I ignored him and lifted her arm up a little farther to reveal where the white skin on top met the red skin underneath.
“See that?” I pointed to the line separating the colors. “That’s liver mortis. When the blood stops pumping it gets sucked down by gravity and pools at the lowest spots. That’s how you can tell if a body’s been moved, if the red isn’t on the bottom like it should be.”
We checked a few other places on her. “Looks right. This is probably our murder scene.”
I kept at the teaching line and focused on the body as just another set of remains. I’d seen hundreds, mostly in Vietnam, of course, and right now I would’ve even gone back there rather than think about who belonged to this wrecked corpse.
I showed Jake the poke test.
“If you poke the pale part of the skin and it flushes red, it’s been less than half a day.”
“So the blood settles within twelve hours.”
“Mm-hmm.” The skin under my gloved finger stayed white. There wasn’t any blood to show beneath it. So she’d been here since at least the early morning.
The barn floor croaked a warning and we both eased back.
“This place is going to fall in on our heads.”
“I doubt it. It’s been like this for the last ten years at least.”
I’d seen this barn almost every weekend during the summertime, from fishing opener to frost, leaning into the east bank of Lake Crosby like it was watching the sunnies dart under the surface. Seen was probably saying too much, though. Sure, I knew it was there, as good a landmark for fishing as the public beach on the exact opposite bank, but I’d never stopped to look at the old Erickson barn for who knew how long. That’s how it always was with things right next to you. Lars Erickson abandoned the building twenty years ago when he sold most of the lakeshore to the city and put up new barns next to his prefab house on the other side of the property, a good mile away. The only visitors this old girl had, besides the lake itself that lapped up during flood years, were teenage kids like the Sanders boy who wanted somewhere private to have sex and smoke joints.
Just about all the place boasted was privacy. It was one big room, a twenty-by thirty-footer, with empty rafters except for the remains of a hay loft on the end that dipped into the lake. The double-wide doors opened on the opposite side and there was a hole in the wall where a window used to be.
With the heavy rains and unseasonably early snowmelt this spring, the water had come up to cover a fourth of the floor and it was full of cigarette butts and empty rolling paper packets, along with something that might have been a ziplock bag or a condom.
Jake followed my gaze.
“Think our murder weapon is in there?”
“The team will find it if it is. They’re thorough.” Some counties had their own crime labs, whole departments of analysts and investigators, but not us. This was misdemeanor country and most of our felonies were the usual drugs and domestic violence, nothing that justified the extra payroll. It had been over a year since I’d called the boys from Minneapolis out for anything.
“If this isn’t Hattie, it’s a transient for sure. There’s no one else reported missing in five counties.”
“You include Rochester in that deduction?”
“Hmm.” He thought about that.
“See if you can find anything outside the entrance.” I handed him the camera and crept back out toward the edge of the water. It hardly creaked without Jake there—compared to him I suppose I was tiny, whittled down to bone and gristle after thirty years on the job. I squatted next to the girl and cupped my jaw in one hand, looking for what I wasn’t seeing. She was drained pale and her face was turned slightly to one side. Her eye sockets, pooled with dried blood, had caught some of her hair. The cuts were mainly to her eyes and cheeks, short jabs except for one long diagonal slash from her temple to her jaw. An exclamation point. Except for the stab wound to the chest the rest of the body was fairly clean. Someone wanted this face to go away pretty bad.
I glanced over at Jake to make sure he was out of earshot, before leaning close.
“Henrietta?” It always riled her when I used her given name, which was why I’d done it for practically eighteen years. Everyone’d called her Hattie since the day she came home from the hospital with a lacy bow tied around her sweet, bald head. That memory just about undid me, so I cleared my throat and made sure Jake was still busy before conceding the name I’d jokingly refused to use in life. “Hattie?”