The man bristled. “Got curious, that’s all. Nothin’ wrong with that.” He shuddered again. “Wish to Christ I ’adn’t. That thing’s gonna give me nightmares for months.”
“Can you show me exactly where you found it?”
Not giving him time to refuse, she opened the door and waited for him to step out. She followed closely behind as he walked over to the stand of bottlebrush trees. The night was closing in. Light would soon become an issue.
Luke jogged up beside them. Ellie turned to face him.
“We need to get forensics out here with some lights,” she said. “It’s my guess it’s just been dumped here, but you never know what you might find. On more than one occasion, a cigarette butt at the scene’s been enough to nail a killer.”
Luke issued a brief smile. “Yeah, on
CSI
, at least.” His expression turned serious. “I’ll give the boss a call. See what he’s organized.”
Luke pulled out his cell phone. Ellie caught up to the fisherman.
“Just ’ere, it was. Right near the trunk of that one.” He pointed to an area at the base of one of the bottlebrushes. There was a faint indentation where the grass had been flattened.
Ellie waited for Luke to finish on the phone before calling out to him.
“Bring your camera over here.” She indicated the flattened area. “This is where our fisherman says he found it.”
Luke closed the short distance between them and came to a standstill beside the witness. He leveled the man with a hard look.
“When did you call the media?”
Griffin’s gaze skittered away and he ducked his head. “It wasn’t me that called ’em.”
Luke snorted. “Right, they just happened to magically appear.” He gave the fisherman a hard look. “You want to hope you don’t have anything in that fishing bag of yours that you shouldn’t. We might not be from fisheries, but it doesn’t mean we don’t know where to find them.”
The man opened his mouth to protest again and Luke cut him off. “Whether you did or whether you didn’t, I don’t give a damn. This is our show now. It’s a murder investigation and we won’t stand for any interference—from you or the media. Got that?”
The man’s gaze fell to his feet. He nodded with reluctance.
“Good.” Luke handed her the camera and she fired off several shots, taking care to photograph the entire area.
She turned to the fisherman. “We need you to come down to the station so we can take a full statement. Constable Jacobs will bring you in.” She turned to the constable who’d come up behind her. “Is that all right with you, Jacobs?”
He nodded emphatically. “Of course, Detective. We’ll leave right away.”
Ellie nodded her thanks. “We’ll be there shortly. Just as soon as forensics arrives and we give them a quick rundown.”
Moments later, headlights swept the riverbank. “Looks like them now,” she murmured.
* * *
Ellie pushed away from the bench and moved closer to the stainless steel gurney where Dr Samantha Wolfe, the head of Forensic Pathology in the Westmead Morgue, examined the head of the unknown woman. The doctor’s glossy black hair was tucked up in its usual position under a blue surgical hat and although Ellie knew the woman wasn’t much older than Ellie, the years spent working with the dead were etched into the lines of fatigue on her face, making her appear older than she was. Even so, Ellie was pleased Samantha had caught the case. The doctor was the best forensic pathologist in Sydney.
“So, what
do you think?” Ellie asked, trying hard not to breathe in too deeply of the smell that was unique to the morgue. It was well after nine, and Ellie was feeling the effects of the long day. And it wasn’t over yet. She’d told Luke to go home. No sense in both of them hanging around. At least one of them ought to get some sleep.
Samantha peered at her from behind clear plastic safety glasses.
“There’s no trauma to the head, as such.” The doctor sent her a wry look. “If you don’t count the fact that it’s been severed from its body.”
Ellie smiled reluctantly. There was something very weird about trading jokes while a woman’s head lay on a gurney between them.
With gloved hands, Samantha examined the girl’s face. “She’s definitely Caucasian. I’d hazard a guess she’s of European or Mediterranean descent. From the broadness of her features and the olive tones of her skin, even taking into account its deterioration, she’s not an English rose.”
“How long do you think she’s been dead?”
She shrugged. “Hard to put an exact time of death. This time of year, tissue breakdown is slowed down by the cold. We’ve had some fairly severe frosts over the past few weeks. A bit like being kept in a freezer. If I had to guess, I’d say two, maybe three weeks. She’s still in pretty good shape, but as I said, the cold weather would have something to do with that.”
With a clank, the doctor dropped a small metal object into an empty kidney dish lined up beside several others on a trolley next to the gurney.
Ellie leaned in closer. “What’s that?”
“An earring. There’s one in the other ear, too.” A few seconds later, another object clattered into the dish. Ellie hunted around for a plastic evidence bag.
“Over near the door.” Samantha indicated the rack of shelves on the far side of the room beside the door through which Ellie had entered.
“I’ll take these with me,” she said scooping them up with gloved fingers and dropping the jewelry carefully into the evidence bag. “They might help us identify her.”
“No sign of the rest of her?”
Ellie shook her head. “Not yet.” She sighed wearily. “I guess we’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
“Come and look at this.”
The doctor’s tone had sharpened. Ellie’s heart accelerated. “What is it?”
Samantha was working her way through the woman’s honey-blond, matted hair with a pair of tweezers. Bending closer, she extracted a small particle and dropped it into a clean kidney dish.
“I don’t know, but her hair’s full of it.” She continued to part sections of hair, retrieving more and more slivers.
Ellie moved closer and peered into the dish. It was difficult to say what they were. Pinkish-brown in color, the particles were irregular in shape and size, the biggest about half the size of her smallest fingernail.
“I’ll send them to the lab.” Samantha indicated with her chin toward the other dishes lined up beside the gurney. “Along with those. Hair and tissue samples, blood samples, mouth swabs. Until someone comes forward with an identification, it’s the best I can do.”
