Page 3 of The Italian Reckoning
Iris stretches, briefly displaying the lithe body hidden under all that thick fur, then crawls onto my lap and immediately alerts me to how cold I’ve become while sitting up here, staring wistfully at the couple across the street.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” Her purr deepens as I scratch behind her ear. My attention drifts to the sparkling city below, a sea of noise and chaos that never sleeps.
Initially, I’d been against my forced transfer here, but it’s become the perfect place for me to hide. In some ways, I’m thankful that I’ve become another faceless detective struggling against the waves of criminals more likely to face justice at the hands of the Mafia than inside a courtroom.
It won’t stop me from trying, though. Eventually, I’ll get one of the big fish and I won’t let them go until the cell doors slam closed behind them. I’ve had my fill of criminals getting away with it.
The buzz of my cell suddenly overshadows the thrum of Iris’s purr. I answer in two rings. “Hello?”
“Detective Gogs?”
“Speaking.”
“We’ve got a body.”
Being on call sucks.
“Walk me through it.”
The crumbling building illuminates with the repetitive flash of blue and red from the patrol cars parked out front, streaking in through several broken windows. That same breeze from my apartment rooftop follows me here, rustling through discarded plastic on the ground and sending an empty can rolling across the ground. The echo of the noise is enough to make my skin jump, so I focus on dragging protective gloves over my hands.
“Dog walker let his dog off the leash,” explains the patrolman walking beside me. “His dog bolted into this abandoned building chasing something, likely a rat. He follows and manages to get his dog back on the leash when he finds this in its mouth.” He holds a plastic baggie up to his face as if checking it’s the right one and then passes it to me. “It’s in such good condition that he thought his dog had stumbled onto some sort of stash, so he asked his dog to fetch and it brought him right to the body.”
Inside the bag is a shining silver bracelet with the nameBelleengraved in gold on a long pink bead. “This looks expensive.”I pass the baggie back. “We’re working on the assumption it belongs to our victim?”
“Or she snatched it off the killer.” He shrugs, leading me across the wide empty floor and through an alcove at the other end. “Once the prints come back on her, we’ll know for sure.”
“Hey, Sarah.” Amelia, the coroner, groans as she climbs to her feet and flashes me a smile. “It’s a late one.”
“Always is when I’m on call.” My attention drifts to the body of the young girl lying dead on the ground, discarded over a pile of crumbling bricks and dirt. “Shit. She can’t be any older than twenty-one.”
“That’s my guess,” Amelia sighs. “I’m not ruling anything out until I get her back to my lab, but my initial diagnosis is that she died by asphyxiation. There are a lot of defensive wounds on her hands and forearms, but some of them look a couple of days old at most. She also has restraint marks around her wrists and ankles and a contusion on the back of her skull.”
I drink in every detail of Amelia’s investigation while studying the body, my heart thumping hard in my chest. No matter how many dead bodies I’ve seen over the years, I can’t get used to it. That body was once a whole entire person who was talking and laughing and crying. How can someone just snuff that out and dump her here like trash?
My chest tightens as anger warms underneath my skin. “How long has she been here?”
“Liver temp was low so twelve hours, give or take.” Amelia rubs at the back of her neck and groans softly. “Like I said, I’ll know more when I get her back to my lab.”
“Twelve hours,” I murmur. “Plus the restraints and the…” Dropping to my haunches next to the body, I study every inch of her for some kind of clue that will jump out at me. She’s slender and fully dressed, apart from no shoes. The bruises on herforearms appear faint under the lights set up by those first on the scene, but her broken and torn fingernails tell a clear story.
She fought for her life.
The ligature marks around her wrists and ankles are deep, suggesting she was bound for quite some time. Other than that, she appears untouched except for the smearing of her heavy makeup.
That gives me pause.
The uncomfortable familiarity of her smeared heavy lipstick, loose eyelashes resting on her cheek, streaked eyeliner, and the heavy blush on her sickly pale skin… I’ve seen this before.
My stomach twists and I abruptly stand, creating distance between myself and the body. The painful familiarity is surely a coincidence, but just the thought of it makes my blood run cold.
“You good?” Amelia tilts her head as she looks me up and down.
“Fine. It’s late, y’know?” Turning my back, I lock eyes with the patrolman. “Run her fingerprints through the missing persons database first. She’s young but dressed up like she was partying, and since it’s only Thursday, I can’t imagine where she should have been. But the ligature marks suggest she was bound, so maybe we’re looking at a kidnapping gone wrong?”
“Understood.” He scribbles quickly into his notebook. “Although you know how it goes. Something like this is probably family revenge or a grudge to work out.”
There it is. Underneath his casual words is the truth. Every single person who walked in here probably took one look at her and thought the same thing.
