Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [254]
“May I see the most recent file?”
“I have the delivery girl on my desk.” He jumped up from his squatting position next to the cartons and quickly riffled through several piles on his desk. “The Kansas City case is here, too. They’ve been faxing us stuff.”
Maggie resisted the urge to help. She wanted to grab all his piles and make order of them. How the hell did this guy get anything done?
“Here’s the file on the delivery girl.”
He handed her a bulging folder with corners of papers and photos sticking out at odd angles. Immediately, Maggie opened it and started straightening and rearranging its contents before examining any of them.
“Is it okay if we use her name?”
“Excuse me?” Agent Tully continued to rummage over his messy desktop. Finally he found his wire-rimmed glasses, put them on and looked at her.
“The pizza delivery girl. Is it okay if we use her name when we refer to her?”
“Of course,” he said, grabbing another file folder and shuffling through it.
Now he was a bit flustered, and Maggie knew he didn’t know the girl’s name without looking. It wasn’t a matter of disrespect. It helped to disconnect. Profilers often referred to a body simply as “the victim” or “Jane Doe.” Their first introduction to the victims came when they were bloody, tangled messes, often sharing little or no resemblance to their former selves. Maggie used to be the same, using general terms to disassociate, to disconnect. But then several months ago she met a little boy named Timmy Hamilton who took time to show her his bedroom and his baseball card collection just before he was abducted. Now it suddenly seemed important to Maggie to know this girl’s name. This beautiful, young, blond woman who she remembered being so cheerful when she had delivered Maggie’s pizza less than a week ago. And who was now dead simply because she had done so.
“Jessica,” Agent Tully finally blurted out. “Her name was Jessica Beckwith.”
Maggie realized she could have found the girl’s name just as easily. The top document was the medical examiner’s autopsy report, and the girl had already been identified at that point. She tried not to think of the parents. Some disconnection was necessary.
“Any trace recovered at the scene that could be used for DNA testing?”
“Nothing substantial. Some fingerprints, but they aren’t matching Stucky’s. Weird thing is, everything looked wiped clean except for this set of fingerprints—one index, one thumb. Chances are they belong to a rookie cop who touched stuff he wasn’t supposed to touch and now he’s afraid to admit it. AFIS hasn’t come up with anything yet.”
He sat on the edge of the desk, laying his folder open on a pile, leaving his fingers free to string more paper clips together.
“The weapon was not retrieved. Is that right?”
“Correct. Looks to be very thin, razor sharp and single edged. I’m thinking maybe even a scalpel, from the way he’s able to slice and dice so easily.”
Maggie winced at his choice of description, and he caught her.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s the first thing that came to mind.”
“Any saliva on the body? Any semen in the mouth?”
“No, which I know is different from Stucky’s usual M.O.”
“If it is Stucky.”
She felt him staring at her but avoided his eyes and examined the autopsy report. Why would Stucky hold back or pull out early now? He certainly wouldn’t go through the trouble of using a condom. After they had revealed his identity as being Albert Stucky, he had blatantly gone on to do whatever he wanted. And that usually meant showing off his sexual prowess by raping his victims several times, and often forcing them to perform oral sex on him. She wished she could take a second look at the girl’s body. By now she knew what kinds of things to look for, otherwise insignificant physical evidence that telegraphed Stucky’s patterns. Unfortunately, she saw at the bottom of the form that Jessica’s body had already been released to her family. Even if she stopped the transfer, all the PE would be gone, washed away by