Page 28 of Remember Her Name

Anya said, “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you by now that everything I’m about to say is based on my initial impressions. I can’t give you any definitive answers until after the exam and autopsy.”

“Of course,” Josie said.

“I’d put her time of death at twenty to twenty-four hours ago, based on the emergence of the maggots alone.”

Maggots hatched from the blowflies’ eggs within twenty-four hours of being deposited into a body’s openings.

“That means she was killed shortly after she was abducted,” Josie said, doing the calculations in her head. The killer hadn’t wasted time. He’d likely killed Cleo shortly after arriving here. Yet, this did not strike her as an impulsive act on his part. Stealing the Hamptons’ car and ditching it at the lot was meant to throw the police off, waste their time and resources, and stretch them thin. It was all distraction.

Which meant that there was more to this case than they knew. Josie had the sinking feeling that they hadn’t even scratched the surface.

Anya pointed to a purple lump along Cleo Tate’s hairline, near her temple. “She’s got a head injury. There’s a superficial laceration to her left hand but other than that, if you look at her forearms, there are no defensive wounds.”

“He knocked her out,” said Josie.

“Or the injury disoriented her enough to make her compliant,” Anya suggested.

“There’s bruising, so she was alive for some time after he hit her, but she was incapacitated enough not to fight back when he started to stab her.”

Anya nodded, swatting at more blowflies, causing a cloud of them to take flight. “So far, I’ve counted three stab wounds on her body. One here.” She pointed to Cleo’s chest. “Here.” This time, her abdomen. “And here.” Her kidney. Maggots writhed inside each of the wounds.

Josie tore her gaze away long enough to see a pair of EMTs approaching with a Stokes basket. She recognized one of them instantly. Sawyer Hayes. Before Josie’s grandmother, Lisette Matson, died, Sawyer had come into their lives with a DNA test proving his blood relation to her. Eli Matson had been his father. The woman who abducted Josie had ensured that Sawyer never knew his father. He hadn’t even found out about his true parentage until he was an adult.

Anya picked her way down to Cleo’s feet, pointing at the backs of the woman’s calves. The skin above her white ankle socks was striped in pink and red. “If you look closely, you can see tiny blue paint chips embedded in her skin.”

“Which means he could have walked her up to the transom, and then she turned around or he forced her to look at him, at which point she fell back or he knocked her down and then started stabbing,” said Josie.

Anya batted more flies away from her face. “I’m not so sure she would have been capable of walking with that head injury.”

“Then he carried her, slung over his shoulder, and tossed her onto her back here, scraping her calves against the transom.”

Anya made a noise of agreement but it was a long way to carry a grown woman, especially in this heat.

Josie glanced back at Sawyer. He had had precious little time with Lisette, and Josie knew he blamed her for Lisette’s death. Josie had done her best to forge a relationship with him, but it was still rocky at times. Today, however, he gave her a wide smile. It sent a shock through her, not only because it was warm but also because every time she saw him, his resemblance to the man she believed was her father for most of her life felt like seeing Eli’s ghost. Maybe the few times she and Noah had had him over for dinner in the last couple of months had helped things.

She gave him a wave and turned back to the task at hand. “But she would have been able to move, right?”

Anya brushed a blowfly from her cheek. “I can’t say with any degree of certainty. It depends on the severity of her head injury. While I can tell from looking at it that it was likely severe enough to keep her from fighting back and make her more pliable, I can’t say whether she was completely unconscious. At least not until I’ve done the autopsy. Why?”

Josie’s eyes swept over Cleo’s body, seizing on the way the fingers of her right hand clutched at the hull’s edge, as if she were trying to pull herself out. “I’m wondering if she ended up in this position on her own or if he staged her body.”

“I’m not sure we’ll be able to answer that.” Anya waved a hand, indicating the entirety of the scene. “Rigor has already worn off but that’s not surprising given this heat. It tends to accelerate decomposition. Here, help me turn her.”

Josie knelt beside the boat at Cleo’s back. She kept her mouth closed against the flies, praying none tried to climb inside her nose. Small stones bit into her knees. Anya joined her, reaching across the body to peel Cleo’s fingers from the boat’s edge. Gingerly she pulled the upper portion of the body toward them while Josie turned the lower section. As expected, every inch of skin that had rested along the boat’s bottom and its shatteredwooden seats was a deep purplish-red. Livor mortis had set in. In the absence of cardiac activity and circulation, gravity made blood pool at the lowest points of the body, causing the discoloration. Twelve hours after death, it became fixed. Josie’s gaze was drawn to a slash in the side of her abdomen, above her hip. The curled bodies of larvae spilled out. She pointed out the wound to Anya.

“I see it. Hold her there while I get my camera. I want to?—”

She broke off, eyes fixed on something on the rotted floor of the boat, peeking out from under one of the bowed seats. Josie adjusted her stance, craning her neck to see what had caught Anya’s attention. There, nestled among the vegetation that had shot up through the splintered planks of the hull, under the board where Cleo Tate’s shoulder had just been, was a polaroid photo.

NINETEEN

“He’s taunting us,” Gretchen said.

Josie turned away from the corkboard and nodded her agreement. The whole stationhouse hummed with activity, uniformed officers coming and going, writing up their reports, checking in with their findings, and heading back out to complete more tasks in the Cleo Tate investigation. Gretchen and Turner sat at their desks while Josie stood beside Noah, studying the enlargement of the polaroid found under Cleo Tate’s body. The Chief stalked in and out of his office, grumbling under his breath and occasionally barking questions. Even Amber was there, perched on the edge of her desk, watching all of them with a subdued expression.

“Look at this,” Noah said. “There’s blood around the frame but not the actual photo.”

“He placed it under her body after he killed her,” said Josie. “In one of the few places where it wouldn’t get soaked with her blood.”

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