“Maybe she was leaving. He had to do it now, before the opportunity was gone.” Zoe gazed at the nearby cluster of bushes, their leaves speckled with red drops like macabre berries. “Perhaps she did see him, and was running away. But I don’t see signs of running—no churned-up ground. She was off to the side, too, away from the harder path. There would be marks on the turf.”
Shelley closed her eyes, as if she were visualizing the scene. “So, we have Lorna walking away, back to the parking lot. He looks ahead and knows he only has a short timeframe before she’s back to safety and he can’t attack. He chooses this moment. Maybe he concealed himself to the side, in those bushes.”
Zoe shook her head, measuring the size of the bushes. Not enough coverage. “I do not think so,” she said, but there was an easy enough way to prove it. “Deputy?”
One of the young men who had been guarding the site looked up at her call. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Do us a favor. Please go and stand in those bushes just there. Crouch or lie down as if you’re trying to hide from view.”
The deputy blinked, then looked to his sheriff, who waved a hand of approval. He did as he was told, moving to conceal himself in the bushes. Even though he wore natural colors, it was easy to spot him amongst the vibrant greens. The bushes were low, and the gaps between their forms left little shelter.
Shelley moved around the cordon to the other side of the trail, looking back toward him. “I can see him from here,” she confirmed.
“Crouch a little,” Zoe called to her. “You are an inch too tall.”
Shelley bent her knees temporarily, ducking down well over two inches. “It makes no difference,” she said. “I can see his feet and his shoulders.”
“Thank you, Deputy. You can get up,” Zoe said, much to the relief of the young man, who leapt up and instantly began brushing away leafy debris from his clothing.
“He was walking, then,” Shelley said, coming closer to her. “She didn’t run, so she probably saw him and didn’t think he was a threat.”
“Then he can’t have been carrying a machete,” Zoe pointed out. “Not openly, at least.”
“What if he knew the victims?” Shelley asked. Her eyes were back on the town in the near distance. “They’re in close proximity. Someone could easily work in one town and live in the other, for example. It would be very plausible for these both to be personal connections.”
“Most personal murders are crimes of passion,” Zoe said, citing by rote the statistics from the textbooks. Even if she knew that off by heart, there was something the textbooks had never been able to tell her: the atmosphere of a crime scene. Here, maybe, she was finally starting to get it. There was planning here somehow, and only enough cuts to chop off the head—no overkill, no frenzy. Calmness. “This is cold and calculated.”
“It could still be personal. Maybe this has been a long and slow mental snap. Maybe he’s a psychopath.”
Zoe still wanted to flinch whenever she heard that word. It had been flung at her enough times. By her mother, by her peers at school, by anyone who thought she didn’t react to social situations with the correct level of emotional response. She had always known she was different. It had taken her a long time to learn that she wasn’t evil because of it.
“I see two options,” she summarized, pushing the feeling away. “Either he walked past her innocently, then turned and attacked with a concealed blade—or he gained her trust first. That may well have been through a preexisting personal connection, or some other method.”
“Then we first have to figure out if Lorna Troye and Michelle Young knew any of the same people,” Shelley said. Despite the dark rings around her eyes from the overnight flight, she was beginning to look brighter and more alert. Almost excited at the prospect of a new lead. “Would you like to go see a body?”
Zoe put on a wry smile for her benefit. “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER SIX
The coroner’s office could have been any small-town coroner’s office in the US, Zoe thought. A cold room with steel tray-beds, just two of them because this place was never particularly busy. One wall lined with nine innocuous drawer handles that nonetheless held unspeakable horrors—at least, to most people. To Zoe and Shelley, it was a Sunday like any other day of the week.
“This is her.” The coroner, a paunchy man with near-sighted glasses that turned his face into an owl’s, pulled out one of the trays with what seemed like unnecessary force. Zoe felt her muscles tense in anticipation of catching a flying body, but it only rocked slightly on the tray.
The body was covered with a modest white sheet, which ended in a sickeningly empty depression where the head should have been. Zoe reached out and pulled it back, knowing that Shelley was already starting to look a little green.
The sight was arresting. The naked body bore no marks or signs of struggle that she could see in any degree, except for the fact that what had once been the neck was now a stump of messy, hacked-off flesh and fiber. The white bone of the spine was just visible under raw, red meat, cut smoothly and yet with a series of conflicting angles. Each one must have been a separate cut.
“What do you make of it?” Shelley asked softly, her voice low out of respect for a body that could not have heard her even if it was still alive, without the ears to do it with.
“Several strikes across the neck,” the coroner said matter-of-factly, pushing his glasses up his nose with one thick finger while the other traced slashes in the air. “Probably a lightweight blade. I’m not able to say with complete certainty, but I would guess a machete. That’s what you would normally expect to see.”
“Normally?” Zoe asked.
The coroner rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “Well, I haven’t seen anything exactly like this myself,” he said. “But I read the statistics. It’s more likely a machete than, say, a samurai sword. Though those are probably in second place. People collect them from Japan or get them on the internet.”
Zoe resisted the urge to tell him they were called katanas, instead returning to the body. She counted the angles on the neck. Two more than she had seen evidence of at the crime scene, the first two being shallow enough not to have hit the ground. “Can you say how much force was put into the four strikes?”
“Not enough to sever the head in one blow, that’s for certain,” the coroner said. “You can see the conflicting planes here and here: each time he struck, it was at a slightly different angle, thus causing the rough edge and uneven surface that you see… four times, yes, as you say.”
“Do you think this was someone without natural strength?” Shelley asked, finally recovering enough from the sight to ask a question.
The coroner shrugged. “Without getting into a time machine, it’s difficult to say. All I know is the level of force. This could have been an elderly woman hacking with every single shred of her strength running on adrenaline, or it could have been Arnold Schwarzenegger having a lazy day of it. I can’t say.”
“Not even enough to suggest whether we are looking for a male or a female?”