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I wish I’d never moved to this fucking city.I want to go home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELLIOT
“Is it her?” I ask the silent room.
Isobel shakes her head beside me. “I can’t get a clear look at her face.”
Somebody hands her a pair of long tweezers and gloves from an evidence collection kit. She hesitates before accepting them. I want to offer to take them, to try and ID the girl, but I stop myself. This was her case, from the very beginning, before I’d ever heard the nameAvery Capulet. Isobel has been tracking the XO killer for a long time, and I’m not about to muscle in and snatch this moment from her.
The room is silent as Isobel hands her rifle to me, drags on plastic gloves, and takes the tweezers from their sterile packaging. She leans over the bathtub, moving strands of hair out of the way, revealing the dead girl’s face.
“It’s not her.”
I let out the breath I’ve been holding, but the dead girl’s identity is hardly a relief. Just because this isn’t the girl we’re looking for, doesn’t make her murder any less heinous. It just adds a layer of complication to an already complex case.
Carefully, Isobel takes the girl’s pale hand in hers and attempts to move her fingers. “Somebody call the Medical Examiner’s office, get a team down here.”
Harker, one of the SWAT officers who led this raid, steps into the hallway, followed by our captain, Tommy. A few moments later, we hear Harker talking to someone at the ME’s office as Tommy radios the station to request forensics.
I glance back at Isobel, watching her blue eyes as they pore over every inch of our Jane Doe’s face.
“This girl has been dead for hours. She’s stiff.” Isobel lets the girl’s hand go gently and braces herself against the side of the bathtub. “I don’t get it. This is where the signal is coming from.”
“Does this place have a basement?” Tommy asks from the hallway. “A crawlspace?”
I chew my lip. “Not on the original plans. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Shit,” Isobel says. “Look.”
I follow her gaze to the tub. It’s one of those old Victorian clawfoot ones. Unlike most modern houses, which have the tub cemented into the floor, this one is freestanding, and when Isobel leans on the edge, it rocks ever-so-slightly. She steps back, taking her weight off the side of the tub so that it doesn’t tip over and send a dead body slip sliding across the tiny room.
I look at the floor where the bath is, noticing a clear difference between the tiles underneath the tub and the tiles we’re standing on. It’s not just that they’re lighter from lack of sunlight fading them over the years; the tiles under the tub are freshly laid, in a perfect rectangle. “Do you see that?” I ask Isobel. “The tiles?”
Isobel takes a step back, pulling her gloves off. “Shit.”
Adrenaline surges in my veins. “Tommy!”
“You found something?” Tommy asks, suddenly beside me.
Isobel points to the floor. “The tiles under the tub are fresh,” she says.
We’re all thinking the same thing. Maybe the signal is coming from underneath the house. More specifically, underneath this bathtub that is currently housing a dead woman.
“We have to move this tub,” Isobel says.
“If we’re wrong, and we disturb a crime scene, we’re fucked.”
“If we don’t move it, and Avery Capulet dies underneath us, we’re more fucked. Which would you prefer? Getting fired or getting cut into tiny pieces and fed to sharks by the Capulet family?”
Tommy thinks about that for about three milliseconds before he nods in agreement. “We need to move this tubnow.”
It takes four of us to lift the tub off the tiles. It weighs a ton and the only compromise we can make is keeping the dead girl—and her blood—inside of it. Fucking with the crime scene is small potatoes compared to losing Avery Capulet. Sweat breaks out under my collar, but we get it done. We fucking get it done.
The tiles turn out to be one piece. Clever. They lift up as a panel, revealing a hidden sub-space accessible by a rough-hewn staircase. Gnarled concrete. It was probably a root cellar entrance at some point. We make our way down in formation, Tommy leading this time, followed by myself, Isobel, and the rest of the team. A few stay upstairs to keep watch. Last thing we need is to all end up downstairs in some sick trap.
At the bottom of the stairs, we fan out into a hallway. There’s another staircase here—this is a second entrance.What fresh hell is this?
