TRACE EVIDENCE: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer by Bruce Henderson Read Free Book Online Page B

furrowed. She seemed to be considering the question very seriously.
    “She’d have been real scared, but she definitely would have resisted. I know she wouldn’t have been out hitchhiking if her car had broken down. But she might have accepted a ride or help if she felt they were trustworthy. She wanted to think the best of people.”
    The detectives drove directly to the home ofJo-Allyn andTom Brown, arriving at 10:30 P.M.
    “I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter’s body has been positively identified by her driver’s license thumbprint,” Bertocchini said somberly.
    “You’ve seen her?” Jo-Allyn asked.
    The detective nodded.
    “Was she—cut up or—mutilated?”
    “No, nothing like that happened,” Bertocchini answered softly.
    The grief-stricken parents had been braced for the news since twoSacramento County homicide detectives had knocked on their door three hours earlier and begun by saying, “Please sit down.” TheBrowns had seen enough police dramas on television to know what came next.
    Lt. Ray Biondi had sent the detectives because he was afraid of a leak to the press—which in every big city monitors police radio frequencies. He hadn’t wanted the parents to hear about their daughter’s death on the news or from an inquiring reporter.
    TheSacramento detectives had earlier told theBrowns of finding Stephanie’s car deserted on I-5, and of the young woman’s body found 15 or 20 miles away that had been “tentatively identified” as Stephanie based on photographs.
    For Jo-AllynBrown, in obvious shock and grasping a wadded tissue now as she spoke to Bertocchini and Rosenquist, the real blow had come that morning.
    Ever since Stephanie had been reported missing, her mother instinctively knew that something dreadful had happened. All day, she’d been wondering just how parents of kidnap victims who are never found could endure such an ordeal. Not knowing had to be the worst torture imaginable. If Stephanie had been killed, her mother at least wanted an intact body to pray over, say good-bye to, and bury nearby.
    Thank God, she’s been found , Jo-Allyn thought.
    Stephanie could come home now.
    Two AND A half hours later, Rosenquist and Bertocchini stood on the embankment above the irrigation ditch that Stephanie’s body had been pulled from that morning. They had come here to check the ambient light at approximately the same time she had been killed the previous night.
    A half moon hung sideways in the sky, but otherwise the night was as black as a bottomless pit.
    They both understood that this exercise was part of the visceral attachment that a detective inevitably makes to each and every victim. They wanted to go where Stephanie had gone on her last ride, following the same roads and going past the same terrain. They wanted to be where she had died just twenty-four hours earlier.
    They hung around, not wanting to go just yet. Each wanted to stay asclose as they could to the crime scene—antennae all the way up and sensors turned on.
    One thing that registered with them both was how incredibly isolated this location was, which caused them to ask aloud: How did the killer find it in the dark?
    They concluded that he had to have been familiar with I-5 and the surrounding area. On this back road at this time of night—so close and yet so far away from the nonstop traffic of a perpetually busy interstate highway—he’d have had little worry of his evil deeds being interrupted. He must have known that.
    As Bertocchini stood listening to about a million frogs croaking contentedly in nearby ditches and ponds, he pondered what must have happened here twenty-four hours earlier. Had she been alive and conscious during the fifteen- or twenty-minute ride here? Yes, he decided, she must have been. Bound and awake, taken away by force … the ride had to have been unbelievably terrifying for her.
    Once they had arrived at the side of the ditch, how long had her ordeal gone on? Had her screams