Dr. Carver twisted on the ladder to look at her. “And you’re afraid this is a harbinger of more?”
“Dear God, let’s hope not,” she breathed.
Aidan Cypress walked over to them. “We’re trying to pull tire tracks, but as you can see, the ground is mostly muck. And it’s rained, so even the paved area is giving us just about nothing. One thing about being on an old road almost no one uses anymore—not a lot of trash. But we’re doing our best to get everything, the tiniest scrap. And some of this is sawgrass—long sawgrass, but we’re doing our best.”
“Thank you, Aidan. You guys are the best,” Amy assured him.
“Sketching again, eh?” Cypress asked.
“You never know.”
“Okay, Picasso!” Dr. Carver called out. “I’m going to get my crew busy taking her down so I can get her to the morgue. From what I’m seeing, and what I believe, she was killed just as darkness was falling last night, and she was between twenty and thirty years old.”
Amy stood just to the side of the corpse, swallowing hard as she saw the blood had covered the body in such quantities and had dried so it was almost as if she were dressed.
“Like Fantasy Fest down in Key West,” John murmured.
She turned to stare at him.
“All the blood...it’s almost as if she’d been body painted.”
Somewhere inside, Amy trembled at the horror of what they saw. Death had taken the woman in such a way she was almost surreal, like a Halloween prop set out for a wickedly scary party.
“That’s what happens,” Carver said, “when you pierce the heart and rip up veins and arteries. Anyway, we’re good to go, team. We’re going to need to get her off the cross—carefully, carefully, my friends,” he said to his assistants.
“And we need to get the cross to the crime lab, as much as is possible,” Cypress said.
Detective Mulberry had been watching and listening. He spoke up. “Yes, please, get everything. This had to have been wackos from somewhere else in the state—or the country. This sure as hell didn’t come from anyone local! And my citizens are going to be terrified. And there aren’t a lot of homes with fancy alarm systems out here.”
Amy hoped he was right: that the murderer—or murderers—had come from somewhere else, and that they would not strike again. She looked down at her sketch of the scene; it was one that would probably give her nightmares.
She swatted another mosquito buzzing around her face. It was going to be a long morning.
The body was removed from the stake with painstaking care.
Dr. Carver wanted the murder weapon left in the body until he reached the lab; his assistants argued over fitting the stake into their vehicle, but it was done. Then Aidan Cypress’s crew began working on the crude cross to which she had been tied.
Amy was watching them work, sketching their efforts, when she thought she saw something tiny fall off the top of the cross as they lowered it.
No one else had seen anything, it seemed, and she wondered if it was a trick of the light, or maybe a small leaf blowing in something that resembled a breeze that had come up as the day had worn on.
Rain was coming.
Floridians liked to joke among themselves about their seasons: they came in hot, hotter, blazing hot and then hotter than hell. The atmosphere didn’t always acknowledge the changing of the seasons, and while winter caused an ease in the rain that tended to come daily in summer, early fall was still part of their hurricane season.
They’d been lucky so far that day. It had rained the night before, a weak rain, ruining much of the crime scene, but not enough to wash away the pints of blood that had half-congealed on the body. Some of the blood had run again; some had stayed hard and crusted.
The forensics crew finally had the cross down.
She walked over to the great hole that had been dug to set the cross. Now it was an area of mucky darkness against the rich sawgrass and foliage that grew around. Her heart sank.
Whatever it had been—if it had been anything—had sunk deep.
Amy went down on her knees, wishing her hands were covered by something a bit tougher than crime scene nitrile gloves.
“What are you doing?” John asked her.
“I think I saw something...something falling off the cross,” she said.
Dr. Carver shouted out to them, “I’m heading out. She’ll be set for autopsy tomorrow. My crew will get her cleaned up and prepped by about nine.”
“Thanks!” John called to him. He turned to her. “Amy, come on, we have a fantastic forensics team—”
“They were busy finagling that cross, John. I saw something.”
“You’re going to cut yourself on all that sawgrass.”
She kept her eyes on the ground, scanning. “It will drive me insane if I don’t look, John.”
He sighed. “All right, I guess I’ll get down in the dirt, too. When I’m itching like crazy from all the brush scratches tonight, just know I’m going to be cursing you out in my sleep.”
Amy continued diligently pawing through the sawgrass when she vaguely heard the arrival of another car.
Cypress called out in greeting to someone, and Amy finally looked up.
Another man had arrived at the scene. He was tall, dark-haired, midthirties. Wearing a suit, he must have been sweltering in the heat. Then again, both she and John were clad in their daily business suits—blue, light cotton blends, but the kind of outfit that meant work clothing.
The man seemed impatient, pushing back the hair from his forehead, looking around at the scene with keen eyes that were light against the bronze of his face.
She watched him, and John rose, frowning, then smiling in recognition.
“Hey, Hunter! What the hell are you doing down here?” John greeted the newcomer.
“Who is that?” Amy asked.
John hadn’t heard her; he’d gone to meet the man.
Apparently, Aidan Cypress knew him, too. After calling out his own greeting, Aidan left his work for a minute to go over and shake hands with the man. “Sent out already, eh?” she overheard.
She shook her head; she’d know soon enough. If she was going to find something, she had to keep looking.
She carefully delved her way through the cutting grass.
But then she had the sense that John had come to stand near her, on the pavement off the mucky embankment.
“Amy, look up for a minute?”
She raised her eyes.
He’d brought the man with him. She waited, watching the stranger. He had the perfect face for law enforcement—which she figured he must be of some kind. His expression gave away nothing. His eyes, she saw then, were a rich, piercing blue that could certainly quell many a suspect. Hard jaw, lean face, high cheeks—the old classic-sculpted bone structure. He stood a few inches over John, which made him at least six-foot-three.