The cop shrugged. “A couple of kids on their way to pick up papers. You know, for their paper route.”
“They still around?”
“We got ’em in a van up on the street.”
“Can I ask them a few questions?”
Again, the cop shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
“You got a name for her yet?”
“Claire Scott, we think. She was reported missing a few days ago. Someone’s on their way out to ID her now.”
“You mind if I take a look?”
“Be careful not to trample anything until Homicide gets here,” the cop said. “But one or two pictures won’t hurt, I guess.”
“Thanks.”
“Just tell Benson I sent you over.”
Nick was aware of the tracks his footsteps left in the muddy ground as he walked toward the body. No one stopped him as he approached. Maybe because the victim was a prostitute, Nick thought. No one cared. Aware of the damage he was causing to the crime scene, though, Nick himself stopped about fifteen feet from the body. When he could smell it. He stared at the pattern of ugly blue and purple bite marks the killer had left in the whore’s yellowing skin. He raised his camera to his eye, using his telephoto lens to bring the naked corpse closer to him. The apparatus made a satisfying click as he noticed the blood matting the tuft of hairs at the woman’s vagina. Nick found himself blinking as he took the camera away from his face, swallowing to keep himself from becoming sick. The killer had entered the woman with a blade.
Turning away, trying to forget the small cloud of flies buzzing above the rotting flesh, laying their larvae in the prostitute’s wounds, he caught sight of another set of tracks in the muddy soil. He let his eyes follow them until they disappeared into the tall grass and nettles feeding off the river. Noticing something unusual about the footsteps, he looked back at the tracks he himself had left, deliberately comparing them. He raised his camera again and snapped a few pictures of the muddy footprints. Then he backtracked, retracing his steps away from the body.
The cop who had let him pass was busy turning Sheila back from the crime scene. Nick waited for him to explain that her crew would compromise the evidence. But you let him through, Sheila said, pointing toward Nick. The officer’s face remained impassive. Maybe I shouldn’t have, he said. Up at the bridge, a convoy of five or six cruisers was pulling to a stop, lights flashing, splashing the river valley with waves of electric color. That’s Homicide now, the cop said to the TV crew. You talk to them. As of now, the crime scene’s sealed, and I’m going to have to ask you to step back. Come on now, you, too, he said to Nick. Step back up to the road.
“Let me ask you something,” Nick said as he approached the officer again.
The officer didn’t respond directly. “Just keep walking.”
“You take a look at the set of footsteps leading up to the body?”
“Yeah, sure,” the officer said, irritated.
“You notice anything odd about them?”
“Like what?”
“Go take a look at them again,” Nick said. “You’ll see. Whoever left them wasn’t wearing shoes.”
“How do you know?”
“Go take a look at them again,” Nick repeated.
He passed Detective Adam Stolie without saying hello. The detective had his hands full. He glanced at Nick without noticing him. A teenage boy was walking in front of him, threatening to break away from the group of policemen and to run down the embankment toward the body half hidden in the grass. Stolie grabbed him by the shoulder to restrain him.
“Yo, Daniel,” the detective said. “Slow it down, would you? We don’t even know it’s your mom yet, okay?”
Nick stopped at the edge of the bridge. He propped his camera on the low concrete barrier to steady it, then zoomed in on the body. Ten minutes later, he was able to snap a few good pictures of the boy identifying his mother, his face drawn, destroyed.
It began to rain as Nick left the crime scene. Sheila was helping the Channel 11 crew stow the camera equipment into the back of the van. As he walked past in the direction of his car, he smiled at her, but he didn’t slow down.
“You know,” she said, finding her voice, “I saw you the other day. At the press conference at City Hall.”
Nick was already past her. He recognized that she was just trying to keep him there, but he stopped anyway. “Did you?” He had no recollection of her being there.
“Yeah. I was—well, I was going to ask you if you wanted to get lunch sometime—or whatever.”
Nick realized that he had never really looked at her. Her makeup was so thick that it was beginning to crack like the floor of a desert. Instead, though, Nick became aware of the blush of her skin underneath. “Sure,” he said. “That would be nice. Hey—I’d better get going now—I’ve got to get these pictures uploaded if I want them to hit the afternoon edition.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Sheila smiled beneath her oily mask.
Walking on, Nick flinched a little, trying to erase the image of Sheila’s awkward approach from his mind.
Back at his car, he looked up at the sky as he kicked off some of the mud caked to the soles of his shoes. In the last week, the weather had turned. It had gone from late summer to autumn. The rains would get heavier soon, the nights would get longer and colder. Without the sun, the chill would never fully leave the air.
The sight of the mutilated corpse had shaken him. Unlocking his car, Nick decided to stop at the Starbucks he frequented near his apartment for a coffee before heading in to the paper. He wanted time to settle himself, and he could just as easily upload his photographs onto his laptop and send them into the office from there, using the café’s wireless link. He twisted the key in the ignition and flicked on the windshield wipers, unconsciously squeezing his arms against his ribs, tightening his fingers around the plastic steering wheel as he pulled away from the curb.
Lost in his thoughts, haunted by the vision of the corpse lying butchered in the wet grass, Nick had no way of knowing that just a few minutes later Sara Garland would fall into his life, unexpectedly, with the certain grace of a diver swooping without a splash into a deep pool of water.
chapter 3
Beyond the plate-glass windows of the Starbucks, the sky was so low and gray that street lamps were still burning at ten in the morning. A fierce wind was blowing, whipping brown and yellow leaves down the broad street, tossing heavy drops of freezing rain in handfuls against the thick window panes. The café was packed with students from the University of Washington. The line stretched nearly to the door. Nick had been lucky to snag the table in front of the gas-burning fireplace. Unsteady still, he was staring at the screen of his small computer, oblivious to the voices rising and falling around him.
When a green-eyed girl with Nordic blond hair stood in front of his table and spoke to him, Nick hardly noticed her. She was only one more of the rumpled, tired-looking students milling around the room, waiting for an empty table. The blond-haired girl put her slender ivory hand down next to his laptop and leaned closer to him.
“Is anyone sitting here?” she repeated.
His interest piqued by the smooth texture of her skin and her long, delicate fingers, Nick looked up at her. The first thought that crossed his mind was that he had never seen a more beautiful woman. The tall, svelte girl smiled at him, and Nick found himself smiling back at her, stunned by the radiance of her eyes. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No one.”
“May I?” She rested a hand on the back of the chair opposite Nick, but politely