The woman had been butchered.
She lay on her back, half upside down in a depression in the damp earth. She was mostly nude. She’d been ripped from sternum to pelvic bone, stabbed multiple times in the face and eyes, neck, and upper chest. Her body was a ghastly pale lump in the now sepulchral light of the moon. And he could smell her: a butcher shop odor, mixed with a fecal stink.
Brandon said, “Oh, fuck me,” turned away, backtracked, and vomited on Alice’s shoes.
After discovering the body, the couple, stoned to the gills and panicked, crashed through the brush and trees, dragged the frightened dog into the open, and ran toward the house where Britney hadbeen singing her song, now replaced by the Backstreet Boys with “I Want It That Way.”
They were running for what they thought might be their lives, between the ballfields, to a parking lot. There, stopping to catch their breath, they called 9-1-1. Ten minutes later, they led a squadron of Woodbury cops back into the trees and the body.
After a quick survey of the murder scene—a mutilated young woman with blond hair, half-wrapped in a silky blood-soaked blouse and beige skirt—the cops called the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul and asked that a crime scene crew and investigators be sent over immediately.
3
Back in the Day
The morning after the body was discovered, two very large BCA investigators, both new to the organization, stood back and watched. Their names were Jenkins and Shrake. They had first names, of course, but nobody used them. Jenkins had been a homicide investigator for the city of Minneapolis before moving to the BCA. Shrake had been an investigator for the city of Duluth.
Although both were smart, hard-nosed cops with enough experience to become cynical about the possibility of progress in human nature, none of the big guns at the BCA trusted them to work a high-profile, media-sensitive investigation like that of the murder of Doris Grandfelt. She was the prime example of the Hot Blonde Syndrome: if you want to keep your murder quiet, kill a Black woman. Or a Mexican or a Palestinian.
You do not kill hot blondes, whose ghastly deaths make the top of the ten o’clock broadcasts, and get away with it.
Unless you do, of course.
In which case, the Jenkinses and Shrakes of the business will be brought in when it’s too late to do any good, hopefully to take the blame for the lack of results.
—
The two newinvestigators had known each other from police department golf events and were becoming friends, as they eased into the chill waters of the BCA. They were allowed to go to the scene of the murder, and ask questions, as long as they didn’t get too close. Shrake caught a crime scene investigator sitting on a bench behind a softball backstop, eating a cheese sandwich, and said to Jenkins, “He’ll speak to us if we’re nice.”
“Or we could beat it out of him,” Jenkins said.
“I like the concept, but I want him healthy enough to talk.”
All they knew about the CSI was that his name was Larry. They sat on either side of Larry, who looked at them warily and asked, through a mouthful of cheddar cheese, “Wut?”
“Tell us about it, Lare,” Jenkins said, leaning close. He was perhaps a hundred pounds heavier than Larry, most of it muscle, so Larry swallowed and told them.
The scene, he said, had been frozen for a hundred yards around, but not before a half-dozen Woodbury cars had come and gone, followed by four more BCA vehicles that tracked over the earlier tracks. The crime scene investigation had begun the night before under portable lights, but nothing was disturbed until morning, when the scene was fully sunlit.
“We’re about to move the body over to the medical examiner. Wedid the inch-by-inch stuff around the body and now we need to see what’s under it.”
“What have you detected?” Shrake asked.
“We may have some footprints.”
“Footprints?”
“Maybe.”
“Will that amount to anything, Lare?”
“Uh…who knows?”
—
Jenkins and Shrakehung around the investigation when they could get away from their own routine assignments, picking up bits and pieces of the BCA investigative culture. The woman, they were told, had been dead for roughly thirty-six hours by the time the medical examiner got to her. Investigators believed she’d been killed the night before she’d been found, which would have been a Wednesday night. She wasn’t killed earlier than that, because she’d been at work on Wednesday. She hadn’t been killed later than that because she hadn’t shown up for work Thursday morning.
“That’s some fancy detectin’, right there,” Shrake observed.
