Page 71 of Justice for Francesca

Calder shook his head and blinked his eyes a few times. “I always say I’m not surprised by what I see anymore, and then I get surprised.” He scanned his report. “In addition to the bruising, she was beheaded. That was not done by knife—too clean of a cut. Like Mila’s stab wound to the heart, however, that was delivered postmortem.”

“What about the lubricant?” Francesca asked.

“No lubricant was found on Jessa, and her kit came back clean. No evidence of recent sexual activity.”

“So the lubricant on Mila might have been left over from someone else just before she was taken. Or she knew her killer, had sex with him by choice, and then he went to work. When can we expect results on Tilly?”

“Twenty-four hours, especially since we know what to look for. But there’s one thing…” Calder shifted uncomfortably.

“What?” Cruz asked.

He flashed a look at Francesca that was part pain and part apology.

“What?” she parroted Cruz. “Just tell us.”

“Two of Tilly’s wounds were more traumatic than the others.” He handed them each a folder. “Pictures seven and eight. At first, they looked like all the others. But when Panama tested the swords, she found bleach, so she went back and checked the skin directly around the wounds. Bleach there as well.”

“Fuck,” Cruz whispered.

“She was alive,” Francesca whispered. “That’s what that means, doesn’t it? He cleaned up the blood to hide that.”

Francesca’s eyes closed. She felt bile rise and barely made it to the garbage can in the corner of the room to spill the contents of her stomach. Cruz was kneeling at her side, rubbing gentle circles on her back, murmuring to her. Calder fled the room, then returned shortly after that, handing a cold compress to Cruz for the back of her neck, and he pressed a second to her forehead.

When she’d managed to gather herself, she stood on shaky legs. Calder handed her a bottle of water and another cold paper towel to wipe her face and mouth. While she fixed herself, he took the garbage can from the room to empty it. By the time he returned, she had downed half the water bottle and recovered enough to cross back to her seat and sit.

“Gruesome as the thought is, Frankie, it’s a mistake,” Cruz said.

She nodded in agreement. “He didn’t have enough time to wait for the drugs to work their magic.”

Calder turned to his preliminary report on Tilly. “She had a prescription for temazepam as part of her psychiatric care plan.”

“She still had nightmares from her prior abduction, so she was refusing to sleep,” Francesca surmised.

“Yes,” Calder confirmed. “Tilly was under medical care with benzos for her anxiety. She had a tolerance, so it probably delayed her response to the other drugs. The other two women had no tolerance for drugs in their system. Well, not significant for Mila since she had basically weaned herself off the hydrocodone. Plus, the killer had significantly less time by several hours to enact his plan.”

Rubbing her forehead, Francesca rose from her chair and crossed to contemplate the whiteboard with all of its sticky notes and photographs. The headache blooming was going to be epic.

“Okay. You need a rundown of who was where and when for the last twenty-four hours of the club staff. It’s likely going toeliminate each of them, with the possibility of Triumph being the only outlier, other than Michael. He also has no alibi. He and Tilly allegedly had a disagreement, which is why she sought out Michael.”

“The analysts have the video footage of Triumph’s apartment building. Since he’s the only one who can say where he was, at least having some corroboration of his whereabouts is better than nothing. He’s tech-savvy and could hack into and alter footage if he needed to.”

“You don’t really suspect him though.”

“No. Dot the i’s and cross the t’s though. But listen, something weird is going on, and I’m not going to have time to dive into it. Push them to check that footage and then verify it yourself. Ortiz is bound and determined to make Michael confess to the murders. She’s not even interested in going out and getting evidence and then having him corroborate it. She’s trying to do this the other way round—confession, then verify with evidence.”

Cruz frowned. “That doesn’t sound like her. You think pressure is coming from somewhere up top for her to close this case fast?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense, and even then, it doesn’t.” She frowned. Something was poking at her brain, but she couldn’t tease it out. Mentally, she slapped it out of the way. She knew that the harder she tried, the less likely whatever it was would come to her. “I’m missing something,” she whispered. “It’s right there. What the fuck is it?”

Calder continued to flip through his folder on the table in exasperation. “This thing reads like an M. Night Shyamalan script. I’m sure when it’s all done, I’ll be smacking myself in the head with an ‘Of course it was X!’ spilling from my mouth, but I sure can’t see it right now.”

Francesca stilled.

“What is it?” Cruz asked.

“Calder, you’re a genius,” she whispered.

“Thank you,” he quipped, “but I have no idea why.”

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