Shelley was talking to a local police officer nearby, while the others were all but packing up. The forensics team had been over the site already, and the body had been taken for testing. All that remained was to pick up all of the little pieces of evidence left behind in the debris of the murder. A female officer with short-cropped hair and a small stature was gingerly placing them, one by one, into plastic evidence bags.
Zoe watched her with only vague interest. Her mind was working along its own paths, tracing what her eyes saw. The woman had been lying with her head next to the overturned trash bags, her feet pointing toward the middle of the alleyway, at a thirty-degree angle to what would have been the center line. She had fallen backward, most likely, after her throat was cut. There were still some traces of blood, beneath the scorching and the melted bodily fluids, that shored this theory up.
They knew a lot about her already, about Callie. The rest they would know when they interviewed her friends and family, found out who she was and what she did. Why someone might want to kill her.
But the killer himself, though: that was a different question. Where was he, or she? Zoe could see nothing on the ground of the alley, no particular sign that might give them away. There were no footprints, not on an alleyway that was no doubt traversed by tens if not hundreds of people a day. There was no discarded lighter or stub of a match, no empty gas can. Any evidence that might have betrayed their presence had been washed away when someone dumped water over the body in an attempt to put it out and save a life that had already ebbed away.
What had he used for fuel? For accelerant? Where had he stood? What kind of weapon had he used to cut the throat? Or she, Zoe tried to remind herself, in an effort to stay open-minded; the statistics were clear, however. This level of violence would usually point at a male suspect.
It was the “usually” that was the problem. Zoe liked to rely on her gut, but unless she was above ninety percent sure of something, she wasn’t willing to bet everything on it. And even when she’d been that sure in the past, she had occasionally been wrong. Right now, she had nothing at all to be sure about, not where this killer was concerned.
Perhaps she would know more when they took a look at the body. She walked back over to Shelley, who was just wrapping up her conversation.
“There is nothing here,” Zoe announced, as soon as Shelley was done.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Shelley replied. She was glancing up at the windows of the apartments above, blackened not by the rising smoke from a human corpse, but by years of dirt and neglect. “No one in the neighborhood saw anything. They said they smelled the smoke first. A few local residents rushed out with a bucket of water to try to help, but that was all. No suspects, no one standing and watching. No witnesses that saw anyone enter the alley around that time.”
“Is there any footage?” Zoe nodded upward to a security camera perched just at the entrance on the side they had walked in by.
Shelley shook her head. “The cops say it’s not even connected. Every time they tried to get it working, kids would come and spray-paint over the lens or cut the wires. They kept it up as a scare tactic, just in case, but it hasn’t worked properly for years.”
“Locals would know that,” Zoe pointed out.
“So would anyone who did a preliminary walk around the block and saw the state it’s in.”
Zoe glanced around one more time, satisfied that there was nothing more to read here. The only story the numbers were telling her was about the construction of the buildings and the alley itself. Since she doubted the height of the walls had any bearing on the crime, they were done here. “To the coroner, then,” she said with determination, striding away toward their rental car.
***
Zoe wrinkled her nose, then modulated her breathing. It was all about focus. She breathed in through her mouth, thus avoiding the worst of the smell, and out through her nose. Shelley was struggling not to gag, but Zoe tried not to let it put her off.
“It’s a bad one, all right,” the coroner said. She was a tall young woman with bronzed blonde hair and a tan, and altogether too much eyeshadow for someone working in a medical office—even if it was only the dead she was working with.
Zoe ignored her, too, and kept her attention on the body. If it even fit under the definition of a body anymore; charcoal was a more fitting description. The man, the one Shelley had named as John Dowling, was no longer a man. There was a certain shape—legs twisted together and to one side, arms close in across the body, a round jut where the head had been—but it would have been just as easy to imagine that it was a bit of scrap, part of the belly of a ship or an ancient piece of machinery that had burned in the ruins of Pompeii.
The second body was more recognizable, though only just. Somehow, even though the burning had not taken hold so badly, the smell was worse with that one. Maybe because she had been left out in the heat of the California sun in the middle of the day. The young woman. The bits of ragged and scorched flesh that still clung to her seemed somehow obscene. Five inches of leg above the foot, two inches at each elbow, a chunk of hair from the back of the head that had been protected by contact with the damp ground. Any longer in the flames, and she would have been just as much ash as he was.
“Ante-immolation wounds?” Zoe asked, without looking up.
The coroner hesitated for a second.
“Before they were burned,” Zoe added for clarification.
“I know what immolation means,” the coroner replied, a hint of tension for the first time in her calm, beachy voice. Everything about her was irritating to Zoe. “As far as I can tell, with the state the bodies are in, there was only the single cut to the throat. Enough to kill on its own. Besides being set on fire, nothing else was done to them.”
Zoe leaned closer, examining the throat. The girl’s hands had been up at hers, and the fingers had fused together and melted against the next when she burned. There was, however, still a distinct and visible wound behind them, gaping open where her head had tilted back.
“This was precise,” she said, more to herself than anything else.
“It was a quick attack,” the coroner agreed. “Whoever the killer was, they knew what they were doing. Straight in from behind, a single slash across the neck to open it fully, in both cases.”
Zoe straightened her back and looked at Shelley—to make it clear that this next observation was for her, not for the irritating presence in the room. “This was not a crime done on impulse. It was planned out, the location chosen carefully.”
“Do you think the victims were chosen on purpose?”
Zoe chewed her lip for a moment, casting her eyes back between them. What did they have in common, other than being burnt to a crisp?
“It is too early to say,” she decided. “We need to learn more about Callie Everard. If we can find a connection between them, good. If not, there may be a bigger message at play.”
“A serial killer?” Shelley groaned. “I hope they’re secret lovers or something. I had my fingers crossed we could get home for the weekend.”
“Good luck,” the coroner put in, a statement that was absolutely unnecessary.
Zoe turned a baleful glance in her direction, and was at least a little pacified by the way the woman shrank away and busied herself with a nearby metal tray of instruments instead of meeting her gaze again.