Page 20 of The Perfect Betrayal

“His name is Taye Boyce,” Stanton replied, his voice shaky. “He’s one of our members, has been for a half dozen years. This is his cruising sailboat.”

“What can you tell us about him?” Jessie asked, doing her best to sound alert.

“I know that he worked in finance and that he does very well for himself,” Stanton said. “He’s single. I’m not sure of his exact age but I believe he’s in his early thirties, a little older than his friend, Mr. Peterson.

“They were friends?” Riddell asked sharply.

.

Stanton jumped at the forcefulness of the detective’s question.

“Yes, Mr. Boyce and Mr. Peterson were good friends.”

“That seems relevant,” Jessie said, aware that she was stating the obvious.

“You think?” Riddell replied acidly, apparently agreeing, before adding, “Are you ready to go onboard or do you want to cling to the dock for a while longer?”

Jessie felt the weight of her weapon on her hip and longed to relieve the pressure by pulling it out and shooting her temporary partner in the chest. She imagined his shocked face as he fell backward into the water, blood darkening the waves as they lapped against the dock.

“Sure,” she said, offering a saccharine smile as she forced down her desire to say much more. “I’ll join you in a second. I just want to reach out to my research team to have them start looking into Boyce.”

Riddell scowled but didn’t object as he turned and stepped onto the short gangway to access the boat. She pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to Jamil, asking for anything they could gather on Taye Boyce.

The second after she sent the text, it occurred to her that she could have sent it to Ryan instead. Still deskbound, he would have leapt at the opportunity to jumpstart the research into the victim. But she cut herself some slack as her brain still wasn’t in full gear yet.

She carefully made her way onboard. Normally she preferred to study the crime scene more generally before examining the victim, but in this case they appeared to be one in the same. Boyce was lying face down on the deck.

A giant pool of blood, now coagulating, surrounded him, with most of it collected near his upper half. Jessie guessed that forthere to be so much blood, the injury was to his neck. It looked like the liquid had been dumped out of him.

There was broken glass mixed in amid the blood, mostly on his left side. To his right, a windbreaker rested limply on the deck, also soaked in blood. A few feet in front of him, a bottle of white wine sat in a chiller. The ice had all melted. That suggested that he’d put it in a while ago.

Jessie was about to silently compliment herself on thinking clearly for several consecutive seconds when her thoughts were interrupted by Dr. Tran.

“Shall we turn him over?” he asked. “I suspect that the cause of death will be easier to determine if we do.”

Jessie looked over at Riddell, who, to her consternation, nodded without even looking at her. She let it slide when she noticed that Tran was still waiting for her go-ahead.

“Please,” she said.

With the assistance of a CSU tech, the medical examiner rolled Boyce onto the plastic sheeting that had been laid out next to his body. Once they stepped aside, Jessie moved closer to take in the man.

His features were hard to discern because of the congealed blood covering his face, but his hair, matted with the viscous liquid, was blond. He wore a polo shirt and casual pants, along with expensive-looking sneakers. He seemed to be in pretty good shape.

But Boyce’s most notable attribute was the giant gash in his throat midway between his jaw and clavicle, right around where the jugular vein was located. Even for a brutal neck wound, this one was messy.

“Another stabbing, obviously,” Riddell muttered.

“Yes,” Dr. Tran agreed, “but this isn’t a normal knife wound. Look at the mangled skin at the edges of the puncture.”

Jessie had noticed that as well. She had a fleeting thought about what might have caused it, but the idea floated away before she could lock it down. She took a step back to try to unfuzz her mind and see if she could recapture it.

She turned her attention from Boyce’s body to the table with the wine bottle. She noticed that something was missing and scanned the deck near the table but found nothing. There was no cork, nor a corkscrew. She turned back to Tran.

“Could the killer have used a corkscrew as the murder weapon, like one used to open a wine bottle?”

The medical examiner glanced at the bottle on the table, then returned his attention to the body, leaning in closer.

“Don’t hold me to this,” he said. “I’ll need to get a better look back at the lab, but based on initial inspection, it certainly could be.”

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