The Soul Catcher - Alex Kava [51]
“Not yet. But we’ll need to get dental prints if there was no ID.”
“I think there’s something in her throat.”
She hesitated. Both men and Racine hovered over the body and over Maggie, waiting and watching. As soon as Maggie pried open the mouth, she could smell it, a sweet almond scent. Again, she hesitated and glanced up at Stan.
“Do you smell that?”
He sniffed the air. Maggie knew not everyone was capable of smelling the scent, actually about fifty percent of the population. It was Tully who finally answered, “Cyanide?”
Maggie used an index finger to scoop inside both cheeks and removed a partially dissolved capsule. Stan held up an open plastic bag.
“What’s with cyanide these days?” Stan said, then noticed the warning look Maggie shot him.
“What kind of crazy son of a bitch gives his victim a cyanide pill after he’s strangled her? Or is that the cause of death?” Racine sounded impatient. She didn’t seem to notice the exchange between Stan and Maggie, who had both recognized the red-and-white capsule. Enough of it was intact to see that the capsule bore the same brand name they had extracted from the five boys in the cabin just last weekend.
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Stan finally answered.
He was growing impatient, too, but for the moment he was keeping what he knew quiet. Evidently he had read Maggie’s urgent look accurately. If there was a connection between this girl and those boys, Racine would know soon enough. For the moment, it was one of the few things they had managed to keep from the media, and Maggie wanted it to remain that way.
“Her mouth was taped shut,” Stan continued. “I bagged the duct tape.”
“He probably stuck the pill into her mouth and taped it shut while she was unconscious,” Tully said, trying to explain the partially dissolved capsule. The girl’s saliva glands would have still needed to be working for the capsule to have started dissolving.
Maggie glanced at Tully and could see that he had recognized the capsule, too, and had guessed what was going on. So Racine was the only one in the dark. Not a bad game plan. Maggie refused to feel an ounce of guilt over keeping this from the detective, especially after their last case together.
“Seems like overkill,” Racine said.
“Or insurance.” Stan was playing along.
“I hate to interrupt your brainstorming, everyone,” Maggie said. “But there’s something else in here. Stan, could you hand me those forceps?”
She opened the woman’s mouth as wide as the rigored jaws allowed, then squinted as she pinched onto an object that was lodged halfway down the girl’s throat. What she extracted was covered with blood, folded and crinkled, but still recognizable.
“I think I just found her ID,” Maggie told them, holding up what looked like a mangled driver’s license.
CHAPTER 27
Tully sipped his Coke, grateful for the break. Wenhoff had taken the seventeen-year-old’s driver’s license and fingerprints upstairs to the lab. But Tully knew they wouldn’t find any priors or runaway reports on Virginia Brier. From the bikini wax and the girl’s mid-November tan lines, Tully knew Virginia was not the typical high-risk victim. She wasn’t a prostitute or some throwaway or a homeless street kid. He guessed she came from a good home, a middle-to upper-class family. Somewhere a father and mother were still waiting for her to come home from last night or going crazy because it was too early to file a missing person’s report. It reminded him of waiting up for Emma last night. She had been only twenty minutes late, but what if…
“Hey, Tully?”
He realized O’Dell was staring at him again with a look of concern.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired. Stayed up too late last night.”
“Oh, really? Hot date?” Racine hoisted herself up onto an empty countertop, her long legs allowing her to do it in one smooth motion.
“My daughter and I stayed up watching Rear Window.”
“Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly?