I groaned. “Not yet. I know I need to.”
“Luckily, Alfred is taking care of everything else,” Zane said.
I laughed. “I told him he can even choose the colors, that’s how much I trust him.”
Doc chuckled and blew across the top of his cup. “I’d say that’s a smart move.”
“Alfred is insistent I do some things on my own,” I said. “Well, maybe not on my own. He’s going with Zane and me to pick out flowers.”
“And the wedding cake?” Doc mused.
“Being made by him,” I said.
Doc opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Barbie hurried back into the room with a smile on her face.”I gota match.” She grabbed her coffee from the machine and took a quick sip. “I’m ready to go.”
We followed Doc through the doorway into his medical lab. Mari Quinn lay on the examination table, a white sheet draped over her body. Doc motioned us closer to the table, and he pulled down the sheet just enough to expose the top of her chest and the marks on her neck.
“Mari Quinn. Thirty-two. Elemental fire witch. Cause of death is ligature strangulation,” Doc said. “The ligature furrow shows a narrow, consistent indentation around the full circumference of the neck, approximately three to four millimeters wide.” He pointed to the bruising pattern with a gloved finger. “You can see here how uniform the marks are. No knot imprint, which tells me the ligature was pulled taut from behind in a single, sustained motion. Whoever did this stood behind Mari and didn’t let up.”
“We know it was someone she trusted since she let them into the house,” I said. “So it makes sense her back was to them.”
“The angle and position of the furrow are consistent with an attacker standing directly behind the victim.” Doc pulled the sheet back up. “There are petechial hemorrhages in the eyes and some bruising on the larynx, both consistent with asphyxiation due to ligature compression. Time of death, I’m narrowing it even more to between 3:30 and 4:30.”
“Any defensive wounds?” Zane asked.
Doc shook his head. “Nothing significant. A couple of minor scrapes on her palms that could have come from falling or grabbing at the ligature, but no skin under her fingernails.”
“Fibers from the scene is where I come in,” Barbie said. “The fibers I pulled from the ligature furrow are consistent with natural jute.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, it’s one of the most common materials for cords out there. You’ll find jute twine in hardware stores, craft shops, marinas, bait shops. Narrowing itdown to a single source is going to be tough unless we find the actual murder weapon and can match the fiber pattern.”
“So we’re looking for a piece of jute twine,” Zane said.
Barbie nodded. “Yes.”
I thought about the different places I’d recently seen spools of twine. I’d seen it at Halter Marina. The ribbon and twine wrapped around Sasha’s gift boxes at Fairy-Kissed Confections. The bait bags Reed had been tying on his boat. All three of them would have easy access to jute twine.
“I don’t remember if I told you or not,” Barbie said, “but there were no fingerprints on the back door. So either the killer used gloves or they wiped the handle clean.” She smiled at us. “Now for some good news. I ran all three valentine cards through the spectrum analyzer and fingerprinted each one—I eliminated yours, Kara, on Mari’s valentine—and there were fingerprints on all three valentines belonging to the same person.” She paused. “Mari Quinn.”
I blinked. “Mari sent the valentines herself?”
Barbie nodded. “That’s what the prints say. Her fingerprints are the only ones on all three cards.”
I looked at Zane. “I think we can assume she sent them to everyone because of what happened fifteen years ago. But maybe Sasha and Hunter didn’t realize Mari had sent them to Rayna and Reed as well, and so maybe Hunter and Sasha—either together or one of them on their own—decided to kill her.”
“What happened fifteen years ago?” Barbie asked.
Zane and I quickly filled them in on what we’d learned so far about the incident involving Eliza Nordic and the others. By the time we finished, Barbie looked absolutely horrified.
“What happens now?” Barbie asked.
“We told Sheriff Stiles,” Zane said. “He’s taking it from here.”
“I hope they are all held accountable,” Barbie said. “Especially if it comes out that Rayna really did what is being said she did to Eliza.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Doc Treestone said.
What I didn’t say aloud was that it may be Eliza Nordic already knew the truth…and she was dealing out her own vigilante justice. Which was only going to get her locked up in a PADA prison.
17
