“You’re the first to arrive.” Not unusual, but I’m about to reprimand him if his attitude doesn’t change.
“Have they been called?” Approaching the body, I see it’s been covered up. “You do that?” He should damn well know better if he did.
Rolling his eyes, he stares at me like I’m a rookie. “Yeah, they’ve been called. Should be here any minute now.”
“And this?” While lifting the corner of the tarp, I see the CSI truck pull up at the same time as my partner.
“Didn’t think she should be bare like that.” His nonchalant attitude is starting to piss me off.
“That’s not your call to make. You know the rules, the regulations. You’re to secure the scene, call it in, and nothing else. How do you know you didn’t affect critical evidence by doing this?” His cheeks turn ruddy as I admonish him.
“Decker, what have we got?” My partner, Dorian Wagner, glares at the covered body when he notices the techs haven’t done their job yet, either. “What the fuck is this shit?”
“A mistake,” I grunt, turning my back on the idiot sergeant.
“I was just tryna’ be respectful. Jesus Christ.” Throwing up his hands, the man walks back up to where his cruiser is parked, passing the annoyed crime scene guys as he goes. Today is not going to be a good day. Everybody is starting this case off in a bad way, which never leads to a good outcome.
“He new?” Dexter, one of the techs, asks as he places his kit on the ground next to the body and begins carefully rolling the covering up, transferring it into an evidence bag another guy hands him.
“Nope. Just wanted outta here,” Dorian mutters before I can. It’s obvious in the way the officer conducted himself today that he just doesn’t give a shit. “Here we go.” Dorian hisses as the woman’s body is revealed.
Blonde, five-six, well-groomed, sexually assaulted before being strangled and beaten up. She went through hell before taking her final breaths. That’s only observational, too. I know from the way she’s torn up that the medical examiner will have a lot more to say about her final hours and minutes of life.
“Gruesome.” Dorian looks up at me from his crouched position as I stare down at the woman. There’s something about her that I’m not registering. Something familiar.
Stepping back a few feet, I walk in a measured circle around her, inspecting the ground she’s lying on, as well as how she’s positioned. It’s niggling at the back of my mind as I make it to her head. A crown of twigs and leaves has been placed around her head, almost like an ethereal glow, enshrining her.
“Hey, Dex, you got a bag for me?” After preserving her hands with plastic coverings, he reaches into his kit and grabs me one. Leaning over her body, that’s when I see it. Hiding behind her hair, on the side of her neck, is a bar code tattoo. “Take a look at this.” There’s been a trafficker in the area over this past year that we’ve been unable to locate and arrest who has been killing his girls. All of them have matching neck tattoos and given where they’ve been found and how they’ve been positioned each time, I fully believe they’re being hunted before they’re raped and killed.
“You think it’s him again?” Dorian grabs Dexter’s camera to take pictures before I pull her hair back with a pen to expose the tattoo.
“It has to be. We’ve never seen anything else like this before. Whomever this guy is, I think he’s getting ready to move. When was the last body found?” I’m unsure how long he was here before landing on our radar, but for almost sixteen months now, we’ve been finding one or two bodies a month, each victim similar to this one.
“Load her up and get her back to the morgue. I want to know everything we can about this girl as soon as possible.” She barely looks eighteen. If I had to guess, I’d say seventeen at the most. Notifying her family is going to be brutal.
Laken
He looks tired. Downright exhausted. Like he’s been up five days straight, and there’s no end in sight. But he’s here, as usual, on the days I work. Except for my last shift two days ago. He was missing then, but it isn’t until right now that I even notice or realize that I’ve been watching for him for the past two and a half hours that I’ve been here.
Sitting outside at his regular table, he hasn’t even ordered anything. He just sort of collapsed into the chair and leaned back. His easy-going demeanor isn’t as it appears, though. He looks languid on the outside, with his backward baseball cap and sunglasses covering his eyes, but I know he’s alert and watching me. I can feel his stare.
“I’ll be right back, Ophelia.” Filling up the largest cup we’ve got, I leave it black with one packet of brown sugar, just how he likes it, and grab one of the spinach wraps I made fresh an hour ago before heading outside. I see his head tracking my moves, and as I get closer to his table, he sits up straighter before removing his glasses and laying them down.
I was right; he’s exhausted.
“You didn’t come in.” As if he doesn’t realize that on his own.
“No, I didn’t.” He continues to watch me. I never noticed before, but his eyes are the lightest blue I’ve ever seen. “Those for me?” He nods at the offerings in my hands.
“You normally get them.” Placing them down on the table, I’m about to run back inside when I feel the warmth of his gentle touch as he hooks a finger around mine.
So simple.
So sweet.
So unknowing.
“Sit with me.” I don’t know why I do it—I swore I’d never do as I was instructed or demanded again—but the way his tone lowers, pleads with me, begs me to keep him company, I plant my butt firmly in the empty chair across from him. “Thank you.” The smile he graces me with has butterflies exploding in my belly.