Chapter 19

I NEEDED COFFEE.All the calm and contentment I’d managed to generate last night by giving Ben Hammond a pounding was gone now. My shoulders were as hard as stone. We stopped at a café on the way back to the city and Tox dragged out an ancient black laptop.

“Claudia’s parents said nothing about her being a hooker.” I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe she was just dipping into the industry briefly to raise some money to go to college.”

“So why borrow the five G’s then?” Tox asked. “Why spend them on conservative clothes?”

“I don’t know. But while we’re on the subject of clothes, you’ll need to change before we go much farther.”

The waitress was so distracted by the blood on the front of Tox’s shirt that she hardly managed to get our order down. My new partner’s eyes were steadily blackening and there was a graze above his nasal bone. Tox glanced at his shirt.

“Eh,” he said.

“You’re going to go to college,” I mused. “Start fresh. Make something of your life. You’re twenty-four years old, so you’ve left it late, but not that late. You’ve been accepted. What do you do?”

“You go out and buy textbooks,” Tox said.

“Right. Textbooks, a laptop maybe. Not expensive clothes. And where’s this money coming from in the first place? The big money she says she’s about to come into?”

An e-mail came up on my phone and I checked it. It was a brief summary from the medical examiner, a quick review of his initial findings before the full autopsy on Claudia Burrows. Tox had been right about the livor mortis, and the pulmonary edema, and the fact that Claudia had likely been dead a day, in the water about twenty hours. He was also right about the breast implants. I saw him smiling at his laptop screen. He’d probably just gotten the same e-mail.

“This is interesting,” I said. “She’d had her hair dyed and cut no more than a week ago. And she’d taken a good bonk to the back of the head.”

“Feet are showing blisters from the new high heels,” Tox added.

“So whatever she needed to jazz up her appearance for, she’s done it in the last week or so. Parents didn’t mention any job interviews. Weird.”

Our coffees came. I gulped mine and ordered another.

“‘Skin slippage around the right ankle suggests ligature, ante-mortem, for a short amount of time, pulling downward over the front of the foot toward the toes,’” I read. “So she was weighed down when she went in the water.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, weight goes into the water.” I drew a circle on the greasy tabletop with my finger, a line rising from it. “Rope goes up from the weight, ties around Claudia’s ankle. Claudia floats upward, pulling the rope down toward her toes. The rope doesn’t bruise her too badly because it comes loose in the storm, letting her body float away.”

We fell into silence to consider the images before us, the cold medical text detailing Claudia’s horrific last moments on earth.

“This is a pretty nasty killer we have here,” I said. “I can’t imagine why throwing her in alive was necessary. By the time you’ve got her tied to the weight, she’s under your control. Why not put her out of her misery? Why make her think about the journey down to the bottom of the sea? It’s so vicious.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tox said. “Think about it. Putting her out of her misery is extra effort. Extra consideration. What we might have here is someone who isn’t even that thoughtful. Someone who never thought about what the victim would or wouldn’t feel. I think we’re looking for a killer whose priority is getting the job done, ticking the boxes. Just my opinion.”

I pushed my phone away and studied his face as he checked through the rest of his e-mails. I couldn’t help but feel an icy heaviness in my chest at his talk of priorities and getting the job done. He’d shown himself to be just that kind of man. Unconcerned with what people feel. I wondered if he was just talking about Claudia’s victims, or his own ones, too.