Unforgivable (6 page)

Mia tipped her head back to look at the sky, grateful for the break in the bleak winter weather. It wasn’t just clear, it was perfectly clear. And the sky wasn’t just blue, it was a brilliant turquoise. The day was gorgeous, filled with sun and promise and possibility.

Just like the day Amy had died.

For an instant, Mia was standing beside her banana-seat bike, watching her sister pull out of the driveway in the secondhand Chevy Malibu she’d bought with life-guarding money. Mia waved, and Amy tapped the horn before driving away.

“Notice anything?”

She snapped back to the present and glanced down into the grinning, freckled face of her six-year-old nephew.

Did she notice anything?

“Umm … you still haven’t tied your sneaker?”

“Nope.” Sam’s smile widened, revealing a missing incisor.

“Umm …” Mia crouched down to tie the shoe herself. “You got a haircut since I last saw you?”

“Nope.”

“You lost another tooth?”

“Nope. Do you give up?”

Mia stood and fisted a hand on her hip. “I give up.”

“I’m standing on your shadow,” he said gleefully. “That means you’re it.”

“I thought we called time out.” They’d been playing shadow tag in her yard that morning before climbing into Mia’s rental car for a trip to the zoo.

“You did. But I called time in, remember? When you were getting the tickets.”

Mia mussed his rust-colored hair, the same color Vivian’s had been before she started dying it. “Okay, then I’m it.” Mia picked up his mittened hand. “But let’s call time out while we visit Cleo and Patra. We can start up again when we get home. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They walked over to the chain-link fence surrounding the cat exhibit—five Bengal tigers, which for a zoo of this size was impressive. The tigers were lolling about on some rocks, enjoying the winter sun. By the bones littered around, it looked as though they’d recently devoured their usual breakfast—a deer hindquarter. Sam tugged out of her grasp and darted between strollers to kneel beside the fence.

Mia watched him with that familiar tightness in her chest. Her nephew loved animals almost as much as she loved taking him to see them. They’d been here dozens of times, but he always begged to come back, although the place wasn’t even a full-fledged zoo. It was more of a rescue center, filled mostly with exotic animals people had acquired as pets before discovering it was a bad
idea—pythons, monkeys, alligators. The aviary was filled with cockatoos and macaws that had decades left to live but whose owners were now in nursing homes.

“Cleo’s asleep,” Sam announced. “So is Patra. This is boring.”

The usually playful tigers were Sam’s favorite attraction. They had been rescued from a ranch not far away following a major drug bust. According to the information posted on the fence, the tigers’ first owner had kept them around to impress his friends and intimidate his rivals.

“Let’s go see the llamas,” Mia suggested, because the cats didn’t look as if they’d be stirring anytime soon. “You said you wanted to feed them this time.”

They trekked along the dirt path to the petting zoo. Sam glanced up at her. “What do you think would happen if they put a person in there instead of a deer?”

“You mean in with the tigers?”

“Yeah, for feeding time.”

“That’s a good question,” she said, which was her typical response when he caught her off guard. It seemed to be happening more and more lately, and she was waiting for the day when he’d come to visit her and the first question out of his mouth would be, “Hey, Aunt Mia, where do babies come from?”

“Do you think they’d eat him? The person?” He gazed up at her.

“I’m not sure. I guess it would depend on how hungry they were.”

“I think they’d eat him,” he said with confidence. “Tigers are meat eaters, like T. rexes. And people are meat.”

Mia watched him as they approached the petting zoo and had the nagging feeling there was more to this conversation than tigers.

He turned to look at her. “Do you really work at a place with lots of dead people?”

She took a deep breath. Why didn’t Viv get these questions? Her sister was so much better at explaining things than she was.

“Who told you that?”

“No one.” He shrugged. “I heard Gram talking to Mom about it. Gram said the place where you work probably stinks to high heaven.”

Some days it did. It depended on which direction the wind was blowing.

Mia cleared her throat. “Well, I work at a research laboratory.” They stopped beside the animal yard, and Sam looked up at her blankly. “It’s a place with all kinds of scientists. Some of us study bugs. Some of us study soil. Some of us study bones. Some of us study what happens to people and animals after they die.”

