Cause to Fear

“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 for a small piece of trash, but all she could find was a hair tie that had snapped on her earlier in the day.

“Black?” Connelly called from the bank. “What are you doing?”

She peered back and saw him standing close to the ice but being very purposeful to not step on it.

“Working,” she hollered back. “Why don’t you skate on out here and help?”

He rolled his eyes at her and she turned back to the ice. She dropped the snapped hair tie into the water and watched it bob up and down for a moment. Then it slowly caught the sluggish current of the water beneath the ice. It was pushed away and under the ice to her left, further out toward Watertown.

So she was dropped in somewhere else, Avery thought, looking down the river in the direction of Boston. On the bank, Connelly and the officer he had been speaking to were heading up behind the Forensics team.

Avery remained on the ice, standing straight up now. She was getting very cold as she watched her breath vaporize on the air. But something about the cold temperature seemed to center her. It allowed her to think, to use the light creaking noises of the ice as a metronome of sorts as she put her thoughts together.

Nude and not a blemish or bruise on her. So assault is ruled out. No jewelry, so it could have been a robbery. But most cases of a body after being robbed would show some signs of struggle…and this woman was spotless. And what about those nails and the absolute lack of hair anywhere other than her head?

She slowly walked to the bank, looking down the frozen river to where it rounded a bend and kept on in the direction of Boston. It was weird to think of how beautiful the frozen Charles River looked from Boston University while less than twenty minutes away a body had been pulled from it.

She pulled up her coat collar around her neck as she walked back to the bank. She was just in time to see the back doors of the Forensics van close. Connelly was approaching her but he was looking beyond her and out to the frozen water.

“You get a good look at her?” Avery asked.

“Yeah. She looked like a damn toy or something. All pale and cold and…”

“And perfect,” Avery said. “Did you notice there was no hair on her? No bruises or bumps, either.”

“Or jewelry,” Connelly added. With a heavy sigh, he asked: “Dare I ask for your initial thoughts?”

She was much more willing to be unfiltered with Connelly now. She had been ever since he and O’Malley had offered her a promotion to sergeant two months ago. In return, they seemed more willing to accept her theories from the get-go rather than questioning the hell out of everything that came out of her mouth.

“Her fingernails were perfectly trimmed,” she said. “It’s like she had just come out of a salon before she was dumped in the river. Then there’s the lack of hair anywhere. One of those things is odd enough but together, it screams intentionality to me.”

“You think someone cleaned her up before they killed her?”

“Seems like it. It’s almost like the funeral parlor making the dead look as presentable as possible for the open casket. Whoever did this cleaned her. Shaved her and did her nails.”

“Any idea why?”

Avery shrugged. “I can only speculate right now. But I can tell you one thing that you probably aren’t going to like very much.”

“Ah hell,” he said, knowing what was coming.

“This guy took his time…not even in the killing, but in how the body would look when it was found. He was intentional. Patient. Based on similar cases, I can almost guarantee you she won’t be the only one.”

With another of his patented sighs, Connelly dug his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call a meeting at the A1,” he said. “I’ll let them know we have a potential serial killer.”

CHAPTER THREE

Avery supposed that if she was going to take the position of sergeant, she needed to get over her hatred of the A1 conference room. She had nothing against the room per se. But she knew that a meeting held within it so soon after the discovery of a body meant that there would be cross-talking and arguing, most of which would be used to shoot down her theories.

Maybe as sergeant, that will come to an end, she thought as she walked into the room.

Connelly was at the head of the table, shoving papers around. She figured O’Malley would be in soon. He’d seemed a lot more present at any meeting she was a part of ever since they had offered her the sergeant position.

Connelly looked up at her through the growing crowd of other officers. “Things are moving quickly on this one,” he said. “The body pulled from the river was ID’ed exactly five minutes ago. Patty Dearborne, twenty-two years of age. A Boston University student and Boston native. Right now, that’s all we know. The parents will need to be informed once this meeting is over.”

He slid over a folder that contained only two sheets of paper. One showed a picture taken from Patty Dearborne’s Facebook profile. The other sheet showed three photos, all taken from the Charles River earlier in the day. Patty Dearborne’s face was present in all of them, her purple-tinted eyelids closed.

In a morbid train of thought, Avery tried to see the young woman’s face in the same way a killer might see it. Patty was gorgeous, even in death. She had a body that Avery herself would have seen as far too skinny but bar-wandering men would salivate over. She used this mentality, trying to gauge why a killer would choose such a victim if there were no sexual implications.

Maybe he’s after beautiful things. The question, of course, is if he is seeking these beautiful things in order to fawn over them or to destroy them. Does he appreciate beauty or does he want to obliterate it?

She wasn’t sure how long she had been thinking about this. All she knew was that she jumped a bit when Connelly called the meeting to order. There were a total of nine people in the conference room. She saw that Ramirez had snuck in. He was in a seat near Connelly, looking through the same type of folder Connelly had given her moments ago. He apparently felt her looking at him; he glanced up and smiled at her.

She returned the smile as Connelly started. She dropped her gaze right away, not wanting to be too obvious. While just about everyone in the precinct knew that she and Ramirez were an item now, they still liked to try to keep it under wraps.

“Everyone should have been briefed by now,” Connelly said. “For those of you that have not, the woman has been identified as Patty Dearborne, a BU senior. She was found in the Charles River just outside of Watertown but she is a Boston native. As Detective Black pointed out in the briefing you all received, the current of the river suggests that the body was dumped elsewhere. Forensics is guessing that her body was in the water for as long as twenty-four hours. Those two things add up to a probable dumping spot somewhere within Boston.”

“Sir,” Officer Finley spoke up. “Forgive me for asking, but why are we not even thinking about suicide? The briefing states there were no bruises and no signs of a struggle.”