Page 114 of Cold, Cold Bones
Second rule: No preconceptions. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.
Nevertheless.
I looked at the bruised and distorted young face and, for a moment, pictured the girl alive, connecting the clasp of her locket behind her neck. Walking along a bleak stretch of road.
Running across a dark parking lot.
Heart hammering.
Headlights blinding.
“It appears to be a hit-and-run.” Nguyen’s voice snapped me back. “The victim appears to be in her late teens, perhaps Hispanic. She hasn’t yet been identified.”
Nguyen crossed to the monitor, her expression somber.
I joined her. Using a gloved finger, she pointed at a defect located approximately mid-shaft in the left collarbone.
At two ribs inferior to it.
Shifting to the next film, she ran the finger down the arm, over the humerus, the radius, the ulna. The hand.
“Yes,” I said to her unspoken question.
She brought up the pelvis. No need to point.
“Yes,” I repeated.
A frontal view of the skull. A side view.
Wordlessly, I returned to the body.
The girl lay on her back. Nguyen hadn’t yet opened her torso and, except for the bruises, abrasions, and odd angles of the limbs due to fractures, she might have been sleeping. The hair haloing her head was long and dark.
Sudden flashback.
Focus, Brennan.
I gloved, masked, and examined the ravaged flesh, ghostly pale and cold to the touch. I palpated the arm, the shoulder, the hand, the abdomen, felt the underlying damage evident on the X-rays in glowing black-and-white.
“Can we turn her over, please?” My voice broke the stillness.
Nguyen stepped to my side. Together we tucked the slender arms tight to the girl’s body and rolled her by the shoulders and hips.
My eyes traveled the delicate spine and the double mounds of the buttocks. Took in the tread marks imprinted on the flesh of the painfully thin thighs.
“This is a patterned injury,” I said, indicating a discoloration on the girl’s right shoulder. Maybe five inches long, the hematoma appeared as a series of dashes. “Any idea what may have made it?”
Nguyen shook her head.
I looked at Slidell. He glanced at the bruise but said nothing.
“May I see the CSU photos?” I asked, stripping off and tossing, not so gently, my latex gloves and mask.
Nguyen collected a bound collection of five-by-sevens from the counter and handed it to me. Frame by frame I viewed the desolate spot where the girl’s body had been found.
The photos told the same story as the corpse.
This was no accident.