“Do you have to touch them?”

“I don’t, no. I’m not that kind of scientist. I study much smaller things, sometimes with a microscope. Remember the microscope I got you for your birthday last year?”

“Yeah. I lost all the slides, though. Aunt Mia, look! There’s a baby one! Can I feed it?”

Mia followed his gaze and saw the baby llama wandering amid the pigs and billy goats.

“You can try,” she said, glad for the distraction. She wasn’t sure how much Vivian wanted her son to know about the Delphi Center, particularly the body farm. It had been controversial since its inception, and many
of the property owners nearby didn’t care for the vultures, the scavengers, or the macabre attention the place attracted.

Mia dug through her purse until she came up with the eight quarters needed to buy kibble from the food dispenser near the barn. She filled a large paper cup and returned to the fence.

She glanced around at the moms and kids, at the strollers parked haphazardly beside the gate. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Her gaze skimmed over the children mingling among the goats and llamas.

“Sam?”

Her heart started to thud. Her chest tightened. She looked at the man with the little girl on his shoulders. She looked at the crying toddler cowering away from a goat. She squeezed her way through a knot of people and stepped into the barn. The smell of manure hit her. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness, and she waited for Sam to emerge from the shadows.

“Sam?”

She was answered by clucking hens and a bleating lamb. She rushed back outside and checked the animal yard again. No Sam. Her stomach did a flip. She cast a frantic look back at the tigers, but he wasn’t over there, either.

“Sam!”

Panic gripped her as she did a slow three-sixty, searching the kaleidoscope of people for an orange mop of hair and a bright green coat. But she didn’t see either and her blood turned to ice.

“Sammy!”
It was loud and shrill, but still no answer.

He was gone.

•  •  •

Jonah propped his shoulder against the door frame as the Travis County deputy ME removed his glasses and cleaned them for what had to be the fifth time.

“And this conclusion’s based on what, exactly?” Ric said, voicing the question in Jonah’s head.

His partner was seated across from George Froehler in the only guest chair available in the man’s cramped office. Jonah hadn’t even been able to set foot in the room because of all the files and medical journals stacked in knee-high piles around the desk. No matter how many times they visited the deputy ME, the mess always came as a surprise. How could such a meticulous doctor tolerate such a cluttered workspace?

“Postmortem lividity.” Froehler replaced the spectacles on his nose. “The process by which red blood cells collect in the body’s lowest points after death.”

“I know what lividity is.” Ric obviously didn’t like being talked down to as if he was some beat cop. “But I’m not getting how that means she was killed indoors. Maybe he killed her outside near the dump site, then the body ended up facedown after she got dropped off that bridge.”

“It did.” Froehler folded his hands in front of him. “The fall would account for the broken ribs and likely the shattered patella visible on the X-rays. My point is, despite being discovered in the facedown position near the bridge, she died on her back and was left that way for at least a few hours. The carpet fibers recovered from her hair, along with the abrasions on her shoulders and buttocks, suggest to me that your primary crime scene is indoors.”

“What color are the carpet fibers?” Ric asked.

“Beige, unfortunately.”

The most common color around.

“And did you see anything similar between this victim’s injuries and the one from three weeks ago? The one from the motel room?”

“Aside from the fact that they both had their hands bound with duct tape and were sexually assaulted? No. In the motel-room murder, the cause of death was manual strangulation, and the assailant left behind semen. As for your more recent victim, Ashley Meyer, she was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head.
After
she sustained the forty-two knife wounds, all shallow. In other words, he didn’t stab her to death, he hit her with something heavy, maybe a wrench or a tire iron, something like that. Also, her assailant used a condom, which left traces of lubricant but no semen. I believe she died indoors on a carpeted floor, then was moved from the scene and dumped off the bridge. She landed facedown, which was how the hikers discovered her.” The ME checked his watch. “Any other questions, Detectives? I’m needed in the morgue.”

“These fibers,” Jonah said. “Did you send them to the lab?”

