“Where did you find this?”
“I’ll show you.” Lauren took the ring back to her evidence locker and led Heat to the open door of the Volvo. “It was there. On the floor under the front seat.”
Nikki looked at the woman’s body. “It is a man’s ring, isn’t it?”
The medical examiner gave her a long, sober look. “I want you to see something.” The two leaned in through the open car door. Inside it was humming with blowflies. “OK, we have a female, aged fifty to fifty-?five. Hard to get an accurate postmortem interval without labbing the rate test because she’s been in that car so long in this heat. My guess—”
“Which is always damn close.”
“Thank you—based on the state of putrefaction is four, four and a half days.”
“And cause?”
“Even with the discoloration that’s taken place over the last few days, it’s pretty clear to see what happened here.” The woman had a thick curtain of hair across her face. Lauren used her small metal ruler to pull the hair aside and reveal her neck.
When she saw the bruising, Nikki swallowed dryness and relived her own choking. “Strangulation” was all she said, though.
“Looks like from someone in the backseat. See where the fingers would have laced together?”
“Looks like she put up a hell of a fight,” said the detective. One of the victim’s shoes was off and her ankles and shins were mottled by scrapes and bruises where she had kicked the underside of the dash.
“And look,” said Lauren, “heel marks on the inside of the windshield over there.” The missing shoe rested broken on the dash above the glove compartment.
“I think that ring belongs to whoever strangled her. It probably came off in the struggle.”
Nikki thought of the woman’s desperate last moments and her brave fight. Whether she had been an innocent victim, a criminal getting a payback, or something in between, she was a person. And had she ever battled to live. Nikki made herself look at the woman’s face, if for no other reason than to honor that struggle.
And when Nikki looked at her, she saw something. Something death plus time couldn’t obscure. Images played hazily in the detective’s mind. Grocery clerks, and bank loan officers, and photos of women from society pages, an old schoolteacher, a bartender in Boston. Nothing came to her. “Could you…” Nikki pointed at the woman’s hair and waved her forefinger. Lauren used her ruler to gently draw all the hair off the face. “I think I’ve seen her before,” said the detective.
Heat shifted her weight on her heels, leaned back from the woman about a foot, and tilted her own head to match the angle of hers. And pondered. And then she knew. The grainy photo, at a three-?quarters angle with the expensive furniture in the background and the framed lithograph of a pineapple on the wall. She would have to look it up to be sure, but damn it, she knew. She looked at Lauren. “I think I’ve seen this woman on the surveillance tape from the Guilford. The morning Matthew Starr was killed.”
Her cell phone rang and she jumped.
“Heat,” she said.
“Guess where I’m standing.”
“Rook, I’m not up for this right now.”
“I’ll give you a clue. Roach got a call about a burglary last night. Guess where.”
A cloud of dread gathered around her. “Starr’s apartment.”
“I’m standing in the living room. Guess what else. Every single painting in the room is gone.”
Heat Wave
ELEVEN