Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl Read Free Book Online

details, but she’d never seen anything as brutal as this. Casey let the picture speak for itself before gesturing to Stuart to click through a series of similar photos taken from different angles.
    “Your ME is working on the details, but we think the victim is a girl between fourteen and twenty. Blond or light brown hair. No way to tell eye color, obviously.”
    Stuart zoomed in on the victim’s eyes, now just blackened sockets, burn holes in a ghoulish Halloween mask.
    “We don’t know what the killer used for fire. Preliminary indications suggest possibly a blowtorch. We had a guy in Providence once, friend of mine’s informant, who got caught ratting out the boys on Federal Hill—we found him in a pizza oven. Apparently they put him in it alive and then turned on the flames. I used to think nothing could top that, but now I ain’t so sure.”
    Stuart zoomed out again, clicking to a slightly more distant view of the next slide, then zoomed back in. Dani noted the position of the body, the victim’s head and neck. Her training in anatomy gave her the names of the exposed tissues, ligaments, and bones, but she was more interested in the mind of the killer than the body of the victim. Considerable trauma had been done to the body, but for some reason Dani didn’t think she was looking at mindless violent actions. Rather, this seemed to be the work of a killer who was brutal, deliberate, and methodical. The things they’d said about Jack the Ripper.
    “No clothing at the scene, but no preliminary indications of sexual assault either,” Casey continued. “The ME can tell us more.”
    “Signs of struggle?” Irene asked.
    “Nothing so far,” Casey said. “Nothing under the fingernails, but again, we’ll know more after we get the labs. The body appears to have been repositioned postmortem.”
    “Moved?” Irene said. “Hard to imagine somebody carrying a body up that hill.”
    “We don’t know.”
    Dani tried to put herself in the mind of the victim. The absence of resistance, John Foley had told her once, indicated that either the victim was unconscious when she was killed, was surprised by a stranger, or was killed suddenly by someone she knew and trusted. The blood of violent crime victims often showed elevated stress hormones secreted to produce a fight/flight response. Banerjee could test for that.
    What would it feel like, she wondered, to know you were about to die? More specifically, what did the girl on Bull’s Rock Hill experience? Had she gone willingly, or was she forced? Tricked?
    Casey turned to Stuart Metz. “What do we have next?”
    Stuart clicked to a picture of the victim’s toes, the nails painted a bright red, then to a picture of the victim’s hands, the nails done in the same color. She wore a red-and-black braided friendship bracelet around her right ankle.
    “If that’s a pedicure, it’s not a very good one,” Irene said.
    “Uneven application on the right hand,” Detective Casey said. “I’m thinking she’s right-handed and did it herself. What’s a pedicure go for around here?”
    Dani blurted out, “Thirty-five dollars,” at the same time that Irene Scotto said, “Seventy-five.” It was no surprise that they didn’t go to the same salon.
    “Harris, is it safe to say that up where you live there are plenty of girls who wouldn’t think twice about paying seventy-five dollars for a pedicure?” Casey asked.
    “Safe to say, yes,” Dani agreed.
    “So this girl does it herself. To save money?”
    “Maybe she did it to cheer herself up?” Irene said.
    “Maybe she was going to a party?” Dani said. “Or on a date?”
    “Ah,” Casey said, pointing his finger at Dani. “I’m with Harris on this one.”
    Stuart clicked to the next photograph, a picture of the victim’s upper body. There was a burned-out cavity in the center of the chest, but it was hard to tell from the photo how deep the burn had gone.
    More intriguing to Dani was a marking on the