Chapter 9

“WHAT THE—”I stood up, tried to shield what Tox was doing from the press, who’d started snapping pictures. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Tox didn’t answer. He flipped the girl onto her front and pulled the underpants he’d slashed from her hips off her body. I watched in horror as he poked at the corpse’s backside with the butt of the blade. He leaned in close and examined the surface of her skin. Someone at the edge of the crowd sneered.

“Sicko,” somebody said. “Someone say something.”

“Nah, man. Leave him. Let him mess up all the evidence.”

“Detective Barnes,” I said, “I’m ordering you to stop what you’re doing right now.”

Tox put both his hands on the corpse’s back and pushed down hard, just once. He pulled the hair away from the girl’s face and stuck his third finger between her lips, pushed it deep inside her throat. The dead girl’s cheeks puckered obscenely to allow his finger to push down. He extracted the finger and looked at the tip in the torchlight, grunted thoughtfully. I watched him take the girl’s wrist and give it an exploratory wiggle before he stood up and dusted off his palms.

“Mmm,” he said, and strode away from me toward the riverbank.

I followed, grateful to be out of earshot of the vile things the cops at the tape were saying about him. I caught him at the water’s edge and shoved him hard in the back. He stumbled in the sand.

“What was that for?” he said in his strange, whispery voice.

“Jesus, I don’t know, for violating the corpse of a young woman in front of all the nation’s leading newspapers and half the police force?” I snarled. “What is wrong with you, man?”

“I wasn’t violating the corpse, I was testing a theory.” He looked toward the mouth of the river. “The kids who found the body said they thought they recognized the girl from a party last night, a few streets back from the river. I wanted to find out if that was bullshit before we go off interviewing all the morons who attended the party. She wasn’t there. So we can forget that.”

I felt as if I were dreaming. This man seemed to have no idea how inappropriate his handling of the body had been. He was looking off toward the river and talking to himself as though I wasn’t standing there.

“Of course she wasn’t at the party,” I said. “Are you that stupid? She’s a Georges River girl. Right river, right age, right placement of the body. I could have told you that before you stuck your finger in her mouth.”

“Are you that stupid?” Tox looked at me finally. “She’s not one of the Georges River Killer’s victims. No. She didn’t die anywhere near here.”

“You’re insane.” I waved him away and turned back to the crime scene. “You don’t touch a body until forensics is done with it. That’s the first thing they teach you on the first day of forensics. You just… you’ve compromised the case.”

I could hardly speak I was so mad. His passive stare made it worse.

“Forensics won’t find anything,” he said. “She’s been in the water for hours.”

“I’m not listening to you. I like my job too much.”

“Heh,” he said. “If you liked your job so much, you wouldn’t insist on doing it wrong.”

“Fuck you.”

“She wasn’t killed here. She was killed out at sea. She came here in the storm.”

I stopped walking and stared at him.

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked back with the ease and calm of a madman.

“Bullshit.”

“Nope,” he said. “She’s got mottled livor mortis on her ass and pulmonary edema in her lungs.”

He waited, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him to explain how he’d come up with that. He walked toward me and stood over me, as most men do.

“Livor mortis,” he said. “The settling and pooling of blood in the veins after de—”

“I know what livor mortis is, asshole.”

“Well, you’ll know that if a corpse is being tossed around in rough water, the blood doesn’t settle, so it never collects,” he said. “Except in the ass. Fine skin. Lots of big juicy fat cells. I’d say she’s been in the water at least twenty hours. With the storm blowing a westerly, she was likely dumped out there, in the ocean.”

“The rigor mortis? Not set?”

“No.”

“And the pulmonary edema,” I said, feeling my hackles rise again. “The foam in her lu—”

“I know what pulmonary edema is, asshole,” Tox said.

“She was alive when she went in,” I whispered.