“Sheriff Hawthorne?” Shelley called out, shading her hand with an eye and waving across a line of official warning tape toward a man in shades of brown and beige. He waved in response and began to trudge over, his white hair catching the sun like a halo at the top of his six-foot height.
“You must be the FBI gals,” he said, glancing over their regulation FBI-branded windbreakers and black suits. “Body’s gone. Had to get it away out of the elements last night. But we’ve got the crime scene, preserved and ready for you to see.”
“I’m Agent Shelley Rose,” Shelley said, briefly flashing her badge at him as procedure demanded. “Please, lead the way.”
“Agent Zoe Prime,” Zoe added, aping Shelley’s movements and then turning to follow them both. At least she had never run into this sheriff before. Maybe that boded well for the rest of their visit.
The green grass on either side of the trail fairly sparkled in the morning light, so fresh and scattered with the lightest dew. It was like being inside a postcard, Zoe thought as they stepped along the well-worn path. It was clearly heavily frequented. Zoe noted the growth patterns of the grass around it, where and when it thinned out, how the wide entrance to the parking lot thinned out to a one-person trail, like a tributary moving away from the ocean.
“It was last night she was found?” Shelley was asking, more for confirmation than anything else.
“Late in the afternoon,” the sheriff confirmed. “We were alerted by a hiker enjoying the last of the nice weather. They wanted to get up to one of the higher ridges and look back over the town at sunset. Unfortunately, they didn’t get very far before they stumbled on Miss Troye’s body. She was right on the trail—well, you’ll see.”
His words were ominous enough, a stark contrast to the idyllic nature of the park and its trails. Zoe cast her eyes from side to side as they walked; up ahead, three men in the same beige and brown uniforms were milling around in a group, no doubt guarding their destination. But around them, to left and right, there was not much to remark upon except for the rolling hills and ridges, shrubbery, and a little further away, the soaring white facades of the wind turbines. Forty-two, she counted at a glance, though there may have been more of them out in the distance where the bright sky would fade them to invisible.
It was the openness that struck her the most. There were no mountains here providing cover, no heavily wooded glades that someone could hide in. There were only the ridges, and the low bushes that clung to them here and there. It wasn’t the kind of place that she would choose, if she was going to commit a murder in broad daylight.
“The killer is bold,” she said, for Shelley’s benefit. “No cover.”
Shelley nodded, dropping a step behind the sheriff so that they could talk. “The victim was alone, but not completely isolated. Someone at the parking lot would have been able to see. Maybe not all of the details, but probably enough to know something was going on.”
“If the victim screamed, she would have been heard,” Zoe added, looking back at the cars now that they were closer to the scene. “Or if she had been able to get away and run, she might have actually escaped. Been able to raise the alarm. This was a big risk.”
They approached the sheriff’s men, standing in a vague semicircle around an area that they fastidiously avoided. Now that they were close enough to look down on it, Zoe could see why: the ground was saturated with blood. It had soaked into the soil and dyed it red, and the blades of grass still bore individual drops splattered away from the body at the time of the attack.
She dropped into a crouch at the very perimeter of the area that was roped off with more tape, getting her eyes closer to the scene for analysis. Calmly, like opening a gate, she allowed the numbers to come flooding back to her.
The victim, Lorna Troye, had shed her life’s blood here. So many pints of it splashed around, and allowing for the soak into the chalky soil, far too much for a person to survive even if her head had not been removed from her neck. It gushed out around one central point, just off to the side of the trail, but the blood also splattered on both sides of the worn path and onto the smooth stones that pebbled it. That told of hacking cuts, enough force to spray those droplets out to either side. Enough to coat shoes and trousers, perhaps even to spray up the front of a shirt.
Zoe circled slowly, still on the outside, not wanting to disturb the evidence any further than it already had been. The path, where it had been worn down, was flat and hard; no footprints were recorded on it, no sign of a struggle. There was a harsh gouge in the earth where the majority of the blood fell, the blade of the murder weapon driving down into the softer soil after the head was severed. The blow had been a strong one.
Did that indicate their killer’s superior strength? Maybe. But it was also possible that the attack took several blows. The ME report for the previous victim hinted at a chopping action—the sword coming down again and again until the job was done. Zoe searched closer, using her gloved hands to carefully lean forward and push a few strands of grass here or there.
There—another line, just close to the first, off at a fifteen-degree angle and with a shallower impact by two inches. He had hacked at her neck until it was severed. So, perhaps not freakishly strong, though it still took some good arm power to force the blade through bone and muscle.
“They don’t have much,” Shelley muttered, rejoining her partner at the side of the tape. “You see anything?”
Zoe stood, feeling the protest in her hamstring muscles as she forced them to move. The numbers were failing her today, with barely any physical evidence to go on. She could estimate the victim’s height from the depressions in the grass, but what help was that? They already had her on a slab. “Not much. Inconclusive on the killer’s height, weight, and upper body strength, although I think we can safely say we are not looking for a weakling. Likely a male, to be able to cut off the head. I cannot estimate his physical attributes because he did the decapitation when she was already on the ground.”
“They conducted a wider search of the area by grid last night and found nothing of consequence,” Shelley said, shading her eyes as she looked over at the rest of the wind farm, stretching out in front of them. “What are you thinking about the location? It’s too random a place to just lie in wait for someone to walk by, surely?”
“And the lack of cover,” Zoe grunted in agreement. “This doesn’t fit into the typical crime of opportunity blueprint. This was something else.”
Shelley was biting her lip, looking around. A light breeze stirred the short hairs at her temple, making them stand up. “Why not lie in wait somewhere with more cover, or further into the park?” she said. She sounded like she was thinking aloud, rather than seriously asking the question. “Right here, so close to the parking lot—there has to be a reason why he took the risk.”
Zoe looked down at the bloodstains on the floor again. “The body was lying in this direction,” she said, pointing with her arms. Feet toward the rest of the park, head toward the parking lot. “Normally when someone is attacked by a concealed predator, it is done from behind, causing the victim to fall forward.”
“You’re saying that it’s likely she was walking back toward the parking lot when it happened.”