“Fatemeh’s personality fits,” I conceded, “but I have a hard time believing these men took advantage of her.”
“No, but she was married to a guy who potentially covered for three rapists. You yourself said she was physically capable of subduing a much larger man, and it was also you who said she hated men in general. She has long, dark hair like you described. Start with her.”
“She wears those scarves too,” I mused.
“There you go.”
“How popular are they? The scarves.”
“They were more popular a couple of years ago, but they’re still worn by a lot of women today. Kobe, you have grounds to bring Fatemeh in. Do it. She might lawyer up, but—” Rue made an odd retching noise and added, “I have to go.”
The line went dead, and I cringed.
Fatemeh Kordestani. She checked a lot of boxes, except the important one: I did not think she’d been assaulted by university students half her age. I did, however, believe wholeheartedly that her husband was somehow complicit. Therefore, Rue’s theory was notable.
I considered Cheyenne again, and Blaze, and all the other girls we’d interviewed in the process of working the case. Individually, they didn’t necessarily fit. The crimes were too savage, but as a group…
Except the evidence didn’t support more than one killer. Did it? No. In fact, if we went back to the first crime scene and considered the distinct marks on the ground, it only showed…
I paused and sat upright. “Hang on.”
We found a distinguishable tread at the first crime scene. Analysis had confirmed it was left behind by our unsub and not a match for Navid’s running shoe. The struggle had veered off the hard-packed trail onto an untrampled area where we’d lifted the perfect print. In every subsequent scene, the killer hadbeen more careful, leaving us nothing salvageable. The partial at LeBreton Flats had yet to be analyzed and could have easily belonged to Malik.
I dug through a folder until I located the images from Navid’s murder. The CSI team had taken a mold of the print since it had been made in the soft ground beside the trail and not in the snow. The report claimed it matched a man’s Timberland winter boot in a size ten and a half. I had guessed eleven, so I was close.
A man’s boot.
The Rue inside my head whispered,Women wear men’s boots all the time.
But a ten and a half? That seemed large for a woman. I used Google to convert to a lady’s size. “Twelve to twelve and a half.” A second Google search informed me that women with feet that large wasn’t as unusual as it had been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Also, they would typically be over five-foot eight.
Not conclusive enough to dismiss, my inner Rue said.
I reconsidered Neo and Laurent, as Rue had suggested. She made a solid argument, but I was too hung up on the hair and scarf.
“Fatemeh first.”
29
Dominique
Malik Quinn lay onthe steel table, skin tinged blue under the harsh overhead lights, lips a deep purple. The bruising around his neck stood out in sharp relief against his pale complexion. The gouges left behind by his fingernails were angrier in death than they might have been in life.
Geared to perform an autopsy, I circled the table, dictating my findings for the recording, speaking clearly to be properly heard through the face mask snug around my mouth.
My assistant on the Boxing Day holiday was a fourth-year med student named Finnegan Johnson, an eager-to-learn pheasant of a man who chirped incessantly in my ear from the moment he arrived. How excited he’d been to get a phone call, and did I know he was top of his class?
External photographs and X-rays had been taken while the body thawed enough for us to begin. Hours had passed since leaving LeBreton Flats, and I’d spent that time reviewing the previous cases, not that I hadn’t already spent hours studying their intricacies. I knew them inside and out.
“This looks like it was done by a tooth,” Finnegan Johnson said as he examined the cut on the backside of the body’s left hand. “Look at the edge and shape. It’s a puncture, don’t you agree? I suspect he backhanded the assailant like this.” Johnson demonstrated.
Ignoring his dramatics, I studied the mark and nodded. “That’s entirely possible.”
“Should I swab the area? It could have residual saliva on the surface. Are you going to write down my assessment in the report? It’s a good theory and worth mentioning.”
With little more than a grunt, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, I motioned to the perforation in the skin. “Proceed with a swab sample.”
Johnson also collected fingernail clippings on my instruction, and we bagged them to be sent for analysis.
