Bleeding Out by Baxter Clare Read Free Book Online Page A

lure him from Melissa. But that was all she was guilty of. The girls basically reiterated what the family and boyfriend said.
    They interviewed casual acquaintances, classmates, an ex-boyfriend. Same story. Agoura hadn’t been in any trouble, she had her steady friends, steady boyfriend. They engaged in the usual teenage mischief and highjinks—nothing serious enough to get her killed. Agoura was a square peg who’d somehow ended up in a round hole. Most murders were not accidental, but Agoura’s victimology was all wrong. She apparently had no connection to anyone from the area or that school. She wasn’t dealing or using, she wasn’t hooking, she wasn’t a banger. As far as Frank and Noah could tell, she had no reason to be in the ‘hood.
    Back at the station, Noah dropped all his paperwork on his desk and headed home. Frank lingered in her office, scanning Crocetti’s terse protocol again. Time of death was roughly 7:00 p.m. the night before she was found. The rape test located three light brown nonvictim pubic hairs. He confirmed there was no evidence of oral or vaginal rape, only anal. The multiple contusions and hematomas were seemingly made by a large, rounded instrument. Crocetti wouldn’t commit to a specific weapon. The nature of her wounds was consistent with the time frame of her absence. Her right shoulder had been dislocated before she was killed. There was no evidence of postmortem injury.
    The forensic tests had finally come back, and Frank studied them one more time. The fragments of wood that Crocetti had plucked from the ripped tissues was elderberry, Sambucus glauca. Frank’s knowledge of botany didn’t extend beyond long-stemmed roses, and she’d asked the lab tech if elderberry was common in the area.
    “Commoner than crabs in a whorehouse,” he’d responded. “It grows wild all over the place.”
    There were isolated fibers found on Agoura: red nylon combed from her hair; white nylon and an additional red one pulled out of several lacerations. Cotton fibers corresponded to the last outfit she was seen in. Four blue nylon fibers appeared to be from vehicle carpeting, and a handful of green/gold carpet fibers were also found on the body. The adhesive from her wrists turned out to be a common 3M brand of packing tape. Nail scrapings revealed nothing, and her tox test was clean. It wasn’t much to go on.
    Frank sighed, closing the binder. She didn’t need it open anyway; she had already memorized the sparse information within. She shut her eyes for a moment and indulged her fatigue. She should be home sitting on her Soloflex, not here. But it was quiet in the squad room after hours, and Frank loved the silence. She’d never admit it, but there was no place in the world she felt as safe. She doodled on a yellow legal pad and her thoughts rode in the wake of the pen.
    Another puzzle was that Agoura had evidently been held against her will and tortured for three days. Death on Frank’s turf was usually sudden—drive-bys, stabbings, ODs. Kidnappings and torture weren’t unheard of, but they were usually highly personalized. That Agoura’s face was basically unmarked and her sexual organs were free of mutilation suggested that Agoura might have been a stranger to the perp. The anal assault seemed to be the focus of his anger. That was a curiously gender-neutral area of assault, adding to the impersonality of the attack. It also suggested that he may have done time.
    On one side of the paper Frank wrote Average or Above Average Intelligence. Whoever had done this to Agoura certainly was reasonably smart. Not only had he abducted her with no witnesses, but he’d managed to keep her and batter her for three days without anyone seeming to know about it. Then he’d dumped the body on a city sidewalk and still hadn’t been seen.
    Frank leaned out of her chair and pulled a dusty notebook off the shelf on the wall. A few years ago she’d participated in a criminal profiling fellowship with the