“I’ve got an ID on the floater.”
“Whoa, you are good. I didn’t know if the prints were going to be usable at all. So who is she?”
“Her name is Jordan Blake. But I don’t think you’re going to want to hear the rest.”
Taylor sank down on the steps, pulling hard on the cigarette, as if a lungful of carbon monoxide would lessen the blow from whatever bad news Lincoln was about to spring. “Shoot.”
“I played a hunch, started with our local AFIS database. It kicked back several possible matches. I eyeballed them to see if we were close. One was.”
“Oh, God no, don’t tell me.”
“She’s a junior at Vanderbilt, Taylor. We have a serious problem on our hands.”
Taylor began to pace the sidewalk in front of Sam’s building, her mind churning. Two girls dead, both murdered, both from the biggest local college campus? This was going to bring everyone out of the woodwork.
“Lincoln, get your butt into Price’s office. Let him know what you’ve got. Has anyone filed a missing persons report on her?”
“I haven’t found one yet. When Sam gives me a solid time line, I’ll be able to get more specific, but I’ve gone through the past month’s reports and haven’t found any matches, which is totally bizarre. I mean, a Vandy student not being reported missing for this long, by anyone? Something’s not jibin’ here, LT.”
“None of this is jibin’, Lincoln. Go on and tell Price what’s up, let him decide how to proceed. Sam should be done with the post soon, so I’ll come in the minute I have the preliminaries. And, Lincoln? Don’t tell anyone about this. Fitz and Marcus are fine, but no one else. Price is going to call the shots from here, okay? We’re going to have media crawling all over us, and we don’t want to make a misstep.”
“You think it’s the same guy?”
“I don’t know. Until Sam finishes the post and we run all the evidence, there’s no way to know. But the posing, the staging, the sexual assault—we may be dealing with more than a simple predator.”
“A serial,” he said, and she heard the teeniest bit of excitement in his voice.
“Possibly. And that, my friend, is top secret information. I’ll be there shortly. Be good.”
“You, too. Oh, hey. There’s a big front headed our way. We’re supposed to have bad weather for the next few days. Be careful.”
Taylor clicked off the phone, tossed the cigarette under the wheel of a relatively new Mustang convertible. Lincoln wasn’t kidding. The sky was darkening, and she could smell the storm; the dry tang of rain getting stronger by the minute. She looked to the west, saw the first lightning strike. Maybe the storm would improve her mood; she always loved a good rain.
Knowing she could put it off no longer, she headed back in to give Sam the bad news.
14
Sam was stripping off her gloves and shield when Taylor walked back in. Her heart reached out to her friend. Taylor was exhausted—that much was readily apparent. Her hair was spilling down from her ponytail, her shoulders were slumped, and there was no bounce in her step. Her eyes were so gray Sam thought rain could pour out of them at any moment, and the smudges underneath were getting worse. She looked as if she had a cold starting on top of it all; she’d been sniffing for most of the afternoon. Sam went to her and surprised her with a quick hug. Taylor hugged her back, quick and hard.
“You look like crap, Taylor. You need to get some sleep and some sinus medicine.”
“Thanks, Mom.” She gave her a halfhearted smile. “I don’t have good news.”
“Neither do I. You want to go first?”
“You go on ahead.”
“Well, this one’s cause of death was definitely from the stab wounds. There were two deep ones, got right into her heart. She didn’t suffer long. The other wounds are perimortem, and different. They’re vicious, ragged wounds with notches, two more in her chest and one right in the gut. Just missed her liver. From the clean stabs, it looks like he used a regular knife with a serrated blade; the flesh on one side of the wound is torn.”
“And the others?”
“Same knife, I think, but he turned it after it went in. Spun it around. A little extra to make it hurt worse. There’s no way to know for certain which were first, but there was a lot of bleeding. She was alive for the torture, unfortunately.”
Taylor blew out a breath. “You’re saying ‘he’ a lot.”
“She was raped, repeatedly, over a length of time. There was enough tissue left to show healed tears on both her vagina and anus. There were also fresh tears. Couldn’t get any semen—it was washed away by the river—but she was being roughed up for a while before she died. And...”
“And?”