Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [34]
Kimberly thought about it a minute. “The cotton field place. Burke County?”
He smiled, a flash of white against his dark skin. “You catch on quick. That’s one of the rules of the game, you see: the first body of the new pair is always left near the second girl of the last pair. Maybe he likes the continuity, or maybe he’s giving us a fighting chance at finding the second body in case we missed it the previous year.” He paused for a second and eyed her appraisingly. “So for this new pair, where’s the second girl?”
“Not in Burke County?”
“You’re cheatin’.”
“Well, he hasn’t repeated an area. So you can assume not the gorge and not a cotton field. Process of elimination.”
“Georgia has nearly sixty thousand square miles of mountains, forests, coastline, swamplands, peach orchards, tobacco fields, and cities. You’re gonna need to eliminate more than that.”
Kimberly acknowledged the point with a slight shrug. Unconsciously she worried her lower lip. “Well, you said it was a game. Does he leave you clues?”
His answering smile was dazzling. “Yes, ma’am. Second rule of the game—for it to be competitive, you gotta leave clues. Let’s go back to the very first girl, found outside of Atlanta. Girl’s laid out next to a major interstate, remember? We have no signs of violence, no sexual assault, so that means no blood, no semen, none of the normal trace evidence you might expect to collect in a homicide case. But here’s something interesting. The body’s clean. Very clean. Almost as if someone has washed the victim’s legs, arms, and shoes. We not only lack hair and fiber, we can’t even find traces of spilled beer on her shoes or a stray peanut in her hair. It’s like the girl’s been . . . sanitized.”
“All of her?” Kimberly asked sharply. “Then you can no longer be sure of lack of sexual assault.”
Mac shook his head. “Not all of her. Just the parts . . . exposed. Hair, face, limbs. My best guess? He wipes them down with a sponge. It’s like . . . he’s wiping a slate clean. And then he starts his work.”
“Oh my God,” Kimberly breathed. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what had happened next.
“They’re a map,” Mac said quietly. “That’s why the first girl exists. That’s why she’s left next to a major road and easily found. Maybe why she gets a quick and relatively painless death. Because she doesn’t matter to him. She’s just a tool, a guide to where the real game is being played out.”
Kimberly was leaning forward again. Her heart had started pounding, neurons firing to life in her brain. She could feel where this was headed now. Almost see the dark, twisted road open up before her. “What are the clues?”
“From the first girl, we found a feather in her hair, a crushed flower beneath her body, traces of rock on her shoe, and a business card in her purse. The crime lab followed protocol and took samples of everything. And then . . . nothin’.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothin’. You ever been to a real crime lab, Kimberly? And by that, I don’t mean the FBI lab. The Feds have money, no doubt about it. I mean what the rest of us working stiffs get to use.”
Kimberly shook her head.
“We have equipment. Lots of equipment. But unless it’s fingerprints or DNA—God’s honest truth—it’s as worthless as an unmatched sock. We don’t have databases. So sure, we collect soil samples, but it’s not like we can scan them into some giant computer and have a matching location magically blip across the screen the way they do in some of those crime shows. Frankly, we operate on tight budgets and tight budgets mean forensics is mostly reactionary. You take samples and someday, if you have a suspect, then you have a reference sample to work with. You take your dirt from the crime scene and hope it matches dirt from the bad guy’s yard. That’s as good