Page 6 of Her Dying Secret

“Here,” Sawyer said, flashing the phone screen toward her. A freckled forearm filled the screen, covered in what looked like a half dozen puncture marks and jagged gashes of varying sizes. Blood congealed around the wounds. Some were shallow while others gaped open. Yellow fatty tissue bulged from a gouge in the meatiest part of her arm while another showed what Josie thought might be bone.

“That’s not from a car accident,” she said.

“Didn’t think so,” Sawyer said with a sigh. He swiped to a second photo which showed Mira’s other forearm. Fewer wounds but similar to the first set he’d shown Josie. “I saved her jacket, too,” he added.

Sawyer’s partner banged a fist against the dash, calling for them to move.

“Thank you. Someone from the ERT will collect all her clothes and boots at the hospital,” Josie said. “To process them.”

“I’ll send you these pictures,” Sawyer said.

She watched the ambulance pull away, trying to ignore the dread building inside her at the thought of what she was going to find at the accident scene.

FIVE

Ten minutes later, Josie was dressed in her own Tyvek suit. She pushed the last of her black locks under the elastic of the skull cap as Brennan lifted the crime scene tape for her to slip beneath it. She dodged evidence markers and did her best to avoid the broken glass scattered over the road as she approached the passenger’s side of the sedan. Up close, she could see that its hood was crushed accordion-style. Somehow, the damage hadn’t deformed so much of the car’s frame that the doors couldn’t be opened. Both of them stood ajar. Dr. Anya Feist knelt at the opening to the passenger’s seat, taking photos with her own camera. She glanced up when she heard Josie approach. As she always did when they met at crime scenes, she offered Josie a pained smile.

“Thought you were off today.”

“I am.” Josie moved in closer, getting her first look at the passenger. Her breath caught in her throat.

Studying her, Anya said, “It’s disturbing, I know.”

Josie’s heart fluttered. She’d seen some horrific things on the job. Bodies so destroyed from accidents and murders that she would have been nauseated for days if she hadn’t learned to deal with carnage early on in her career and become so good at squashing her visceral reactions in favor of getting her job done. This certainly wasn’t the goriest thing she’d ever seen, but something about it set off her inner alarm bells. “It’s not what I expected.”

Anya snapped another photo of the woman. Her skull rested against the headrest, looking too big for her frail body but that was only because she was emaciated. The pale skin of her face was taut against her bony cheeks. Even her teeth seemed to protrude, as though her lips had started to shrink back—or maybe it was that her gums had swollen. A stained T-shirt, that might have been white at some point but was now yellow and gray with grime and age, hung on her shoulders. At the neck, the ends of her collarbones jutted out. Her short brown hair was dull. Josie could see the places where it had been unevenly cut. Not cut, she realized. Hacked away. In some places, the hair had been shorn so close to her scalp that only skin remained.

Someone had done this to her—not by her choice.

Josie’s stomach turned. Anya stepped to the side, snapping photos from a different angle. “Don’t ask me what happened to her. You know I can’t tell you that until I get her on the table.”

“Brennan said this was a homicide. Sawyer just showed me defensive wounds on the driver’s forearms. Most of them look like puncture wounds although not any type of bite mark. What’s going on here?”

Anya beckoned her closer to the car. Careful not to touch anything, Josie poked her head inside. There was a distinctive odor emanating from the passenger. It was a putrid mixture of body odor, human waste, and something else—something earthy. Trying her best to ignore it, she scanned the woman, immediately zeroing in on what the rest of the team had already seen. “Well, shit.”

Behind her, Anya said, “Doesn’t get much more obvious than that.”

Through a pair of threadbare gray sweatpants, the shape of the woman’s knobby knees was visible. They kissed the dashboard, the impact having lodged them in place so that her bare feet dangled over the floor. One of her thin hands rested in her lap in a tight fist. The other curled around a small, oddly shaped wooden handle protruding from her abdomen. A knife? No part of the blade was visible. Blood, still fresh and red, bloomed all around the hilt.

That was why Sawyer had mentioned the wounds on Mira Summers’s forearms. But what kind of knife left puncture marks? Unless it wasn’t a knife. Josie craned her neck, trying to get a better look, but the woman’s fist covered most of the handle. They’d have to wait for it to be removed from the body in order to confirm that it was a knife.

“They were both stabbed with something. Do you think the passenger died in this car?” asked Josie.

Anya shrugged. “It’s possible. Either that or she died shortly before she got into it. Her death was in the last two hours. She hasn’t gone into rigor yet.”

Josie’s eyes were drawn to the tan seat belt strapped across her chest, above the hilt of the knife. “She’d already been stabbed when she got in here. Even if the dashboard was where it should be, there wouldn’t be enough room for someone to drive this thing into her abdomen straight on like that from inside the car—even if the blade was relatively short. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen inside this car.”

“Agree.”

The car’s interior upholstery was tan, now smeared and splattered with blood. Glass sparkled in the crevices of the driver’s seat. Blood dried on the center console and the driver’s side door. It was smeared across the steering wheel. The back seat was empty. Backing up slightly, Josie studied the bottom of the passenger’s side doorframe and saw more blood droplets.

Glancing over her shoulder at Anya, she said, “Either these two managed to get away from whoever attacked them before he could finish the job, or her killer left the knife in her body.”

“We don’t actually know if the stab wound is what caused this woman’s death,” Anya pointed out. “She could have died from injuries sustained in the accident. I won’t know until I do the autopsy.”

Josie knew Anya was right, but she also knew enough about anatomy to have already made the leap from motor vehicle accident fatality to murder. “What’s your educated guess? MVA fatality or homicide?”

Anya sighed. “Given the location of the knife and assuming the blade is three to four inches long, my educated guess is that this is a homicide. Murderers don’t usually leave the weapons behind. I haven’t seen that many retained knives as medical examiner. Only once. It was a domestic. Messy. Multiple stab wounds. The husband left it in her on purpose. He was making a statement.” Anya shuddered, and Josie knew she was thinking of her own abusive ex-husband. He was now in prison for multiple crimes, not least of which was murdering Josie’s former colleague, Detective Finn Mettner. Josie’s palms tingled. Whenever she thought of Finn, her body remembered the feel of his hand in hers as he bled out. Sometimes it felt like she’d never really let go. She quickly found the box in her mental vault where she kept her most traumatic memories and stuffed the thought back inside.

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