The Triumph of Katie Byrne

In the distance, faintly, she heard his response. ‘Okay, Katie. It’s okay, I hear you.’

Swinging around, she returned to the truck and once again drove up the hill to wait for the ambulance and the police. Her head had begun to pound, and she felt sick again, as though she were going to throw up. She took a number of deep breaths, as she so often did when she stood in the wings, willing her stage fright to go away. This nauseous feeling wasn’t caused by stage fright, though, but by genuine fear. What if the killer was looking for her, as her mother had suggested he could be?

She sat waiting on the highway, but she didn’t have long to wait. Within the space of five minutes she heard a siren, and a moment later a state trooper’s car came into view. It raced along the highway at breakneck speed.

Since the state trooper was coming up Route 7, from the direction of Gaylordsville, he had to park on the opposite side of the road; he got out and hurried over to the pickup truck.

Katie rolled down her window and peered out at him, her face strained, her eyes bleak with pain.

‘Are you Katie Byrne?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I am. Is the ambulance coming?’

‘It should be here real fast. I was in the immediate vicinity, and answered the radio call at once. Where’s the crime scene located exactly?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Katie opened the door, jumped down and led the trooper across the short stretch of barren land. Pointing down the hill, she said, ‘It’s in the wood immediately opposite that old barn down there. My brother Niall’s waiting in the wood. He thought he’d better stay with Carly, to protect her. Just in case the attacker was still around here –’ Katie stopped. Her voice was wobbling and tears had welled in her eyes.

‘Take it easy, Katie,’ the trooper said.

Gulping, she nodded, and endeavoured to get control of herself. ‘Shall I wait for the ambulance while you go down the hill? To show them the way?’

‘You won’t have to do that. It’s about to arrive,’ the state trooper answered, cocking his head at the sound of screaming sirens. The highway was filled with whirling red lights as the ambulance shot along the road, coming to a halt behind the state trooper’s car.

Katie made for Niall’s truck and got inside. She was chilled to the bone and unexpectedly exhausted. She watched as the trooper sprinted over to the ambulance and spoke to the driver, pointed down the hill and then went and got into his own car. The ambulance began to move.

Katie followed the ambulance.

The state trooper was immediately behind her in his police car, his red light turned on, his siren shrilling loud and clear.

After pointing the way through the wood, Katie stood to one side and watched as the medics raced down the narrow path, carrying a stretcher.

Within minutes they were returning with Carly, and she was still alive. It’s a miracle, Katie thought. She had been teetering on the edge of despair, certain her friend could not last. But Carly had hung in there. She made it. Oh God, thank you, thank you.

The medics were huddled around Carly, checking her vital signs before putting her in the ambulance.

Katie clung to Niall; the two of them were standing together near the barn, just a few feet away from Carly. How pale she was, Katie thought. White as bleached bone, and so still. Still as death. But the medics had given the thumbs up sign a moment ago, and one of them had said, ‘She’s breathing.’

‘She is going to live, isn’t she?’ Katie asked the medic who had just helped to lift the stretcher into the ambulance.

He glanced over his shoulder at Katie and nodded. ‘I think so. I hope so.’

The ambulance left with Carly, and Katie took hold of Niall’s hand, held it tightly in hers. He looked at her quickly, and asked, ‘Did you call Mom?’

‘Yes. I told her what’s happened. She was distraught. I think I’d better go home now, Niall. I told her I would, once Carly was on the way to the hospital.’

‘You’ll have to stay here with me, Katie. The state trooper needs to talk to us when he gets back from looking at Denise’s body –’ Niall paused, listened. ‘Sounds like sirens again. More state troopers arriving, I guess.’

Katie seemed uncomprehending for a moment.

Niall stared back at her, his eyes narrowing. ‘Denise has been murdered,’ he said, sorrow echoing in his voice. ‘This place is going to be teeming with police in the next half hour.’

Chapter Seven (#)

This was the type of crime he detested. Defenceless young girls mercilessly beaten and murdered. Easy prey, innocent prey, Mac MacDonald thought bleakly as he sidestepped the yellow police tape two state troopers were placing around the wood, to cordon off the crime scene and safeguard it.

