Chapter 5

Ten minutes later, Josie was dressed in her own Tyvek suit. She pushed the last of her black locks under the elastic of the skull cap as Brennan lifted the crime scene tape for her to slip beneath it. She dodged evidence markers and did her best to avoid the broken glass scattered over the road as she approached the passenger's side of the sedan. Up close, she could see that its hood was crushed accordion-style. Somehow, the damage hadn't deformed so much of the car's frame that the doors couldn't be opened. Both of them stood ajar. Dr. Anya Feist knelt at the opening to the passenger's seat, taking photos with her own camera. She glanced up when she heard Josie approach. As she always did when they met at crime scenes, she offered Josie a pained smile.

"Thought you were off today."

"I am." Josie moved in closer, getting her first look at the passenger. Her breath caught in her throat.

Studying her, Anya said, "It's disturbing, I know."

Josie's heart fluttered. She'd seen some horrific things on the job. Bodies so destroyed from accidents and murders that she would have been nauseated for days if she hadn't learned to deal with carnage early on in her career and become so good at squashing her visceral reactions in favor of getting her job done. This certainly wasn't the goriest thing she'd ever seen, but something about it set off her inner alarm bells. "It's not what I expected."

Anya snapped another photo of the woman. Her skull rested against the headrest, looking too big for her frail body but that was only because she was emaciated. The pale skin of her face was taut against her bony cheeks. Even her teeth seemed to protrude, as though her lips had started to shrink back—or maybe it was that her gums had swollen. A stained T-shirt, that might have been white at some point but was now yellow and gray with grime and age, hung on her shoulders. At the neck, the ends of her collarbones jutted out. Her short brown hair was dull. Josie could see the places where it had been unevenly cut. Not cut, she realized. Hacked away. In some places, the hair had been shorn so close to her scalp that only skin remained.

Someone had done this to her—not by her choice.

Josie's stomach turned. Anya stepped to the side, snapping photos from a different angle. "Don't ask me what happened to her. You know I can't tell you that until I get her on the table."

"Brennan said this was a homicide. Sawyer just showed me defensive wounds on the driver's forearms. Most of them look like puncture wounds although not any type of bite mark. What's going on here?"

Anya beckoned her closer to the car. Careful not to touch anything, Josie poked her head inside. There was a distinctive odor emanating from the passenger. It was a putrid mixture of body odor, human waste, and something else—something earthy. Trying her best to ignore it, she scanned the woman, immediately zeroing in on what the rest of the team had already seen. "Well, shit."

Behind her, Anya said, "Doesn't get much more obvious than that."

Through a pair of threadbare gray sweatpants, the shape of the woman's knobby knees was visible. They kissed the dashboard, the impact having lodged them in place so that her bare feet dangled over the floor. One of her thin hands rested in her lap in a tight fist. The other curled around a small, oddly shaped wooden handle protruding from her abdomen. A knife? No part of the blade was visible. Blood, still fresh and red, bloomed all around the hilt.

That was why Sawyer had mentioned the wounds on Mira Summers's forearms. But what kind of knife left puncture marks? Unless it wasn't a knife. Josie craned her neck, trying to get a better look, but the woman's fist covered most of the handle. They'd have to wait for it to be removed from the body in order to confirm that it was a knife.

"They were both stabbed with something. Do you think the passenger died in this car?" asked Josie.

Anya shrugged. "It's possible. Either that or she died shortly before she got into it. Her death was in the last two hours. She hasn't gone into rigor yet."

Josie's eyes were drawn to the tan seat belt strapped across her chest, above the hilt of the knife. "She'd already been stabbed when she got in here. Even if the dashboard was where it should be, there wouldn't be enough room for someone to drive this thing into her abdomen straight on like that from inside the car—even if the blade was relatively short. Whatever happened, it didn't happen inside this car."

"Agree."

The car's interior upholstery was tan, now smeared and splattered with blood. Glass sparkled in the crevices of the driver's seat. Blood dried on the center console and the driver's side door. It was smeared across the steering wheel. The back seat was empty. Backing up slightly, Josie studied the bottom of the passenger's side doorframe and saw more blood droplets.

Glancing over her shoulder at Anya, she said, "Either these two managed to get away from whoever attacked them before he could finish the job, or her killer left the knife in her body."

"We don't actually know if the stab wound is what caused this woman's death," Anya pointed out. "She could have died from injuries sustained in the accident. I won't know until I do the autopsy."

