Discretion by Allison Leotta Read Free Book Online

Enquirer.
    Still, if Anna said something was true, it probably was. One of the things he loved about her was how bright and intuitive she was. He cupped his hand over his phone so the officers wouldn’t hear their conversation. You never knew who might leak something to the press.
    “What is TrickAdviser?” he asked. “And why do you think our victim was a call girl?”
    As Anna explained, Jack watched the MLI work. Checking for rigor mortis, the stiffness of the body; and livor mortis, its color. This would help determine when and how the woman died. In manycases, that was a mystery. Jack once prosecuted a mother who killed her three children, then left the bodies to disintegrate in their beds for several months. The remains were barely recognizable as people. It was a human nightmare and also a forensics nightmare. The Medical Examiner—D.C.’s coroner—could only speculate on the cause and time of death for those victims.
    Here, however, the authorities knew exactly how and when the victim had died. The guards at the senate carriage entrance had written down the time she’d checked in. The Capitol Police officer who’d seen her fall had noted the time. The authorities knew the how, when, and where. They just needed to find out the who and why.
    The most useful thing the Medical Examiner would do was run a sex kit. They would swab the victim’s orifices with long Q-tip-like implements, take samples from her panties and under her fingernails, and comb her body for foreign hairs and fibers. If there was any foreign DNA on her, it could be of tremendous evidentiary value. Semen lasted only seventy-two hours before it degraded to the point where no DNA profile could be determined, so the ME would do it as soon as her body arrived at the morgue. But for now Jack had a simpler question.
    He ducked under the yellow police tape and walked over to the medicolegal investigator. He placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder.
    “Can I take a look at her lower back?” Jack asked.
    The man nodded. The victim was on her side, where she’d landed. With gloved hands, the MLI pulled her suit jacket up and her skirt waistband down, revealing the small of her back.
    In the center, where her flesh undulated around her lower spine, was a black-and-white Egyptian-eye tattoo. Whatever protection it was supposed to provide hadn’t worked.
    Like the sky above, the house was dark at one A.M . Detective Tavon McGee stood on the front porch of the modest split-level house and braced himself. In a job full of heart-wrenching tasks, this was one of the hardest. He exhaled through pursed lips and rang the doorbell.After a moment, a light in an upstairs window went on. McGee could hear shuffling at the front door and a frightened female voice on the other side.
    “Who is it?”
    “Metropolitan Police Department.”
    A curtain was pulled back, and a middle-aged woman stared at him from behind the glass. The curtain dropped back into place. “A big black man,” murmured the female voice. Now a boy, maybe fifteen years old, came to the window. Must be her son. McGee held his MPD badge closer to the windowpane.
    Columbia was a quiet bedroom community in Maryland, halfway between D.C. and Baltimore. McGee expected they didn’t get many police visits to this neatly mowed patch of suburbia. He held his badge steadily, giving the homeowners plenty of time to check it out.
    More shuffling, lights, soft voices. Finally, the door swung open. The boy wore checkered pajamas and stood a step in front of his mother, as if to protect her. The woman wore a terry-cloth bathrobe and an expression of dread. McGee had seen that look on hundreds of parents’ faces when he’d made similar house calls. Everyone knew that a midnight visit from the police meant something had gone horribly wrong.
    “Good evening. I’m Detective Tavon McGee, with MPD’s Major Case unit. Are you Donna McBride?” The woman nodded, confirming the information he’d gotten from a