The Yoga Store Murder by Dan Morse Read Free Book Online Page B

about six feet tall. The other was shorter. Both were dressed head to toe in black clothing. One wore a knit cap, similar to the way robbers were known to roll up their ski masks after leaving a crime scene. Ruvin scrolled the DVD backward, slowed it down, kept repeating the images. He couldn’t see the men’s faces, but he could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Tremendous, Ruvin thought: if they found the guy, they could use exact cell-phone call logs and GPS tracking technology to further tie him to the area. Ruvin called Wittenberger. “I think I see these two guys,” he said.
    The sergeant was about to leave the store anyway. Twenty minutes later, he stood over Ruvin’s shoulder, watching the video snippet over and over. Wittenberger strained his neck to look to the far left of the image, trying to make out a piece of lululemon athletica’s back door. He couldn’t. But the men were moving quickly. One had a backpack.
    If Brittany had been in on it, Wittenberger thought, surely she wouldn’t have described the guys so exactly; she would have at least come up with different heights and different colored clothes for these guys. And why say it was a pair of assailants? Why not one, or three? “Well, my fucking theory’s out the window,” he told Ruvin. “I guess it is two masked men.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hundreds of Wounds
    Early on Sunday, March 13, 2011, Detective Dimitry Ruvin had two things to pick up before driving to Jayna Murray’s autopsy in Baltimore: the rope at Montgomery County Police headquarters and Detective Mike “Bucket” Carin at his home. By 8:00 A.M. the skyline of downtown Baltimore appeared, burnished by new office buildings and high-rise hotels. But off to the left and right, as the detectives knew, were the low-slung, row-house neighborhoods that served up more killings in a given month than Montgomery County might see in a year.
    The detectives drove into an area just west of downtown, parking in a garage across from the state’s five-story, brand-spanking-new, $43 million Forensic Medical Center. Ruvin grabbed his paper bag and notebook. The two detectives eventually were led into one of the building’s two cavernous autopsy rooms—fifty feet long, thirty feet wide. The gurney holding Jayna’s body had already been wheeled into position, next to a stainless-steel table that held knives, scalpels, clamps, and other dissection tools. The body bag was zipped open. Jayna was still on her back, just how they’d last seen her in the store.
    A thirty-one-year-old autopsy technician in a white coat introduced himself as Mario Alston. “What happened?” he asked.
    Ruvin explained about the crime scene at the yoga shop in Bethesda. He told him about the suspects they were looking for—two guys in masks, and how they’d attacked two workers inside the shop. “These two assholes go into the store, kill this girl, rape this other girl. It’s crazy.”
    Alston was shocked. Moments before, when he’d unzipped the bag and seen Jayna’s distorted face and the athletic clothes she was wearing, he’d thought maybe she’d been hit by a car while riding a bicycle, maybe even slammed headfirst into a tree.
    “Are you kidding me?” Alston asked Ruvin, who said he wasn’t, and handed over the brown paper bag.
    Two doctors joined them: Mary Ripple and Kristin Johnson. They cut open the bag and looked at the rope, noting its dark-red stains and coarse fibers. A lab photographer started taking pictures. Ripple bent down to look at Jayna’s hands and forearms, quickly noting what the detectives had seen the night before: dozens of defensive wounds. Entangled in Jayna’s bloodstained fingers were fibers similar to those on the rope, and hairs similar to her own.
    Dr. Ripple knew this autopsy would take all day. “Uh-oh,” the forty-eight-year-old Ripple had said to herself as she’d looked through pictures from the scene in her office earlier that morning. She was one of the agency’s