Dead Wrong

They both glanced involuntarily toward the body.

“Paroled?”

“We’ll find out.”

The photographer signaled the coroner, and the two women joined him. Sanchez, an elected official, had run unopposed for as long as Meg had been with the Butte County Sheriff’s Department. Unlike some elected coroners or medical examiners, he was good.

“Don’t see any surprises,” he said after a minute. “Looks like strangulation. See how deep the elastic has cut into her throat?”

They saw.

“Time of death?”

He hemmed and hawed. This cold made it harder to tell. It was like putting a body in deep freeze. “You find any ID?”

“So far, we haven’t even found her panties.”

He nodded. “I’m thinking last night,” he finally concluded. “Maybe twelve hours ago. You might look for a young woman who waited bar, say, and didn’t make it home.”

“Okay.” Meg was trying to take notes. She hoped they were readable. Either she wore gloves, or her fingers went numb. She alternated.

“Let’s take a look at the face,” the coroner suggested. “Then roll her.”

Meg struggled to pull a latex glove onto her right hand, then reached out and tugged the jockstrap to one side.

The victim’s mouth was frozen open as if in a scream, the grotesquely swollen tongue protruding.

“Was he hiding her face?” Giallombardo whispered. “If anything would shock you…” Before Meg could comment, the young detective was already shaking her head. “No. He posed her. He didn’t kill her out here. She would have been scraped by cinders when she struggled. And if he, uh, penetrated her, he’d have had to expose his penis.”

The coroner actually hunched, as if the very idea of baring himself to the sub-freezing air was so hideous he couldn’t prevent a physical reaction.

“Plus he’d have had to kneel on the cinders… No.”

Meg agreed. “She was already dead when he carried her here. A man horrified by his crime flees. He doesn’t lay out the victim so carefully.”

“He has to be a local. To know to come out here.”

“That thought has occurred to me.” Meg nodded at the victim. “You’re local. Do you recognize her?”

Giallombardo swallowed. Meg watched as she focused on the face, made herself look past the distended tongue. To study glazed eyes that might have been hazel, the tiny mole on one high cheekbone…

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

“You do know her.”

Her breath rattled in her chest and she nodded dumbly.

“Who is she?”

Giallombardo swallowed again. Against nausea, Meg guessed. “Amy Owen. She might not be anymore. I mean, she might have gotten married. But in high school, that was her name.”

Disquiet struck again. “That sounds familiar.”

“I think…” The detective was taking quick, shallow breaths. “I think Will dated her.”

Air hissed from between Meg’s teeth.

“He brought girls out here. Sometimes.”

With quick alarm, she thought, Not Trina Giallombardo. Boy, would that complicate things. “How do you know?” she asked, aware she sounded harsh.

Her deputy didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Not because…” She closed her eyes, obviously struggling to regain her composure. When she spoke again, her voice was devoid of emotion. “I heard girls talk. That’s all.”

Meg’s eyes narrowed. Was there some history here of which she was unaware? Damn it, had the young Trina Giallombardo had a crush on Will? If so, should she be jettisoned from the case?

But they didn’t know that this had anything to do with Will.

Please God.

“I came out here when I was a teenager,” she heard herself say. She was distantly aware that the other two were gaping. “With Will’s father.”

After what she realized was an appalled silence, Giallombardo said, “Um…I suppose almost everyone in Elk Springs has.”

The coroner looked up at Meg with shrewd eyes. “You sure Mendoza is still locked up?”

“We should have been informed if he came up for parole.” Meg stared down at the body. “Let’s roll her.”

Between rigor mortis and freezing, the job wasn’t easy. Despite the cold, Giallombardo looked green by the time they were done.

The backside revealed lividity and more bruising, nothing else.

Meg raised her voice. “Let’s bag her. People, has anyone found anything?”

General shakes of the head. No tracks, no discarded clothing, no convenient cigarette butts that didn’t look as if they’d been left last summer. Truthfully, Meg hadn’t expected anything different. The unknown subject—or UNSUB, to cops—had driven out here with the dead woman likely in his trunk. Maybe at night, maybe this morning. He’d carried her a few feet up the slope of the lava cone, splayed her limbs, adjusted the jockstrap like a man adding a flourish to his signature and left.

How in hell had he known every detail? Had he seen the body? Could there have been two murderers? Had he stumbled on the body before the cops found it? Or, she thought with a jolt, was this killer a cop?

And, whoever he was, why had he waited six years to imitate the previous rape and murder?

“Lieutenant?”

She knew on one level that Sanchez was talking to her, but still she stared down at the body and asked herself the one question she’d been avoiding.

What if Ricky Mendoza’s protestations of innocence were real? What if he didn’t do it?

And what if the real killer had been shocked by what he’d done? What if he’d been able to suppress his sexual perversion for six years—until something triggered his rage?

Something, say, like the fact that Will Patton had just moved back to Elk Springs?