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My eyes had traveled to the staircase because my brain was delaying a look at the body.
No sense putting it off.
She was barefoot, with long, thick blond hair fanning around her head. Golden blond where the blood hadn’t hennaed it. She wore a black silk bathrobe patterned with green and gold dragons and nothing else. The robe’s belt lay at her sides, crinkled by hardened blood intowhat looked like sections of tapeworm. My first thought was someone had yanked the garment open to expose her sexually but as I took a closer look, I wondered.
Lust killers lack imagination and when manipulating their victims’ clothing, they tend to follow scripts: stripping the body bare in order to degrade, ripping fabric to shreds in hormonal rage, or choreographing poses that grotesquely ape consensual passion.
The strip of bare skin of this victim, exposed by the robe falling away, was narrow and pristine.
Maybe just a garment loosening during a struggle.
Any struggle appeared minimal. Through plastic bags tied over the hands, I made out purple thatches of defensive wounds on both palms. But they looked scant and shallow.
Not a prolonged battle. A single, viciously effective wound had ended this woman’s life: diagonal slash to the left side of the neck exposing veins and trachea.
This picture would stay with me for a while.
I pushed past that and forced myself to imagine the scene.
The look of surprised horror on her face as she tried to fend off an attack.
Failure. Pain. Collapse. Eternity.
Her face was canted away from where I stood. Taking several breaths, I kneeled and got a close look. Shot upward as if yanked by a rope, feeling the heat drain from my body.
Milo took hold of my arm. “You okay?”
I exhaled.
“Alex?”
“I know her.”
CHAPTER
5
I’d met Cordi Gannett two years ago, in the mahogany-paneled chambers of a Superior Court judge in the main court building, downtown.
No, not met.Encounteredis a better word.
Thein camerasession was an attempt to mediate a custody dispute between a pair of divorcing gym owners. My job had been to assess each of their abilities to raise their two-year-old daughter.
I’ve been doing custody evals for years and have established my rules.
Wary of being seen as a pay-to-play whore, I never work for either side, functioning instead as an impartial agent of the court. Sometimes it means everyone ends up happy with me, sometimes just the opposite. When I sign my reports I know I’ve been careful, fair, and as close to objective as any human can come.
Some custody cases involve feeling my way through blind alleys of emotional nuance and behavioral subtlety. Not so on the case that brought me into contact with Cordi Gannett.
The mother, a dancer/SoulCycle instructor, was intense andambitious. Also loving and attentive to a daughter tending to shyness. The father, a former collegiate wrestler who taught weight training and a bit of mixed martial arts, was none of the above.
Added to that, he had a history of domestic abuse with three previous girlfriends, including a battery conviction that had earned him jail time.
The level of rancor hadn’t risen that high with the only woman he’d married. So far.
When I observed him with his daughter, he had no clue what to do, spoke very little, seemed detached. When he tried to engage the child, she shied away from him.
When she was out of earshot, I commented on her social distancing and he shrugged it off. “She’s too little to think.”
