All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [59]
He moved a few feet away and rubbed his hand vigorously through his thick hair, making it stick out in all directions. He felt the frustration rise in him. A local sergeant copping attitude was going to give him a headache. He could hear the whapping drone of news helicopters above, looking for purchase with their long-lens cameras, bleating moment-to-moment information back to their anchors.
“I asked you if we could move her.” It wasn’t a statement but a challenge.
“Tell me something, Sergeant,” Baldwin said quietly. The man glared at him as if Baldwin had murdered the girl at their feet.
“Was she posed, or was she dropped here?”
The man scratched his head. “Weel, it’s pretty obvious that she was posed. Don’t they teach you that kind of stuff where you come from, Mr. F BEE EYE agent?”
Baldwin gave the man a rueful smile. “Have you ever seen a body tossed out of a car, Sergeant?”
“Of course I have. Seen plenty. They tumble out and land on their backs, arms out in a crosslike position, and their legs…Oh.”
“‘Oh’ is right. Take another look.”
The sergeant took his time, walking widdershins around the body, sucking industriously on a toothpick that had magically appeared in the corner of his mouth. He made another pass, then spat, careful to turn away from the girl.
“Weel, I’d say there was a pretty good chance that she may have been tossed out of a car.”
“And have you found any tire tracks to support that theory?” Baldwin gazed at the young man expectantly.
“There weren’t any that we could see when we pulled up, no, sir.”
Baldwin noted the “sir” and decided to stop hassling the kid. “So there’s a good chance that the killer parked on the road, then carried her out here and posed her, rather than dumping her out of the car right at this spot and speeding away?”
The sergeant looked up at him with squinted eyes. “You were just playing with me, weren’t you?”
“No, son, I never play when death is involved. I just wanted you to stop and think about another option. There is never anything obvious at a murder scene.” He saw Grimes wave. It was time to get her to the morgue. “Call in your folks. You can move her now. Besides, it’s going to rain.”
He turned his back and walked away from the dead girl. Maybe he’d taught the young sergeant a lesson. Especially in a situation as dicey as this one was shaping up to be, never make assumptions. He pulled his cell phone out of its waist clip and punched a number on speed dial. A voice on the other end barked “What?” in a semblance of a greeting.
“Garrett, it’s Baldwin. I’m out here in Roanoke.”
“Same guy?”
“Looks that way.”
Baldwin felt rather than heard the great sigh that whistled through the phone. He empathized; when he’d first gazed upon the dead girl, he felt like all the wind had been knocked out of him.
“Do you have anything from the geographic profile yet?”
“No, it hasn’t finished running. I was looking at the map myself, I think you’re onto something. Problem with this software is it takes at least eight points to be accurate. So whatever it coughs out is going to be incomplete at best. I’d plan on working without it.”
“Right. Well, if it spits anything out, let me know. It’s better than nothing, which is what we have right now. He’s definitely escalating, Garrett. Took her hands like the others, but cut her face up pretty good. If this was a generic killer, I’d say he was buying himself some time so we don’t get an ID so quickly, but thanks to the media everyone in the country knows Marni Fischer is missing. He’s not trying to mislead us, not taking their hands so we can’t ID the bodies. He’s collecting them. I don’t know, Garrett, something feels all