“I’m Lieutenant Dallas, NYPSD. Put your damn recorder on, Leary,” she muttered.
“Yes. Sorry. I’ve never . . . we don’t. I’m not quite sure what I’m about.”
“You’re about to take a witness report, secure this scene, then call in whoever it is around here who investigates homicides.”
“There really isn’t anyone—that is, not right around here. I’ll have to contact the sergeant. We just don’t have this happen here. Not here.” He looked at her. “Would you help me? I don’t want to make a mistake.”
“Names. You have mine. That’s Roarke. This is Brian Kelly, a friend from Dublin. This is Sean Lannigan.”
“Yeah, I know Sean here. How’s it all going then?”
“I found her.”
“Are you doing all right there, lad?”
“Sean, tell the officer what you know, what you did.”
“Well, see, we were all over at the park there, having another picnic, and the dogs ran off in here. They wouldn’t come back and were barking like the mad. So I asked my lieutenant cousin to come find them with me. We all came in the wood, and I went on ahead to where the dogs were barking. And I saw her there, the dead girl, and I ran back and brought our cop to see.”
“That’s a good lad.” Leary looked appealingly at Eve.
“We’ve remained here since the discovery. Roarke and Sean walked to the road and back. The dogs have been all over the scene, as you can see from their prints in the softer ground. You can also observe shoe prints, which would most likely belong to whoever put her here, as none of us have gone closer than we are now.”
“Shoe prints. Aye, I see. All right. I can’t say I recognize her.”
“She’s not from around here.” Eve dug for patience. “She’s city. Multiple tats and piercings, neon polish, fingers and toes. Look at the shoe. She didn’t walk in here wearing those. This is a dump site.”
“You’re meaning she wasn’t killed here, but put here, as you said before.”
“There’s no sign of struggle here. No bruising on her wrists or ankles, so she wasn’t restrained. Somebody punches you in the face a few times, chokes you to death, you generally put up a fight. You need to record her, call in your ME, forensics. You need to ID her and determine time of death. The animals haven’t been at her, so she can’t have been here very long.”
He nodded, kept nodding, then pulled an ID pad out of his pocket. “I’ve got this, but I’ve never used it.”
Eve walked him through it.
“She’s Holly Curlow. Lives in—lived in—Limerick.”
Eve tipped her head to read the data. Twenty-two, single, bar waitress, a couple of illegals pops. Next of kin, mother from someplace called Newmarket-on-Fergus.
Where did they get these names?
“I’ll, ah, need to get the other equipment—and I’ll contact the sergeant. Would you mind staying, to secure the scene? To keep it that way, I’m meaning. This is a bleeding mess, and I want to do right by her.”
“I’ll wait. You’re doing okay.”
“Thanks for that. I’ll be back quick as I can.”
She turned to Sean. “We’ve got her now, okay? I’ll stay with her, but you need to go back. You and Brian need to go back, take the dogs. Leave this to me now.”
“She has a name. She’s Holly. I’ll remember it.”
“You stood up, Sean. You stood up for her. That’s the first thing a cop has to do.”
With a ghost of a smile, he turned to the dogs. “Let’s go, lads.”
“I’ll look after him.” Brian laid a hand on Sean’s shoulder and walked with him.
Eve turned, looked at Roarke. “There are always bad guys.”
“It’s a hard lesson to learn that young.”
“It’s hard anytime.”
She took Roarke’s hand and stood over the dead, as she had countless times before.
3
A GREEN COP, A DEAD BODY, AND NO LEGITIMATE authority added up to frustration. Leary tried, she gave him that, but he was struggling to navigate through what was for him completely uncharted territory.
When he confided to Eve that the only dead person he’d ever seen was his granny at her wake, she couldn’t decide whether to pat his head or boot his ass.
“They’ll send down a team from Limerick,” he told her, shifting from foot to foot as the doctor who served as the ME examined the body. “And my sergeant will come back if he’s needed, but for now I’m supposed to . . . proceed.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe you could help me. Just give me a pointer or two.”
Eve continued to study the body. She didn’t need the ME to give her cause of death, not from the pattern of bruising around the throat. Manual strangulation, she thought, and her instincts pointed her toward violent argument, crime of the moment, desperate cover-up.
Too soon, not enough data.
“Get the ME’s opinion on cause of death, time of death.”
The ME, who with his lion’s mane of snowy hair and eyes she thought would have been described as merry under other circumstances, glanced up.
“She was throttled, good and proper. Beaten a bit about the face first, then . . .” He demonstrated by lifting his hands, curling his fingers in a choke hold. “She’s some skin and blood under her nails, so I’d say she got a piece of him before she went down. And she died just after two this morning, rest her soul. Not here,” he added. “Not from the way the blood settled. I’ll take her in, of course, when you’re ready for that, and do the rest of it.”
“Ask him if he’s calling it homicide.”
“Sure and it’s murder, no question there. Someone brought her here after, miss, and left her.”
“Lieutenant,” Eve said automatically.
“Um, if she scraped the skin off him, it’d show, wouldn’t it?” Leary asked. “Seems she’d go for his face or his hands, wouldn’t she? So he’d have marks on him that show.”
He’s thinking now, Eve decided. Trying to see it.
“And wouldn’t bringing her here this way, without even trying to bury her, mean it was all done paniclike?”
“Well, I’m not a detective, Jimmy, but that seems logical enough. Would you say, Lieutenant?”
“Even a shallow grave would’ve bought him time, and the ground’s soft so it wouldn’t have taken that much effort. She’s listed a Limerick address, but that’s miles from here according to my data. Panic and stupidity probably merged on this, but not enough for me to buy the killer drove a dead woman all this way.”
“So . . .” Leary’s brow creased. “They were nearby when he killed her.”
“I’d say the probability’s high. You should run that. She’s dressed for a party or a fancy night out. So you try to run down where she might’ve gone, with whom. You show her ID picture around, check to see if anyone knows her or saw her. And when you notify next of kin, you ask about boyfriends.”
“Notify . . .” He didn’t turn green this time around but sheet white. “I’m to do that? To tell her mother?”
“You’re currently primary of this investigation. They’ll run the skin and blood under her nails, and with any luck you’ll get an ID through the DNA bank.”
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Look, whoever did this isn’t very bright, and it’s botched so badly it was probably a first kill. Your ME’s going to check for sexual assault, but she’s fully dressed, underwear’s in place, so it’s not saying rape to me. It’s going to be a boyfriend or somebody who wanted to be, somebody who used to be. You have the data—where she worked, lived, went to school. You run it down. Either she or the killer had some sort of a connection with the area.”
“Tulla?”
“That or the surrounding area, one of the towns within, most likely, an hour’s drive. Run the probabilities, connect the data, use the data. You’ve probably got your killer with what’s under her nails, but until you have an ID, and a suspect to bring in to interview, you work the case.”
“Well, her mother lives in Newmarket-on-Fergus, that’s not far at all.”
“Start there,” Eve advised.
“Go to her mother and tell her . . .” Leary glanced at the body again. “You’ve done that before.”
“Yeah.”