Page 23 of Half the Summer's Night
“Jesus Christ,” I murmur, reflexively stepping backward.
It doesn’t look like the Olivia I remember, the pretty blonde woman who bought me a coffee and listened without judging. The face barely looks human at all. It’s nearly split in half, in fact, cut at her mouth so the top part of her skull falls backward, revealing the glossy, bloody mess of tongue and mouth.
Worse, the body is naked and black with bruises—around the throat, across the chest. Around the wrists, too, which are positioned behind the back, with the body arranged into a kneeling position. One of the breasts has been cut off, a black, oozing hole where it should be. The entire front of the body is drenched in blood. The same blood that ran down the steps and onto the sidewalk.
What patches of clear skin I can see, it’s clear that lividity has already set in. She’s been dead for at least a few hours. Probably longer, given the scent of rot on the air.
For a moment, everything seems to constrict around me. The cicadas are already screaming, and the sound draws tighter and tighter in until I think I might black out.
“Who found her?” I spit out the first question I think to ask, even though I already know the answer.
“A groundskeeper,” Rick says. “We spoke to him already. I sincerely doubt he had anything to do with this.”
I walk around her slowly, my steps shaky. “How did she get here? Do you know?”
Rick gestures at the CSI, who throws the fabric back over the body. I breathe out, relieved even though I don’t want to admit it. Rick wouldn’t hold it against me, but I can feel Kaplan watching me from the grass, and he would.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Rick says. “Her husband’s out of town. We confirmed that, by the way. Been in New Orleans for the past three days. Got tons of witnesses to back it up, too.”
I nod, my throat dry.
“She was killed here,” I say numbly. “There wouldn’t be so much blood otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Rick says. “Unfortunately, the security cameras were vandalized a few days ago. Hadn’t been replaced yet.”
Of course.
“We’re asking around some of the shops on the square to see if they might have any footage. Hopefully, we’ll find something.”
I keep walking around the gazebo. Nothing else looks out of place. But then, I don’t normally look at crime scenes, do I? I look at the body.
“When did the last shop close?” I study a wisp of spider web in the corner. My killer?—
You did not just think of him that way.
He broke in a little after midnight.
“The diner across the street closed at 10 P.M.” Rick nods toward it. “I’ve got someone following up with the cook who closed last night, but the waitress here this morning said they’re usually gone by eleven. So we figure the death had to happen sometime between eleven and five A.M.”
I shudder. My encounter happened a little after midnight. I suppose it’s possible that he broke into my examination room, kissed me, and then killed Olivia Pearce.
But it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel likehim. This wasn’t made to look like an accident, for one.
But I’ll only know for sure if there’s no letter marked on her skin.
“Send the body to the funeral home when you’re ready,” I say, wheeling around and out of the gazebo. It feels better out in the thick, stagnant air, even though the stink of death hangs heavy around us. “I’ll get the autopsy done today.”
SeeingOlivia laid out on my examination slab is somehow worse than seeing her at the crime scene. At least out there, she was a victim of a terrible crime. In here, on the metal table and beneath the bright lights, she’s meat.
Horrible, mangled, horribly mutilated meat.
The first thing I do after Hector delivers her to my examination room is search her body for another letter. I rinse the blood off in patches, scouring her bruised, mottled skin for one of those telltale marks.
It’s not there. Not on her ankles or calves, not on her hip, not in the crook of her elbow. Not in any of the places the letters have been before.
But more than that, rigor mortis has already set in through the body, the limbs stiff and immobile. I take the internal body temperature and calculate backward.
The time of death, as best I can tell, is between eleven and one A.M.
