You could hear the morning traffic, on the street and overhead, but here, there was a small slice of countrified with a vegetable patch spread out in tidy rows behind a screen of pest and vandal fence. She didn’t know what the hell was growing in it. Leafy stuff and viney stuff and things that sprawled over small, neat hills.
Part of that verdant smell was probably fertilizer or manure or whatever the hell these people mixed in the dirt to grow things they’d eventually put in their mouths and call natural.
Well, come to think of it, there wasn’t anything much more natural than shit.
Except blood and death.
At the end of the patch, behind the odd little vertical triangles where vines grew, behind the screen to keep dogs and street people out, was a statue of a man and a woman. Each wore a hat. He carried some sort of hoe or rake, and she a basket loaded with what was meant to be the fruits of their labor. A harvest.
Harvest was the name of the statue, she knew, but everyone called it Ma and Pa Farmer. Or just Ma and Pa.
Annalisa lay at their feet, like an offering to the gods with her hands clasped between her naked breasts. Her face was bloody and ruined, her body covered with bruises.
“Crappy way to start the day,” Peabody commented.
“Yeah. A lot crappier for her.”
Eve fixed on her goggles, got out her gauges. “Get her ID.”
She began to recite what the recorder could already see.
“Victim is Caucasian female. Evidence of violence on face, torso, limbs. Broken clavicle. No defensive wounds evident. Red corded ribbon at the throat apparent murder weapon. Strangulation. There is evidence of sexual assault. Bruising and lacerations on the thighs and genitals.”
“ID’d as Annalisa Sommers, age thirty-two. Resides Fifteen West Thirty-first.”
“Identification now on record. Victim’s eyes have been removed in a manner similar to previous victims Maplewood and Napier. Manner of assault, death, mutilation, location type, and position of body all in accordance with previous victims.”
“He doesn’t vary much from pattern,” Peabody said.
“Not much. Why mess with success? Got some hair fibers. On her right hand, adhering to the dried blood.”
She tweezed them off, bagged them. And sat back on her haunches.
“What was she doing in here, Dallas? Walking through here in the middle of the damn night. They four-walled the media conference. She had to know this guy trolls the parks.”
“Not going to happen to her. People always think it can’t happen to them, instead of thinking it’s going to happen to somebody, why not me.”
She studied the body. “She lives close. That fits with the others, too. Odds are she had a pattern, coming through here, on her way home, or away from home. She cuts through, knows her way around. Hair’s not right,” Eve muttered.
“A little shorter than the others, a little darker. But still in the ballpark.”
“Yeah.”
“He’d have to be a little flexible, wouldn’t he?”
“Apparently.”
With the scene on record, the body’s position logged, she turned the victim’s head, lifted it. “Took a blow to the back of the head. Hard blow. Maybe he comes up behind her, comes up, hits her, takes her down. She’s got some scrapes at the knees, grass and dirt in the cuts. She goes down, hands and knees.”
She lifted one of the hands, showed the abrasions on the heels. “Then he lays into her. Beating, kicking. Violence is escalating each time. More premortem violence. Losing it. Rapes her, carts her over, finishes the job.”
“We didn’t hear from Celina on this one.”
“Noticed that?” Eve pushed to her feet. “We’ll tag her in a few minutes. Let’s look at the kill site.”
It wasn’t far this time, just on the other end of the vegetable patch, along the path. Traces of blood were in splotches or sprinkles or smears, over grass and dirt.
Made it easier for him, Eve thought. He only had to carry this one about eight feet.