John ‘Mac’ MacDonald, commander of the Major Crime Squad of the Connecticut State Police out of Litchfield, had long ago discovered that crimes of this nature inevitably turned him into a raging bull inside. But he knew better than to unleash his fury. He had schooled himself for years to exercise total self-control and discipline. But that didn’t mean he held the rage in check all the time. Most weekends found him hitting a punching bag in his basement exercise room, imagining who the recipients of his intense pummelling might possibly be. It was a release of a kind for him, yet he was aware it did nothing to stop the senseless murder and rape of young women. He had two teenage daughters himself, and he worried about them constantly, drilled them relentlessly about being street-smart and careful. Images of their lovely young faces leapt into his head, but he pushed them away. He could not afford to be distracted. He needed total concentration. He must think about one thing only: solving this case quickly.

Mac paused to speak to one of the state troopers handling the yellow tape. ‘You were the first here, weren’t you,’ he stated, his manner chatty, friendly.

The state trooper nodded. ‘Yeah, I was, Lieutenant. I made certain the crime scene wasn’t contaminated in any way, and the medics were careful, they didn’t destroy its integrity either. They went straight in, got the injured girl and came straight out. One, two, three, just like that.’

‘And the other girl was dead when you arrived.’ This was again a statement, not a question.

‘Yeah. Poor kid.’ The trooper shook his head and his eyes were suddenly sad. ‘What a lousy thing!’ he muttered and half grimaced, turned away.

Mac sighed under his breath as he moved on towards the wood. He knew how the trooper felt. He also knew that as long as he lived he would always react strongly to violence against women. It made him want to teach the cowards who perpetrated these outrages a lesson they would never forget. Some son of a bitch had done a really foul job on two young women earlier, and the fury Mac felt brought a hard glint to his grey eyes, and his expression was grim and as cold as steel. He never let any other emotion show on his narrow, craggy face; that’s why they called him Mac the Knife behind his back.

Adopting a brisker pace, Mac walked down the narrow path that led to the middle of the wood where he knew a seventeen-year-old girl lay dead.

He was also well aware that Doctor Allegra Marsh, the Medical Examiner, was already on the scene. She had arrived a short while before he had, according to two of his detectives who were in the barn. Also, her dark-green Cherokee jeep was parked next to the black van he knew came from her office.

Mac liked Allegra Marsh, admired her. For one thing, there was no bullshit about her. She always called it the way she saw it at a crime scene, and she was very forthright in every other way. They had worked on countless cases together, and she had gone the distance for him, gone beyond the call of duty, in a sense.

All of this aside, she was the most brilliant forensic scientist and pathologist he had ever known and worked with. In her own way, she was also a detective, just as he was; they simply used different methods. They were good friends, but it stopped there, even though he was long widowed and she was single. With Allegra there were certain boundaries, ones which he knew not to cross, although sometimes…Well, that was another story.

Even if he hadn’t been told she was here, the intense beams of light from her battery-operated spotlights announced her formidable presence in the wood.

When he was about five feet away, Mac came to a standstill, and said, ‘Not a happy night, Allegra.’

The Medical Examiner was kneeling on the ground with one of the forensic team, and she glanced up at him and shook her blonde head. ‘Hi, Mac. And you’re right, not happy at all.’ She sighed and added, ‘It was some angry man who paid a visit here earlier tonight, no doubt about that.’

‘What’ve you found?’

‘Death by strangulation. Manual strangulation. Her larynx is crushed. Very intense bruising around the neck area. A violent attack. And she was raped, but you most likely know that from your team.’

‘Yeah, I do.’ He was staring down at the body, and he muttered, ‘Oh God, she was so young…’

‘And a virgin,’ Allegra said.

‘She was?’

‘Yes, I believe so. Obviously, I’ll know for certain once I do the autopsy. But there was blood mixed in with the seminal fluid. I have a number of DNA samples from her body. Semen, blood, which I believe to be hers, hair follicles. Skin and flesh from underneath her fingernails. More hair. Different hair. And this.’

Allegra showed him the large tweezers in her right hand, which she generally used to lift off DNA samples from a body. They now held a cigarette stub. ‘We just found this beauty partially hidden under her body.’ She placed it carefully in the glassine envelope her assistant was now holding, and went on, ‘I’m certain the girl was not sitting around here smoking, Mac. She was running for her life. This was an oversight on the assailant’s part. He tossed it away and forgot it.’ She sat back on her heels. ‘Saliva, Mac, the perp’s saliva. I hope.’ Her dark eyes sparkled at this thought.

He nodded. ‘Any idea yet of what time she died?’

‘In the vicinity of six, six-fifteen. I’ll be able to place the time more accurately, pinpoint it, after the post-mortem. But it wasn’t much later than six-twenty, I’m fairly sure.’ As she was speaking, Allegra was putting items away in one of the two metal medical cases she favoured. Then turning to her assistant, she said, ‘Let’s get her into the body bag, Ken.’