Chapter 26
JUSTINE LIFTED HER hand in a wave to Lieutenant Nora Cronin, who gave her the customary dirty look before turning back to the black construction-grade trash bag lying like a crashed balloon at her feet.
Justine’s chest tightened as she remembered another schoolgirl who’d been dumped here a year ago encased in a similar black plastic bag. Her name was Laura Lee Branco, and she had been knifed through the heart.
Cronin cut the tie with a pocketknife, and the bag fell open.
An arm tumbled out, almost in slow motion, the palm and fingers outstretched. It took Justine a long, heart-stopping moment to understand what she was seeing.
“What the hell?” Cronin said, pulling back the edges of the bag to reveal a department store dummy. Two other cops tugged the mannequin out of the bag.
Cronin turned over the female form and inspected it. There was no writing on the dummy, no note inside the black bag.
“So what’s the big message?” Cronin asked the air. “You’re the shrink, right?”
“The medium is the message,” Justine said. “It’s a dummy, get it? The implication is that we’re being played.”
Cronin said, “Why, thank you, Justine. That’s very astute. It’s a frickin’ waste of time, that’s what it is. And it definitely isn’t Serena Moses.”
Justine reeled from a wave of relief that was immediately followed by sadness. Serena Moses was still missing, wasn’t she? They still didn’t know where she was, or whether she was alive or dead.
She glared back at Cronin. “So where is Serena, Lieutenant? I guess you’re going to have to keep looking. I hope you’re as good as you think you are.”