Page 49 of The Killer She Knew

The classroom door protested on its hinges as Ford entered.

“I see you finally got your beauty sleep.” She sat back on her haunches, hands still connected to the corpse. The medical examiner was going to have a hell of a time determining time of death with the changes in environment and temperature. It wasn’t a conversation she was looking forward to.

“You think I’m beautiful?” The marshal’s crooked smile triggered a chill up her spine as he crossed the classroom to her position. Not a single wrinkle in his damn suit.

Hell, she couldn’t even keep one set of clothing dry, and he looked like he’d stepped out of the office. “Can’t say you’re hard to look at. This guy, on the other hand, has seen better days.”

“We figure out who he is?” Crouching, Ford met her eye line.

“No. Not yet.” She settled the victim’s eyelids back into place. “But I can tell you he wasn’t poisoned, which confirms my theory our unsub wasn’t planning on killing him. It was an impulse decision, but he’s been stripped of any identifiers, including his ID. It’s possible his is one of the six driver’s licenses forensics is working on restoring, but I found something much more interesting.”

Ford’s attention shifted from the body to her, and the entire world closed in around her. Just as it had when he’d hauled her against him in the hallway. “Oh?”

Her breath shuddered out of her at the memory. So much had happened in the past two days—almost dying, for one—but in those short minutes, Ford had brought something in her alive. Leigh pointed to the remains’ white button-down shirt. “Yeah. His clothes are too big.”

“His clothes?” He scanned their unidentified victim from head to toe, and she was reminded that studying dead bodies wasn’t actually part of his line of work. He was a hunter.

“Gas builds up the longer a body is left to decompose. Primarily in the torso. That’s why he floated to the ceiling when I let him out of the closet.” Leigh pointed to the line of buttons bisecting the remains. “The bacteria in his intestines start releasing gas at time of death and it stretches the skin like air in a balloon. If you push down on his stomach, you can feel the gas is there, but the buttons on his shirt aren’t straining against his torso. Same goes for his pants. There are wear marks on thethird hole in, but his belt is buckled on the fifth. So either he’s recently lost around fifty pounds without updating his wardrobe, or the killer stripped and dressed him.”

His mouth parted. “You got all of that just from looking at him?”

“What can I say? I’m perceptive.” A bolt of grief shot through her. “Professor Morrow used to have me assess random photos of death scenes and bodies as his research assistant. I’d find them in my backpack, in my email, or sometimes waiting for me in a file slipped under the door of my dorm. One time he built a diorama with handmade dolls and used corn syrup for blood. He wanted to know how the victim died and who was the most likely suspect given as little information as possible. It was probably one of the most effective pieces of my training. Now I can walk onto a scene and tell you everything that’s wrong with it.”

“I’m sorry.” Ford kept his gaze on the body, obviously out of his element in the “offering condolences” department. “He obviously meant a great deal to you.”

She hadn’t considered how much until now. “Yeah. Well, he wasn’t exactly who I thought he was in the end.”

“Are any of us?” Ford said.

His statement wedged into her mind as she turned the remains to one side. She let her grip slip. The body rolled back into place. “What if that’s true?”

The marshal examined the remains. “What? That none of us are who people think we are?”

Leigh gave herself permission to verbally piece the theory together, even if Ford couldn’t see inside her brain. “Serial offenders typically have one goal. They like to exert control over others, but our unsub has two. He has two sets of victims. The five—potentially six if the driver’s licenses can tell us more—males whose identities he absorbed or used to fill a need, including Professor Morrow, and the three females all killed onthis campus. What if he’s trying to become someone else with his male victims, and he’s trying to bring our attention back to Teshia Elborne with his female victims?”

“What? Like a split personality?” Ford braced one forearm against his leg.

“No.” She reached for the pieces to shape the puzzle in her head. “We were right before. I think whoever is killing these women now murdered Teshia Elborne eighteen years ago. There’s no other way he’d know to use chloroform to knock out his victims before poisoning them with the syringe. That detail was left out of the reports, and only the medical examiner and investigating detective learned of it after the autopsy had been completed. But I think he regrets killing her.”

A foreign expression contorted Ford’s features. “Guy’s got a weird way of showing regret by killing two more women on campus.”

“That’s where the identity theft comes in.” The more thought she put into the theory, the more solid it became. Real. “He’s doing everything in his power to become someone else. He’s running away from who he was. Teshia Elborne’s death broke something in him, and he’ll do whatever it takes to convince himself he didn’t hurt her.”

“Then he knew her,” Ford said. “He had to be at this school eighteen years ago. You and I both know Durham PD only had one suspect then, Leigh.”

“But Dean Groves wasn’t the victim’s only point of conflict at that time in her life.” Her heart jerked at the mention of Dean’s name, and she feared she was right back in that police station, going to bat for a man she believed innocent. “We’re looking for someone familiar with policing and forensics, someone who knew the area well enough to get on and off campus without raising suspicion. The forensic techs have airtight alibis foreach other and the campus police officers we thought could be involved are both new to the area.”

The marshal’s brows met at the bridge of his nose. “So who do you have in mind?”

“The one person who knew Teshia Elborne better than anyone else,” Leigh said. “The boyfriend from high school.”

THIRTY

Durham, New Hampshire

Thursday, October 10

5:47 p.m.

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