“Fuck me,” Tomasetti mutters.
Looking at the body, watching her long hair ebb and flow with the current is surreal. Neither of us moves or speaks. The tempo of the rain increases, but I barely notice. I don’t feel the wet or the cold. I can’t stop looking at the dead girl, and I wonder how her life came to this terrible end so long before her time.
I pull myself back to reality. When I speak, my voice is level and calm. “How long do you think she’s been there?”
“She’s intact. No deterioration that I can see.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. “No visible wounds,” I say, thinking about the blood we found on the road that afternoon.
“Still wearing her underclothes.”
But we both know it’s no guarantee that a sexual assault wasn’t committed. Perpetrators have been known to re-dress their victims. “No makeup or jewelry. Nails are unpainted. Tomasetti, that dress is an Amish print.”
“Goddamn it.”
I look upstream, toward the bridge, but it’s too dark to see anything. “You think someone dumped her here? Or at the bridge?”
He shines the beam on the ground, illuminating several footprints, ours and a waffle stamp that may or may not be Foster’s. But there are no broken branches. No crushed grass. No blood. “No obvious sign of a struggle,” he growls. “We’re going to need to get tread imprints from Foster’s shoes.”
He trains the beam on the steep bank directly below us, then shines it across the surface of the water. The creek is about twenty-five feet wide. It looks deep, but I can hear the gurgle of a shallow bottleneck a few yards downstream. “He could have dumped her upstream. Current carried her down.”
“Or stopped on the bridge and threw her over,” I say.
“Shit.” Pulling out his phone, Tomasetti calls Goddard and asks him to cordon off the bridge. “Tire-tread impressions are a long shot,” he says as he snaps his phone closed.
“We might get lucky.”
Neither of us believes that. It’s extremely difficult to extract meaningful evidence from an outdoor scene that’s spread over a large area, especially if it’s been left unprotected or trampled. Or rained on.
For several minutes, we stand there, using our flashlights, getting a sense of the scene. I wish for a camera, but we’re going to have to hoof it back to the Tahoe to get it. I make a mental note of the time and memorize as much as I can—the location and position of the body, the slant of the tree, the erosion of the bank, the profusion of roots at the water’s edge, the victim’s clothes. But I know it’s her face that will stay with me.
“We need to go back, get the camera, and a generator and lights,” Tomasetti says after a moment.
“I hate leaving her like that.” I know it’s a stupid comment; we can’t move the victim until the scene has been documented. But I hate the idea of leaving her in the water, where it’s murky and cold and her flesh is at the mercy of the aquatic creatures whose domain has been invaded.
Abruptly, Tomasetti jerks the beam from the body, clicks off the flashlight, and stalks away. Surprised, I glance over at him. In the gray light seeping down from the canopy, I see him set his hand against a tree and lean against it, close his eyes. And I realize that even though he is a veteran witness to this kind of violence, he is as outraged and repulsed as I am.
After a moment, he scrapes a hand over his jaw and pushes away from the tree. “I’m going to get a CSU down here before the rain destroys what little evidence is left.” Turning on the flashlight, he runs the beam along the steep, tangled bank of the creek. “They might be able to pick up some footwear imprints.”
But he doesn’t pull out his phone. He stands motionless between the path and the creek bank, the beam focused on the ground. His back is to me and his shoulders are rigid. I can’t see his face, but I sense he doesn’t want questions.
I give him a minute before asking, “Do you want me to make the call?”
Slowly, he turns. I can just make out his features in the peripheral light from the beam. The shadows reveal lines in his face I never noticed before, something in his eyes I understand because I know he’s seen the same thing in mine.
“I’ll do it.” He looks away. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look fine.”
His eyes meet mine. “Five years ago, a scene like this would have pissed me off, and that would have been the extent of my emotional response. I would have felt nothing for that dead girl or her family. All I cared about was catching the fucker responsible. It was an added bonus if I got to take his head off in the process.”