Ellie suppressed a sigh. Someone out there was missing a daughter, a sister—maybe even a mother. “I appreciate your help, Samantha. Any clues on how it was removed?”
The doctor turned the head until it rested on its side. Ellie tried not to look at the single, milky-brown eye as it stared sightlessly up at her. Pointing with her tweezers, Samantha indicated the area where the woman’s neck should have been.
“Have a look here. See the striations in the vertebrae? It looks to me like it’s been sawn off.”
Ellie swallowed and shook her head. “What sort of a monster does something like that?”
“I’m afraid it gets worse.” Samantha poked at the ragged, exposed flesh. “There’s still blood in this tissue.” She raised her head and stared at Ellie. “Have you ever seen a dead heart pump?”
CHAPTER TWO
“For the love of God, will somebody answer that phone?”
The incessant ringing continued behind Ellie. Her fingers clenched around the phone already pressed against her ear and she gritted her teeth. It wasn’t the fault of her colleagues that she’d spent the rest of last night drowning memories of her son, Jamie, with a bottle of merlot. To top that off, she now had the unenviable task of identifying a young woman’s head.
Luke sidled in from the tea room and propped his hip against her desk, his usual mug of morning coffee in hand. A shock of red hair fell across his eyes as he took a sip. “How did it go last night?”
She grimaced and covered the mouthpiece. “We’ve got a real sicko on our hands. Samantha’s preliminary examination found the head was severed while the girl was still alive.”
“Shit! You’re kidding?”
“Afraid not. To make it worse, we still don’t have an ID. We’ve joined the queue waiting for lab results. There’s a backlog, apparently.”
“Of course there is. So, Sam did the autopsy?”
Ellie nodded. “Yeah.”
“Lucky break.”
“Yeah, let’s hope it’s not the only one. We haven’t got much to go on. A pair of earrings and some weird pink-colored particles found in her hair. Sam thinks the girl could have been dead for up to three weeks.”
“Have you sent pictures to the media yet?”
Ellie nodded. “Sam did her best to minimize the shock factor with some strategic drapes, but they were still pretty awful. As much as I want to get her identified, I feel for family members that recognize her. No one should have to see their loved one like that.”
Luke’s lips compressed.
Ellie did her best to stop her mind from straying to the last moments she’d spent with her son Jamie. She knew exactly what it felt like to identify a loved one in the morgue.
Determinedly pushing the painful memories aside, she concentrated on listening to the elevator music that played monotonously in her ear.
“Who are you waiting on the line for?” Luke asked.
“The Department of Roads and Maritime Services. Thought it would kill some time while I’m waiting. The boss asked me to take a look at a spate of thefts that have cropped up in the Mt Druitt area. I’m trying to get some registration information on a vehicle spotted by one of the victims about the time of the burglary.”
Luke shook his head. “You mean the general duties boys haven’t already done that? What the hell are they teaching them at the Academy these days? Back in our day—”
“Hey, don’t go lumping me in with your vintage. You must have at least a decade on me.”
Luke grinned. “Really? And here I just thought you looked good for your age.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, Baxter.”
“No offence, Cooper.” He sidled closer to her desk. “How old are you, anyway? Or are you one of those girls who can’t bear to mention their age?”
Ellie tried for a glare but couldn’t quite pull it off. She’d never had an issue with her age. The alternative to no longer having birthdays was pretty grim.
“I’m twenty-seven, if you really want to know.”
Luke whistled. “That old?”
She picked up a file and hit him with it.
“Hey! You spilled my coffee.”
“Not the least of what you deserve.”
“Now, now, Coop. Don’t be like that.”
Before she could cut him down with a suitably disparaging reply, Detective Superintendent Ben Walker appeared in the doorway of his office, his face grim.
“Luke. Ellie. In here now.”
Ellie watched him retreat back into his office. She turned to Luke, her eyebrows raised. Luke shrugged. With a sigh, she replaced the phone in its dock and stood.
“Sounds serious,” she murmured.
“Yeah.”
“Guess we’d better get in there, then.”
“Yeah.”
She crossed the squad room floor, wending her way through the clutter of government-issued gray steel-and-laminate desks, Luke close on her heels.
“Shut the door.” The curt command came from the direction of the window. Ben Walker stood motionless, his back to them, staring through the glass at the gray, dreary day beyond.
“Is there something wrong, sir?”
“Yes, Detective Cooper. There’s something wrong.” He leaned over his crowded desk and picked up a piece of paper. “A few moments ago, I took a call from an Evelyn Ward at Cranebrook. Her daughter’s missing. No one’s seen or heard from the girl since ten last night. The mother called her disappearance in last night and someone downstairs filled in a missing person’s report. It’s been referred to us because there’s still no sign of her.”
Ellie frowned. “How old is she?”
“Nineteen.”
“
Nineteen
? With all due respect, sir, it’s not unusual for nineteen-year-olds to disappear for a day or two. Maybe she’s with friends?”
“I know what you’re saying, Ellie, but not this girl.”
“How can you be so sure? When I was nineteen, there was more than one occasion when I lost track of time and ended up spending the night at a girlfriend’s place. Mom and Dad wouldn’t know where I was until I called in the next day.”
“What a joy you must have been, Cooper.” Luke held his poker face under her narrow-eyed scrutiny.
She punched him in the arm. “Just you wait, Baxter. You, me and the squash courts. Later.”
Luke’s gaze swept over her petite frame. She barely came up to his shoulder. “You’re on,” he grinned.
“Cut it out, you two.”
Their expressions immediately turned solemn and they murmured apologies.
Ben ran a tired hand through his graying hair. “This is the second girl to go missing in the last few weeks. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. I know it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, but the thing is, this girl’s never spent a night away from home.”