,’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
‘Guillermo.’
He white-knuckled the steering wheel. ‘What?’
We drove along the freeway, windows down, my hair flying around my face wildly in the breeze. It was the weekend and the I-5 was relatively clear, a small mercy.
‘I’m going in,’ I declared boldly.
Guillermo ripped his eyes from the road and stared at me until I was squirming in my seat, wishing he’d pay attention to where he was driving.
‘To Emilio?’
I shook my head. ‘With the . . .baby.’
‘To the crematorium? No fucking way.’ He slapped his hand against the wheel, agitated. ‘My life was never this complicated until you turned up. You got a way of pissing people off, you know?’
I might have grown a skin of steel, but his words foundchinks in my armour and sliced deep. I sagged back in my seat, deflated, feeling the last bits of my strength bleed out through the cracks.