“Of course. They’re at the Delphi Center, along with the other trace evidence in this case.” He stood up and handed Ric a copy of the autopsy report.

“Thanks for your help.” Ric took the report and headed for the door. “Oh, and one more thing. In the Meyer case, did you remove the duct tape from her wrists at autopsy? The tape was cut through in three different places.”

Froehler stiffened. “Absolutely not. I would have used a single razor cut in order to preserve the integrity of the binding. Her hands were bagged separately when she arrived here.”

Ric shot Jonah a look. Sounded as if the crime-scene techs had screwed up right under the lead detective’s nose.

They made their way back down to the main floor of the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office. Hays County wasn’t big enough to have its own ME, so San Marcos cops had to work with TCMEO in Austin. It was a nice facility, but the half-hour drive was a pain in the ass.

A cold gust hit them when Jonah pushed open the door.

“So, what do you think of his theory?” Ric asked, taking his keys from his pocket as they approached the unmarked police unit parked at a meter in front of the building.

“Froehler’s?”

“Yeah. That the murders aren’t connected.”

Jonah pulled open his door with a squeak and slid into the passenger seat. “I think he’s right. These two cases, I don’t know, don’t fit or something. The crimes seem totally different to me.”

“Except for the duct tape, the timing, and the sexual assault.” Ric reached behind his seat to slide the report into an accordion file that was growing fatter by the hour. He started the engine.

“Lot of rapes involve duct tape,” Jonah said. “That’s why the bindings are important. Perps have a certain way of doing it.”

Ric flashed him a look, and Jonah knew he was telling his partner something he already knew. But he was thinking out loud here.

Ric pulled onto Sabine Street. “I get the same feeling. First crime, pretty straightforward—prostitute killed in a motel room. Maybe she tried to shake down her john or something, he got ticked off. Or maybe he didn’t want to pay. Ashley Meyer was a college student, clean record. Plus, it seems like her killer was pretty amped up. The knife wounds. The blow to the head. A lot of emotion there.”

“I’m getting that, too. Seems like a different MO.”

Ric shook his head. “This case is gonna drag. And I really want to focus on the Hannigan shooting before that trail gets cold.”

Jonah glanced at him. “You think it’s a straight-up robbery that went south?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Jonah hesitated, then decided to throw it out there. “How well do you know the DNA doc?”

Ric shot him a sidelong glance. “Mia?”

“Yeah.”

“I know her fine. Why?”

“You notice we haven’t looked at her? Not even as a long shot?”

Ric blinked at him. “You’re saying Mia Voss could have offed Frank Hannigan? What are you, on crack?”

Jonah trained his gaze on the road.

“Are you fucking serious? Why would she do that?”

“I didn’t say she did.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying what I said. We haven’t even looked at her. We got no eyewitnesses saying what really happened on that road out there—”

“Besides Mia,” Ric cut in.

“Besides her, yeah, and you haven’t even teed up the possibility she might be involved. Frank was a cop. He had enemies. How do we know there wasn’t some kind of setup?”

“The woman got shot. Was that part of the setup, too? And what about the surveillance video?”

“Stranger things have happened. Anyway, I’m just saying it’s possible. But we haven’t even looked at it, because we took everything she told us at face value. And I’m wondering, why did we do that?”

Ric’s expression hardened. He didn’t like Jonah bringing this up, but that was too bad. This was a murder case. A
cop
murder. And the lead investigator had allowed himself to get distracted by a nice pair of breasts. Ric wasn’t approaching this with nearly his usual objectivity.

“Hey, I like her, don’t get me wrong,” Jonah said. “She’s squeaky clean, as far as I know. But we haven’t even talked about it. And it’s not like you to ignore an angle.”

The car got quiet. Jonah was right, and Ric knew it.

Ric’s phone buzzed, and he looked grateful for the distraction as he dug it out of his pocket. Jonah stared out the window as they passed a strip of fast-food joints. He’d logged six miles that morning before coming in. Now it was after three, and he was about to eat his arm.

“Say that again? I can’t understand you.”

Something in Ric’s tone had Jonah’s head turning.