Ashes to Ashes by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

body down the hill for his little ceremony. Quinn looked up at the sodium vapor security light that topped a dark pole near the utility shed. The glass had been shattered, but there were no visible fragments of it on the ground.
    “We know how long that light's been out?”
    Walsh looked up, blinking and grimacing as the rain hit him in the face. “You'll have to ask the cops.”
    A couple of days, Quinn bet. Not long enough that the park service would have gotten around to fixing it. If the damage was the work of their man in preparation for his midnight call . . . If he had come here in advance, knocked out the light, cleaned up the glass to help avoid detection of the vandalism and thereby improve his odds that the security light would not be replaced quickly . . . if all of that was true, they were dealing with a strong degree of planning and premeditation. And experience. MO was learned behavior. A criminal learned by trial and error what to do and what not to do in the commission of his crimes. He improved his methods with time and repetition.
    Ignoring the rain that pelted down on his bare head, Quinn hunched his shoulders inside his trench coat and started down the hill, conscious that the killer would have taken this route with a body in his arms. It was a fair distance—fifty or sixty yards. The crime scene unit would have the exact measurements. It took strength to carry a dead weight that far. The time of death would have determined how he had carried her. Over the shoulder would have been easiest—if rigor had not yet set in, or if it had come and gone already. If he had been able to carry her over his shoulder, then his size could vary more; a smaller man could accomplish the task. If he had to carry her in his arms, he would had to have been larger. Quinn hoped they would know more after the autopsy.
    “What did the crime scene unit cover?” he asked, the words coming out of his mouth on a cloud of steam.
    Walsh hustled along three paces behind him, coughing. “Everything. This whole section of park, including the parking area and the utility shed. The homicide guys called in their own Bureau of Investigation crime scene people and the mobile lab from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension as well. They were very thorough.”
    “When did this rain start?”
    “This morning.”
    “Shit,” Quinn grumbled. “Last night—would the ground have been hard or soft?”
    “Like a rock. They didn't get any shoe prints. They picked up some garbage—scraps of paper, cigarette butts, like that. But hell, it's a public park. The stuff could have come from anyone.”
    “Anything distinguishing left at the first two scenes?”
    “The victims' driver's licenses. Other than that, nothing to my knowledge.”
    “Who's doing the lab work?”
    “BCA. Their facilities are excellent.”
    “I've heard that.”
    “They're aware they can contact the FBI lab if they need help or clarification on anything.”
    Quinn pulled up just short of the charred ground where the body had been left, a thick, dark sense of oppression closing tight around his chest as it always did at a crime scene. He had never tried to discern whether the feeling was anything as mystical or romantic as the notion of a malingering sense of evil or something as psychologically profound as displaced guilt. The feeling was just a part of him. He supposed he should have welcomed it as some proof of his humanity. After all the bodies he'd seen, he had yet to become totally hardened.
    Then again, he might have been better off if he had.
    For the first time, he opened the folder Walsh had given him and looked at the photographs someone had had the foresight to slip into plastic protectors. The tableau presented might have made the average person recoil. Portable halogen lights had been set up near the body to illuminate both the night and the corpse, giving the photo a weirdly artistic quality. As did the charring of the flesh, and the melted fabric