“I know that, Mom,” Rose said. Then, with a smirk, she added: “And I can’t tell you how sad that sounds.”
They shared a laugh at this but secretly, Avery was awed by how much Rose was like her in that moment. The instant any conversation became too emotional or personal, Rose tended to shut it down with either silence or humor. In other words, the apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.
In the midst of their laughter, a dainty little waitress came over, the same one who had taken their orders and delivered their coffee. “Refills?” she asked.
“None for me,” Avery said.
“Same here,” Rose said. She then stood up as the waitress took her leave. “I actually need to get going,” she said. “I’ve got that meeting with the academic advisor in an hour.”
This was yet another thing Avery was afraid to make a big deal of. She was excited that Rose had finally decided to go to college. At nineteen, she’d made the moves and had set up appointments with advisors at a Boston-based community college. As far as Avery was concerned, that meant that she was ready to start making something of her life but was also not quite ready to leave familiar things – potentially including a strained yet fixable relationship with her mother.
“Call me later to know how it goes,” Avery said.
“I will. Thanks again, Mom. This was surprisingly fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime soon.”
Avery gave a nod as she watched her daughter leave. She took the last gulp of her coffee and stood, gathering up the four shopping bags by her chair. After bundling them up around her shoulder, she left the coffee shop and headed for her car.
When her phone rang, it was quite an ordeal to answer it while carrying the shopping bags. She felt silly with the bags, actually. She had never been one of those women who liked to shop. But it had been a great mending exercise with Rose, and that was what was important.
After shifting all the bags around on her shoulder, she was finally able to reach the cell phone in her inner coat pocket.
“Avery Black,” she said.
“Black,” said the always-gruff and rapid voice of A1 Homicide Supervisor Dylan Connelly. “Where are you right now?”
“The Leather District,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need you over at the Charles River, just outside of town over near Watertown, as fast as you can.”
She heard the tone in his voice, the urgency, and her heart skipped a beat.
“What is it?” she said, almost afraid to ask.
There came a long pause, followed by a heavy sigh.
“We found a body under the ice,” he said. “And you’re going to have to see this one to believe it.”
CHAPTER TWO
Avery arrived at the scene exactly twenty-seven minutes later. Watertown, Massachusetts, roughly twenty miles outside of Boston’s city limits, was just one of the numerous towns that shared the Charles River with Boston. The Watertown Dam sat upstream of the Watertown Bridge. The area round the dam was mostly rural, as was the crime scene she was currently parking in front of. She estimated that the dam was still a good fifteen miles away, as the city of Watertown was another four miles up the road.
When she walked down to the river, Avery ducked under a long strip of crime scene tape. The crime scene was quite large, the yellow tape making a huge rectangle from two trees along the bank to two steel poles that the police had jammed into the solid ice on the river. Connelly was standing on the bank speaking with two other officers. Out on the ice, a team of three people were hunkered down on the ice, looking in.
She passed Connelly and gave him a wave. He glanced at his watch, gave an impressed look, and waved her on.
“Forensics can fill you in,” he said.
That was fine with her. While she was growing to like Connelly more and more with each case, he was still best taken in small quantities. Avery made her way out onto the ice, wondering if those few times on a rink during her pre-teen years might serve her well. Apparently, though, those skills were long gone. She walked slowly, careful not to slip. She hated to feel vulnerable and not fully in control but the damned ice was just so slippery.
“It’s okay,” one of the Forensics members said, noticing her coming toward them. “Hatch fell on his ass three times getting out here.”
“Shut up,” said another member of the team, presumably Hatch.
Avery finally made it across to where the Forensics guys were huddled. They were hunched down, looking into a cleanly broken portion of ice. Beneath it, she saw the body of a nude woman. She looked to be in her early twenties. Pale and partially frozen skin aside, she looked quite striking. Gorgeous, actually.
Forensics had managed to hook the body beneath the arms with plastic poles. The end of each pole had a simple U-shaped bend to it, coated with what looked like some sort of cotton. To the right of the broken ice, a simple insulated blanket waited for the body.
“And she was found like this?” Avery asked.
“Yeah,” said the man she assumed was named Hatch. “By kids, no less. The mom called the local PD and an hour and fifteen minutes later, here we are.”
“You’re Avery Black, right?” the third member asked.
“I am.”
“You need to check things over before we take her out?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
The three of them stepped back a bit. Hatch and the member who had called him out for busting his ass held on to the plastic poles. Avery inched closer; the toes of her shoes were less than six inches from the broken ice and open water.
The broken ice allowed her to see the woman from her brow all the way down to her knees. She looked almost like a wax figure. Avery knew the extreme temperatures might have something to do with that, but there was something else to her flawlessness. She was incredibly thin – maybe just a scrap over one hundred pounds. Her flushed face was turning a shade of blue but other than that, there were no blemishes – no scrapes, no cuts, no bruises or even pimples.
Avery also noticed that other than her soaked and partially frozen blonde hair, there was not a single hair on her body. Her legs were perfectly shaved, as was her pubic region. She looked like a life-sized doll.
With a final glance at the body, Avery stepped back. “I’m good,” she told the Forensics team.
They came forward and with a count to three, pulled the body slowly from the water. When they pulled her out, they angled her so that she came out mostly on the insulated blanket. Avery noted that there was also a stretcher beneath the blanket.
With the body fully out of the water, she noticed two other things that struck her as odd. First, the woman was not wearing a single piece of jewelry. She knelt down and saw that her ears were pierced but there were no earrings. She then turned her attention to the second oddity: the woman’s fingernails and toenails were neatly clipped – to the point of looking recently manicured.
It was odd, but this was what raised the most alarm bells in her mind. With the frigid flesh turning blue beneath those nails, there was something eerie about it. It’s almost like she’s been polished, she thought.
“We good here?” Hatch asked her.
She nodded.
As the three of them covered the body and then carefully trudged back toward the bank with the stretcher board, Avery remained by the section of broken ice. She peered down into the water, thinking. She reached into her pocket, looking