Josie knew Anya was right, but she also knew enough about anatomy to have already made the leap from motor vehicle accident fatality to murder. "What's your educated guess? MVA fatality or homicide?"

Anya sighed. "Given the location of the knife and assuming the blade is three to four inches long, my educated guess is that this is a homicide. Murderers don't usually leave the weapons behind. I haven't seen that many retained knives as medical examiner. Only once. It was a domestic. Messy. Multiple stab wounds. The husband left it in her on purpose. He was making a statement." Anya shuddered, and Josie knew she was thinking of her own abusive ex-husband. He was now in prison for multiple crimes, not least of which was murdering Josie's former colleague, Detective Finn Mettner. Josie's palms tingled. Whenever she thought of Finn, her body remembered the feel of his hand in hers as he bled out. Sometimes it felt like she'd never really let go. She quickly found the box in her mental vault where she kept her most traumatic memories and stuffed the thought back inside.

"What a bastard," Josie said.

"Yeah." Anya studied the victim, head tilting in thought. "In my experience, though, stabbing deaths resulting from domestic violence are usually much worse than this. These men—they never stab just once."

But someone had tried to stab Mira Summers multiple times. Had she been trying to defend the passenger? Had she been stabbed with the same weapon that now protruded from the victim's stomach?

Josie's eyes were drawn to the woman's hollow cheeks again. "If we're looking at a domestic, maybe the stabbing wasn't the worst of what he did to her."

"Or maybe you're not looking at a domestic. Maybe the killer is someone other than a partner. Maybe she was trying to get away. Could be the driver was trying to help her. In my ER rotation, I saw a few retained knives from stabbing incidents. It was usually because the person was too afraid to pull the knife out. In at least two of the cases, the patient thought that somehow the knife was holding all the vessels and tissue in place and preventing them from bleeding out."

Under her cap, sweat beaded at Josie's hairline, making her scalp itch. "Were they right?"

"One of them was, yes. Sort of. He would have bled out anyway—the damage was done—but leaving the knife in did slow the bleeding long enough for him to get the medical care that saved his life."

"You think she was trying to keep the knife where it was until she got help?" Josie asked, gaze flitting to the woman's skeletal fingers curled around the knife handle.

"I don't know. Maybe she was too weak to pull it out, or maybe the driver was afraid to pull it out," Anya said.

"Mira Summers put a seat belt on this woman. She was driving her somewhere. Maybe to the hospital?"

"Why not call 911?" Anya asked.

Josie looked toward the north where the road stretched on until the horizon, nothing ahead, and then south, where it rolled down a long hill leading into the city. "If they were fleeing someone, she might not have had time. If they were attacked somewhere out here, it would probably take 911 too long to get to wherever they were." She pointed to the northbound side of the road. "This goes on for at least fifteen miles before it reaches another town. There might be a few residences in between, but this is a fairly deserted stretch of road."

She'd have to find out where the driver was coming from and at what point and under what circumstances the passenger got inside the car. According to what Brennan had read off from Mira Summers's driver's license, she lived in Denton, which meant she must have traveled this road and then turned back toward the city.

Anya said, "That's your department. I'll do what I can on exam and autopsy to give you something to work with in terms of the actual homicide."

Josie stepped back so that Anya could continue her examination. She snapped a few more photos before returning her camera to its case. Then she leaned inside the car, arching her back so she didn't disturb the handle of the weapon, and used her gloved hands to probe the pockets of the woman's sweatpants. Josie couldn't help but notice that those, too, looked old and dirty. Mud streaked down their front.

"Nothing in the pockets," Anya muttered.

Josie hadn't expected anything. The woman didn't even have shoes on. It appeared the only thing in her possession was the weapon that had killed her.

"Almost done," Anya said. "I just want to check her other hand."

Josie watched as Anya pried the woman's fist open. Flakes of dried blood fell from her fingers. In the center of her palm was a folded piece of white paper.

"What do we have here?" Anya said, her voice tinged with excitement.

"Hummel!" Josie called. "We've got something."

A moment later, he was at her side, his clipboard tucked under his arm. Josie stepped back several feet and Anya joined her as they let the ERT document and photograph the paper before it was removed.

Finally, they gathered near the open door again as Hummel unfolded the page with care. It looked like regular copy paper they used in the office. "It's damp," he said. The ends of it hung limply from his hands. Smears of blood marred the edges.

Anya said, "Is that?—"

"A child's drawing," Josie said.