The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

been a mesmerizing thing to watch if not for the utter horror embodied by the decedent. Or maybe she was the jarring focal point that put the entire picture into perspective. She was a thing from another dimension, all harsh angles and strong colors, dirty and bloody and broken in too many places. Her face was a mask of raw meat and white bone. The dark hair was shaved to the scalp on one side of the skull and a Medusa’s mane of twisted, matted snarls on the other.
    “I see what you mean,” Möller said, glancing from the young woman’s face to Kovac. “You’ll have your work cut out for you to get an ID.”
    “Right?” Kovac said. “What are we supposed to do with that? We can’t put out a photograph. And what’s a sketch artist going to make of it? Can you tell what she must have looked like? Any artist’s rendition is going to be pure guesswork.”
    “A bad sketch is worse than no sketch at all,” Liska said.
    People cruising the missing and unidentified persons websites looking for loved ones rode a double-edged sword, both wanting and not wanting to find the person they were looking for. Staring at sketches, they would fixate not only on similarities to their missing daughter, sister, friend but also on the differences. Maybe this one was . . . but the nose was too narrow or the mouth was too wide. They remembered their lover’s, mother’s, brother’s crooked smile, but no one died smiling, and sketches were rendered with little emotion on the victim’s face so as not to distort the features.
    Kovac himself had sat up late at night staring at the computer screen, at those photographs and sketches, trying to put a name to a victim. He had compared their sketch of New Year’s Doe (Jane Doe 01-11) to the missing persons photo of Rose Reiser again and again without being able to conclusively say the two were the same girl. His victim’s nose had been smashed to a pulp. The sketch artist had given her a generic nose. Rose Reiser’s nose in her photograph was short and turned up at the end.
    “The witness says her face was messed up like that when she came out of the trunk,” Liska said. “Like half her face had melted, he said.”
    Möller gazed down at the dead girl, frowning. “Acid.”
    “What kind of acid?” Kovac asked.
    “The lab will have to tell you that. Could be one of several. Hydrochloric, ferric, sulfuric, phosphoric. Not hydrofluoric. Hydrofluoric doesn’t damage the skin so much. It’s better for dissolving bone. It likes calcium. If you want to get rid of a skeleton, hydrofluoric acid is your best choice.”
    “Why does it creep me out that you know that?” Liska asked.
    Möller looked right at her with amusement in his eyes. Behind his mask he was undoubtedly smiling like a cat.
    “For the purpose of damaging flesh, I would choose sulfuric acid,” he went on. “It’s easily had.”
    “That’s battery acid, right?” Kovac asked.
    “Or a component of drain cleaner, or rust remover, or liquid fertilizer. It has a long list of uses,” Möller said. “It can be purchased at the hardware store in a strong concentration—and this would have been quite concentrated to cause this kind of deep-tissue damage.
    “At strength not only does it hydrolyze proteins and lipids, causing the primary chemical burn, it also causes a secondary thermal burn by dehydrating carbohydrates,” he said. “And, if combined with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, one creates a substance called a piranha solution, which will dissolve nearly anything, including carbon on glassware.”
    “Piranha solution?” Kovac said. “Sounds like something out of an old James Bond movie.”
    “Indeed.”
    Using his fingers with delicate care, Möller examined what was left of the victim’s lips and mouth. One side of the tongue—which had the appearance of raw hamburger—was visible through the hole the acid had burned through the cheek.
    “Burns in the mouth . . . ,” he said, gently prying the