Josie used a ballpoint pen to lift the girl’s long black hair away from her face and grimaced at the swollen discolored sight. She took close-up shots of her face and neck before she stood, turning her back on the body and taking a deep breath.
After Josie had graduated from the police academy, she worked for the Indianapolis Police Department for three years before moving to Texas. Initially, her intent had been to work CSI, but her roommate had been a crime scene specialist for the PD, and she’d come to understand the stress the techs endure. Josie had watched her roommate go from a well-adjusted new recruit to a woman suffering from nightmares and relying on prescription sleep aids and vodka shots to erase the visions from her head long enough to sleep a few hours each night. After the horrors of what her roommate had experienced—the smell of blood and death, touching the flesh of a dead body, being at the scene with the dead victim long after everyone else had left—Josie had changed her mind. Now, in a small-town department without the funds to pay a crime scene tech, the job fell to her anyway. The TV shows were far from reality. There was nothing exhilarating about lifting a dead girl’s hair to view her bloated face. Only sorrow.
Josie’s thoughts returned to her roommate and she wondered if she still worked in law enforcement. Josie contemplated when she would hit a wall and no longer be able to face the nightmarish scenes that occasionally accompanied her job.
“Josie,” Nick called.
She turned and saw Nick on his hands and knees, staring down at the ground. “I found a casing.”
Josie counted her steps off. The spent case lay on the ground approximately twenty-three feet from the body. “Maybe she was gaining ground on them. They gave up the chase and shot her.”
Nick stood and brushed off his hands on his pants. He looked tired at the sight of one more statistic to log in his memory. “The sad thing is, she’s probably better off now than if she’d been caught.”
Josie took a photo of the casing and its relationship to the body. She then took measurements and drew them on a crime scene template that she would later log into her computer using a drawing program. As she was getting the location of the body oriented to the position of the road behind her, she saw a car traveling down Schenck Road toward her house. She and Nick both turned off their flashlights as a precaution. Otto and Roy were in the barn where they couldn’t be seen. She radioed Phillips. “That’s probably Cowan. Tell him to leave the hearse on the side of the road. The tires will get hung up in this sand.”
“Will do.”
*
While Cowan made his way over to the body, Josie called the mayor to fill him in. In the past he’d made it clear that he should be called in the event of any major crime that could affect public safety. She wasn’t sure this crime fit that description, but better safe than sorry. He didn’t answer his cell phone, so she left a message and said she’d call later with an update. She’d begun to wonder if the anonymous call left on the mayor’s answering machine could have something to do with the body.
Cowan joined Nick and Josie. “Good morning,” he said, sounding surprisingly energetic for four in the morning.
He wore a white short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into polyester pants held up with a wide black belt. A large canvas bag was slung over one shoulder and a camera bag over the other. The walk had clearly winded him and he dropped his bags onto the ground with a huff. He had a wide midsection that made his bald head and narrow shoulders seem out of proportion.
Cowan unzipped his duffel, pulled out a blue tarp, and laid it on the ground. He then moved his bags onto the tarp and began pulling out the various pieces of equipment he would need for the exam. When he stood again, he turned to Josie. “You’ve gotten the photos and measurements you need?”
She nodded. “I’m done with her until we can roll her over. I’m anxious to determine the time of death. I’d be shocked to discover it happened at night. I’d have heard the gunshot.”
“Wouldn’t Dell have heard the shot during the day?” Nick asked.
Josie tilted her head to concede the point.
Nick stood beside her. “Hard to imagine the girl running in the daytime, getting fatally shot, and then the killers coming back at night to search for her.”
“More likely the killers were coming back for the girl who was hiding on my front porch.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Nick said. “Which means they’ll be back again.”
“It’s a shame we couldn’t keep this quiet for a day or two,” she said. “We could watch the area and hope the car returned.”
“Why can’t you?” Nick asked.
“I called it in to dispatch. Border Patrol has been notified, plus the coroner call. I’m sure some of the local cop junkies already picked it up on the scanner. Rumors will be running like water through the Hot Tamale by breakfast.”