She drove through a series of paddocks where the gates had been left open and followed the tire tracks that wound their way onto a huge field where the pristine blanket of snow had been broken into a thick trail of tire tracks running along one fence.
“This butts up to government land,” Watershed explained. “O’Halleran and his kid were out checking for holes in the fence.” As the Jeep powered through six to eight inches of snow, he went on to tell the same story Alvarez had relayed earlier, finishing with, “So once the kid spooked and took off for the house on his horse, O’Halleran investigated and found the woman, obviously dead. Still, he pulled her from the water and checked for a pulse, listened to her lungs, but she’d been in there awhile, her body half frozen. You’ll see.”
“And the missing finger?” Alvarez asked.
“Ring finger, left hand. Not found. So far. Sliced off pretty cleanly at the first knuckle. Don’t know if it was pre- or postmortem.”
“Lovely,” Alvarez said. “A finger fetish?”
“Just a freak,” Pescoli said as they reached the end of the field near a meandering brook bordered by stands of trees. Officers were already on the job, a tarp laid out across which a partially clothed body of a woman lay. Her skin was blue, her hair wet, the finger missing, but Pescoli noted there were earrings visible in her earlobes. “O’Halleran didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?”
Watershed shook his head. “Nope. And no tracks have been found around the area. Don’t know if she was killed here, or brought here and the body dumped. Could have come from the federal land. There’s an access road about a mile west.”
Pescoli asked, “What about the neighbors?”
“Haven’t talked to them yet.”
“Let’s do it,” Pescoli said, scanning the area. “She had to get here somehow.” Squinting through the falling snow, she added, “Not much chance of finding any trace.” The frigid weather was working against them, but then it always did.
“You don’t know what we’ll find.” Alvarez was always more optimistic than she, a woman who believed that with today’s technology, anything was possible.
At the edge of the trees, parked helter-skelter, were a rescue vehicle from the fire department, another department-issued Jeep, a crime scene van and a banged-up pickup with two dogs locked in the cab, their noses pressed to the window. Officers dressed in heavy outerwear were already scouring the creek bed and surrounding area. Crime scene tape stretched from one sapling to the next, roping off the area that was to be searched.
Pescoli parked the Jeep close to the rescue van. “O’Halleran here?”
“Yeah, out talking to Cabral,” Watershed said as Pescoli cut the engine.
She noticed the rancher standing near another deputy, Rosetta Cabral, new to the force, all of twenty-four years old. Just a girl in Pescoli’s opinion, though she was a college graduate, divorced, and a single mother of a two-year-old. Cabral was blessed with the same gung ho fire as Blackwater and was currently engaging Trace O’Halleran in conversation.
“The kid?” Pescoli asked.
“In the Jeep with Beaumont.” Watershed nodded toward the other Pinewood County vehicle. “Came back down here with his mom after he ran back to the house. She’s a doctor, you know. Drove like mad down here in that truck,” he said, hitching his chin toward the beat-up Chevy. “Brought the kid with her ’cause she wasn’t sure what was going on. She thought that maybe she could save the Jane Doe, but nah, it was . . . too late.”
They climbed out and trudged between the vehicles to the tarp where a woman, maybe thirty or thirty-five, lay stretched onto a tarp, another sheet of plastic tented so that the body was protected and couldn’t be viewed from the vehicle where the O’Halleran boy was keeping warm.
“We got statements from everyone?” Pescoli asked, and Watershed nodded.
Mikhail Slatkin, a forensic scientist, was kneeling on the edge of the tarp, examining the body as they waited for someone from the coroner’s office to arrive. Over six feet and rawboned, the son of Russian immigrants, he was one of the best forensic scientists Pescoli had ever worked with.
“What happened to her?” she asked, studying the victim.
She’d been short, around five-two, Pescoli guessed, with long brownish hair on the curly side that was stiff and riddled with tiny ice crystals. The woman’s face was heart-shaped, with a straight little nose and blue eyes that were fixed, seeming to stare blindly upward. Neatly plucked eyebrows and thin cheeks lay above cold, blue lips. She was wearing a dress, gray and fitted, earrings that looked like diamond studs, and fingers and toes that were polished a matching cranberry hue. Unbroken fingernails, neatly manicured, suggested there had been no struggle. Well, except for the ring finger of her left hand, most of which was missing.
What’s up with that? The killer’s trophy? Or an accident that had sent her running here? Pescoli regarded the wooded foothills where snow was covering the ground, boulders and snags protruding from the thick white blanket, the nearly frozen stream softly gurgling as it wound between the trees.
Slat
kin glanced up, his blue eyes finding her gaze. “Don’t know yet. Maybe drowned. Or could be head trauma. Got a few bruises.” He frowned thoughtfully, eyeing the woman’s slim throat. “Possible strangulation.” His thick eyebrows drew together over his cold-reddened face. “Won’t know until the autopsy.”
Nodding, Pescoli stared down at the dead woman and wondered what had happened to her. How had she ended up in this creek? Had she made it under her own power, or had someone left her here? And why here? She glanced around the stretch of ranch land where field met forest. Why had this place been chosen as either the killing ground or dumping spot? Eyeing the creek, she saw that it was deep enough for a body to submerge, despite the encroaching ice. Where was the woman’s coat or jacket? Her shoes? Her purse and, especially, her finger?
What kind of whacked-up freak would cut off the finger?
Of course, Pescoli reminded herself, we don’t know one hundred percent that the woman has been murdered.
The missing finger certainly suggested that something violent had gone down, maybe even some kind of accident. She had learned over the years not to make quick assumptions, though oftentimes her gut instinct proved right. Until all the facts were in, however, she wouldn’t make a final decision.
Once more, she looked at the left hand where a finger had been severed, the bone and flesh visible. Her stomach turned a bit and she drew her eyes away for a second, nausea building.