She looked down at her hand again. The diamond was huge, set in platinum and bordered by diamond baguettes. She was still trying to remember exactly what Simon had said, but all she could remember was saying yes, and he swept her off her feet and made love to her the rest of the night.
The phone rang, startling her from her reverie. She dropped the scalpel in her lap and caught it between her knees. An absurd memory flooded her mind—her father, lecturing on the virtues of abstinence when she was a teenager getting ready to leave on her first big date. He had handed her an aspirin as she was going out the door. She looked at him quizzically and asked what it was for. He replied in his booming voice, “If you sit all night with that balanced between your knees, young Simon here won’t be able to make any moves on you.” He’d dissolved into laughter, and Sam and Simon, both blushing furiously, had scurried away as quickly as possible. Her father would have been proud; she hadn’t given in to Simon’s relentless begging for another two years, the night of their senior prom.
Shaking her head and giggling under her breath, she answered the phone.
“Dr. Owens, it’s Tim. Thought you’d want to know I’m bringing in a body. Female pulled out of Old Hickory Lake this morning by a couple of fisherman.”
Sam drew in a quick breath. She hadn’t even started the autopsy of the girl they’d found in the church. She was waiting for Taylor to bring over the dental x-rays from Jill Gates’s father. Another body could be another chance of finding Jill. Damn.
Tim read her thoughts. “It’s not her, Doc. Sorry, I forgot to tell you, she’s black. Looks like a drowning.”
She blew out a breath. “Well, at least the break in the pattern means this victim isn’t part of the Vanderbilt series. No ID?”
“Actually, yes, there is. An ID card that says her name is Tammy Boxer.”
“ID card? Like a license, but not a license to drive?”
“Yep. Address is over on Dickerson Road.”
“Working girl?”
“Could be. I don’t know, looks like she’s been under the water for a while.”
“Thanks for the heads up. I’ll see you soon.”
She clicked off, shaking her head. Dead prostitutes weren’t a rare occurrence in Nashville. The police actually built a database specifically for their postmortem identification. Since many of the girls went by aliases, the midnight shift patrolled their most common hunting grounds, pulling over to chat and check them out. Dickerson Road, also known as Hooker Alley, was an area with the worst offenders. The officers would go over the girls’ information and run their sheets, then take Polaroid pictures and fingerprints and note any tattoos or characteristics. They got as much contact information as they could glean from the girls, though most of it was bogus. They’d use it to track down family, or pimps, should the need arise.
This information was fed into the database, and when a girl showed up dead, they were much easier to identify. Sam had ridden along when they first implemented the program, amazed at the lack of concern the prostitutes showed when they went through the process. It seemed they didn’t realize, or care, that the police were doing this so they could identify them when they were pulled out of a dumpster the next morning.
Sam picked up the phone again and placed a call to Lincoln. The database had been his idea and was still his baby. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, Lincoln. How’s it shakin’ over there?”
“Shaking and baking, sister. Taylor is heading your way. I’m getting ready to go home myself, get a couple of hours sleep.”
“Good, you guys need a break. I wasn’t calling about Taylor. I just got a call from my ‘gator, Tim. Looks like they may have pulled a working girl out of Old Hickory. We’ll send over the information to see if you can lay out a positive ID.”
Sam could hear him clicking away on his keyboard in the background and smiled, he was already loading the database. “Any chance you have a name? I have an MP report on a lost soul from Magdalene House.”
“Actually, she had an ID card on her, but who knows if it’s really hers.” She looked at her notes. “Tim said the name on the card is Tammy Boxer. Ring any bells?”
“Yes, damn it. That’s the name they gave me last night. Hadn’t seen her in a week, said she missed a couple of med checks. This is really going to make their day.”
Sam gave a big sigh. The Magdalene House was one of Nashville’s jewels. A minister at Vanderbilt’s St. Augustine’s Church had developed the program. It was designed to get girls off the street, cleaned up, give them some education and skills, and help them back out into the real world. It was a huge success, and Sam remembered reading that they were opening a second house because the demand had grown so large.
“Will you give them a call and let them know we may have found her? If they can send someone over this afternoon to ID her, we’ll try to get things moving over here.”