He stared at her. “Do you think they leave evidence every time?”
She smiled, nodded, and stated, “Every damn time. I get that this guy is getting better and that chances are there might be something here that we haven’t seen before, but there’s also always a chance that he made a mistake. And one of the mistakes is that, in this case, he didn’t dispose of the body yet. So either he wasn’t done or wasn’t ready, and now he’ll never get that opportunity to clean up whatever he may have left behind for forensics to find. This poor victim is mine now,” she stated. “And, as much as I would hope to never ever see one like this again, she’s mine now, and I’ll do my best for her. And, more than that, I’ll take every step I can to make sure this guy doesn’t take another victim ever again.”
And he believed her.
There was just something so quietly passionate as she turned her already professional gaze to study the scenario. She looked at him and said, “Please, just move back a little bit farther.”
He nodded and watched as she went to work because it was a treat to see such professionalism and passion focused on the scene. As long as he didn’t spend too much time thinking about what it was that she was focused on, it was pure magic to watch it happen.
He wanted to ask what she was getting from this scene already, but he pushed it back, realizing that, for any number of reasons, she wouldn’t respond. All of her reasons would be good, but, at the same time, it was irritating to always be waiting for her to have time for him. He shook his head, smiling, because his complaint with previous girlfriends was that they had been too clingy and had always been asking more of him.
Chapter 15
Hours later Katestepped away from the body. Rodney had been at her side and had been for the last half hour.
“You ready to go home?” he asked her.
She broke her trance, locked on to this poor victim for far too long, looked up at Rodney, slightly confused, then nodded. “Yeah, I need to grab some shut-eye,” she murmured, turning resolutely away from the crime scene.
“At least we found ground zero,” he murmured.
“At least,” she agreed. “Too bad we couldn’t get ahead of this guy.”
“She’s been dead for quite a while,” Rodney noted. “I don’t know how long. The coroner is not giving us anything to go on yet. But it had to be at least a week.”
“Why?” she asked, looking up at him. “Why this victim? Why now? That’s more than two, unlike his previous pattern.”
“Hmm. That puts this woman’s capture very close to when we found the last one, when we found Cherry.”
“Exactly, so the question is, why so close together? What triggered it?”
“It would be somewhere around the time that you started the case investigation.” Rodney stared at her.
“What? So he takes another victim to taunt me?” she asked in disgust.
“No, I guess not. At that point he probably didn’t even know you were assigned to these cases.”
“I agree”—she nodded—“but he disposed of the other victim, Cherry, and not this one. Why?”
“She didn’t deserve it,” Rodney guessed, topped with a shrug.
She turned and looked at him. “Why?” she asked, pushing further.
“This one didn’t act the way he wanted her to. She wasn’t worthy.”
“Worthy? Simon suggested she died too quickly.”
Rodney nodded slowly. “And that makes a weird sense, if you think about it. If she died too soon, he didn’t get the same pleasure and satisfaction of the torture he had planned for her. He was too fast, too brutal with this one. Just look at her body, at the damage done to her. I think she probably died very, very quickly. Some of these injuries look like he just lashed out.”
“And quite possibly could be postmortem then,” Kate suggested.
“That’ll be Dr. Smidge’s job to confirm,” he noted.
She nodded. “He won’t be happy with this.”
Rodney laughed. “He’s never happy with us because we always bring him work.”
“And it’s not the work any of us want to bring him either. But that’s what the job is.”