Page 20 of Water's Edge

Now write a big report.I hope to keep her busy and out of my hair.

“Okay.” She gets up and looks around for a computer. “I’ll have to call Roy and find out when he and Deputy Floyd arrived.”

Roy?“You don’t need that in your report. The captainwill do his own report.” She just stands there. I don’t have time to hold her hand. “When you’re finished, let me read it before we give it to the sheriff. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I pick up the desk phone and start to dial Jerry Larsen’s number. Ronnie is trying to get my attention.

“What?”

“What time do I get off today?”

We get off when I say we get off.

“Whenever your shift is over, you can leave. If it’s important, you can leave whenever.”

Deputy Marsh is not going to make it as a detective. She may not make it as a deputy. But that is her problem. I didn’t want to take her on this morning and my gut feelings on her were right on target. Her shift ended an hour ago, but I would have thought she’d show a little interest in this. She sulks off and I get on the phone and call Larsen.

No answer.

I finish my report and collect what Ronnie has typed up. It’s actually pretty concise; I have to give her that. We have to wait for Crime Scene’s report. They will be working on it for a while. Crime Scene will run the victim’s fingerprints through our database and IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—the national fingerprint and criminal history system kept by the FBI. I have a thought just then. Maybe she isn’t in IAFIS or the local and state database. If she commits a crime that is minor enough, some jurisdictions don’t enter fingerprints. In Jefferson County, if we arrest someone for a minor vandalism, for instance, we don’t require the suspect’s prints be put in any database. We keep them in our records, but that’s as far as it goes.

I check a few things on the missing persons database and get nowhere. I tell Ronnie she can go home, and she bolts. I check in with Sheriff Gray. He’s playing solitaire on his computer.

“I want to catch you up.”

“Do you have a suspect?”

“No.”

“Have you identified the victim?”

“No.”

“Have you done everything you can for the night?”

“Yes.”

“Go home and leave me to my solitary pursuits.”

I smile politely at his pun and head for home thinking I should have asked Ronnie to get a drink with me. On the other hand I was hoping that I’d seen the last of her. If Sheriff Gray sees us getting close, he will keep us paired.

Not going to happen.

Eleven

I sit, engine running, in front of my place in Port Townsend, lost in thought. The thing about being a detective is that you never stop detecting. You don’t write a traffic citation or make an arrest and then go home knowing tomorrow will be different. What’s on my mind is the preliminary coroner’s report. He faxed it over, but I need to clarify what he found. Her hand was broken. There were scrape marks on the wrist and bruising on the heel of her right hand. The trapezium and metacarpal bones were dislocated. The metacarpals are the bones in the palm of the hand, which the fingers are connected to, and the trapezium is the bone that connects the thumb’s metacarpal to the wrist. He said my hunch about handcuffs was the most likely cause. She had pulled or tried to pull her hand out of one of the cuffs. The bruising down the side of the hand, from wrist to little finger, indicated she was successful. As if that weren’t enough, the metacarpals of both hands were broken, and half-moon-shaped bruising suggested someone stomped on them. He also saw scuff marks on the backs of both elbows. He didn’t touch them but indicated it in his preliminary for the pathologist to confirm. To him it looked like she’d crawled on elbows and knees across a rough surface. He didn’t see fiber but didn’t rule it out.

I figure this is punishment for trying to get out of the handcuffs. He stomped both hands to be sure she wouldn’t be able to do it again. She crawled on her elbows because her hands were broken. A pathologist can determine how long ago the bones were broken. That may give me an idea how long she was held captive and possibly when she was murdered. Jerry Larsen isn’t a forensic pathologist. He doesn’t cut the bodies up to see what made them stop ticking. But he has spent more than half of his sixty years of age doing the job, and with that he’s developed some damn fine instincts. Still, I need to talk to Dr. Andrade.

Crime Scene wouldn’t have collected a rape kit. That will be Andrade’s job in the morning. The rape kit is important for DNA, but the turnaround time for DNA testing and comparison is weeks. The sheriff can request the rape kit be expedited, but it will only tell me if the victim had sex and not with whom. DNA may do that. I know what the crime lab will say. They are always backed up and busy.

It is only one case. For now. I worry that it’s not a lone murder. Tomorrow I’ll attend the autopsy. Dr. Andrade will be expecting me. Depending on how late Crime Scene works tonight, I don’t expect her fingerprints to be run through the local and national database before late morning. If that doesn’t give me an identification, I’ll just have to continue poring over missing person reports. There are an average of about three hundred murders each year in Washington. Unless I can spotlight this case, the sheriff’s request for expedited DNA analysis will go to the back of the line or not see daylight at all, and she will just be a Jane Doe.

I shut off the engine and head up the walk to the historic Victorian. Historic usually equals quaint, but there’s nothing quaint about this place. It’s a big house divided into two units. At the moment I’m the sole tenant and I like it that way. The other unit is currently, and probably always will be, unoccupied. The last renter gave up because of unreliable heat in the winter and sweltering heat in the summer. The ancient wood floors are dangerously uneven, causing me to trip some nights on my way to the bathroom.

I drop my purse and keys on the table by the leaded glass door to my bedroom, the only part of the house that has any style from the bygone era. I expect someday the place will be razed and the door will end up in some fancy home in Seattle. I have a little office area tucked in one corner and a gun safe in the closet. I lock my gun in the safe and sit at my desk, staring at the blank screen of my laptop.

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