She wanted to tell him to forget it until later that day. But if he wasn’t going to talk, she needed that report. “Right. If you would.” She pulled out her phone, dialed. “Let me video chat with Bergen. Get an update.” Her phone connected to the car, rang half a ring.
Bergen’s face lit the small screen in the middle of the dash. “Sheriff. Another slashing. No one local, not a big woman, not this time. A petite tourist, single, forty-five, taking the long way around to visit her kids in Portland. Stopped in Virtue Falls to pick up dinner, drove down the highway to Lupine Point. Got out to picnic. Cheese and crackers and baby carrots were scattered toward the front of the car. I’d say she pulled into the pocket park, found an isolated overlook, sat on the hood to eat her lunch and enjoy the sunset. He snuck up on her…”
Behind him, she saw floodlights, men moving from one place to another, serious expressions and the occasional angry glance.
Bergen continued, “He used a scalpel? A razor blade? Something sharp. Mike doesn’t know what. Not yet. Cut along her jawline, traced the line around one ear. I’ve never seen anything like it. She bled…” Bergen gestured randomly.
“Who is she?” Kateri asked.
“According to her driver’s license, she’s Carolyn Abner of Springfield, Missouri.”
“Her driver’s license was on her?” Not good.
“It was in her purse. Which was in her car. Keys in the ignition. Robbery was not the motive.”
Which left little motive except … murder for the joy of it.
“Coroner is here,” Bergen said. “Preliminary—Mike says she’s been dead at least eight hours. At one point her killer crushed her windpipe. But cause of death was bleeding, not suffocation. She fought. She’s got bruising and scrapes on her knuckles and two torn fingernails.”
“Let me see.”
“You aren’t going to like it.”
“Do you like it?”
He turned his camera and pointed it at the scene.
First Kateri saw the congregation of lights against the ground. Then she saw their coroner, Mike Sun. He moved back on Bergen’s command. Bergen zoomed in and Kateri saw the body.
Carolyn Abner rested on her back, her eyes open, staring toward the sky. Blood had poured from the incisions along her jawbone and up past her ear and cheek. Blood had filled her blondish hair and turned the strands into a gruesome, clotted black. Her face was eerily clean, as if the killer had wiped any trace of blood away from her pale skin.
Kateri fought the same sickness that afflicted Moen and Bergen. “Mike, anything you want to tell me?”
“Look at this.” Mike gestured Bergen closer. “I just found this. Right here, right at the point at her temple where he stopped cutting, there’s a tear in the skin. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t some symmetry here.”
“Right. Symmetry.” Mike was five-foot-five, half-Chinese and half-Aleut, raised in Virtue Falls and had been with the city most of his career. He was a good guy, a good coroner, and Kateri trusted his findings—and his intuitions—implicitly. If he said there should be symmetry, then he was right.
“If he’s going to cut half her face, why not the other half? But it looks like he screwed up, tugged at the delicate skin here and it tore.” In a characteristic gesture, Mike swiped his shoulder-length straight black hair off his forehead. “That’s why he stopped. I think otherwise he would have kept right on cutting.”
Moen rolled down the window, slowed the car.
She glanced at him.
Maybe it was the dash lights, but he looked green.
He came to a stop on the shoulder of the dark, isolated highway, opened the door, unclicked his seat belt and vomited on the pavement.
She reached back into the first-aid kit, got a cold pack, broke it to release the chemicals and placed it on the back of his neck.
“Kid sick?” Mike asked.
“Aren’t we all?” Kateri countered.
Around the lighted circle, heads nodded.
“We’re almost there,” Kateri said to the men on the scene. To Moen, she said, “Can you drive?”
He pulled himself back into the car and put the car in gear.
She wanted to tell him to put on his seat belt, but she knew he was afraid he was going to be sick again.
He slowed at the sign for Lupine Point, turned onto the narrow, winding road and pulled into the usually quiet parking lot packed with bright lights and grim-faced police.
“You going to be okay to get home?” Kateri asked Moen.
“Sure, Sheriff. I’m fine.”
Stick in hand, she got out and watched him drive away. Moen had dreamed of illustrating graphic novels. Maybe this would give him the push he needed to follow his dream. Or maybe, like a hot flame, it would harden him into steel.
She limped over to the body and the men surrounding it.
Her officers had fanned out in the parking lot, the grass and up the dune toward the beach. Most of them were in uniform; all of them carried flashlights and occasionally one would call Officer Bill Chippen over to take a photo. These guys knew the procedure all too well.
She glanced at Carolyn Abner, but didn’t quite look at her straight on. There was no need, and she had to be steady and on her feet for the next God knew how many hours. She asked the first, most important question. “Bergen, do you think John is doing this?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” Bergen said.
He was so prompt and emphatic, she almost laughed. Except that the truth was so awful.
He continued, “Because if it’s not John Terrance, we’ve got not just one sick bastard on our hands, but two.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it. Give it to me straight.” But he only said what they all were thinking. “How did this guy arrive at the scene?”
“Don’t know. Too much evidence, we’re working to narrow it down. Car probably. All kinds of tracks. It’s the high season for bikes, and those tracks are here, too.” Bergen pointed toward the beach. “And he could have parked down at the dunes and walked up the trail or along the beach. It’s only a couple of miles.”
“Mike, any of his DNA?” she asked.
“She should have flesh and blood under her fingernails.” Mike lifted one of her hands. “He cleaned them out. I’ll have to get her back to the morgue to see if he dropped a hair or missed a molecule of skin.”
Kateri stared at Carolyn Abner’s circled, rigid fingers, at the wide silver ring, the torn nails and the broken skin over the knuckles. Then she had to look at her, all of her, and acknowledge the woman beneath the tragedy.
Carolyn Abner was dressed like a typical summertime tourist, in loose white capris and a pink sweatshirt jacket. Her hair was styled in a bob. She’d lost a sandal. Kateri thought of all the other tourists, some already spooked by the specter of John Terrance, some completely unaware, some determinedly going on with their vacations. She thought of Terrance, belligerent, skinny, scrawny, so mean he starved his own dog to ensure the beast was vicious. She was going to have to do something, and fast. “It’s our second slashing, and fatal. When I get back to City Hall and pull the preliminary reports together, I’ll call Garik Jacobsen at the FBI and see what he knows.”
Mike Sun reached up and punched Bergen on the thigh. “I told you she’d think of it herself.”