Kale struggled to keep the frustration out of his tone. “The chief has a complete file on the case.” How did she think they did business up here? “We could go—”
“Have you seen them?” She looked at him when she asked the question. Really looked. As if she was watching for a certain reaction.
He nodded.
“What did you see?”
“You didn’t read those details in the newspaper?” Just about every damned thing about the murder scene was outlined in print as well as on every news channel from here to LA. Except for the one detail they had excluded from all reports. Nausea roiled in his stomach as thegrotesque letters scrawled on the victim’s body shimmered in front of his retinas.
“I want to know what you saw that morning.”
His guard went up. How did she know he’d been at the scene that morning? His presence hadn’t been reported in the media. She was fishing again. Had to be. He could lie. But, as she studied him like an amoeba under a microscope, he understood with complete certainty that she would recognize the lie. It was more than the way she looked at him. It was her too-laid-back-and-yet-completely confident posture. The cool, I-see-everything look in those eerie blue eyes.
“I didn’t say I saw anything that morning. I said I saw the crime-scene photos.”
“But you did ... see something that morning. You were here.”
“Why the hell would you say that?” She was pushing his buttons and it was working.
“You have that look, Conner. The one that says I was here and I saw things I never want to see again.”
He started to take a stab at a subject change by reminding her to call him Kale, but the way his gut churned he wasn’t sure he wanted to open his mouth.
“So”—she turned her attention back to the chapel with its cold stone floor and century-old wooden canopy—“when you stood here in the freezing cold with the tang of coagulating blood rushing into your lungs, tell me what you saw.” When he didn’t answer right away, she went on. “You told me we were on the same side. Now’s your chance to prove your claim.”
He thought about that for a few seconds.
Then he caved. Cooperate as much as possible, that was what the mayor had said. “There was a lot of blood.” He closed his eyes and forced his mind to relive that morning. He and the chief had been having coffee at Cappy’s. The same way they had a thousand times. Fate, bad luck, whatever, the call had come in and Kale had ended up riding out here with Willard.
“She was lying here, right?”
Kale opened his eyes and stared at Newton. She lowered into a crouch, studied the place where Valerie Gerard’s mutilated body had been positioned.
“Yes.”
The lone word echoed around him, haunted him. He shouldn’t talk about this ... not with her.
“Was it unusually cold that morning, Conner?”
He nodded, then remembered that she wasn’t looking at him. “Damned cold. The stone path was icy.” The chief had fallen twice in their haste to scramble up the slope.
“The medical examiner said she’d only been dead a few hours,” Newton prompted.
“Between three and four, but the temperature made it difficult to nail down a more exact time frame.” Kale stared out at the ocean, couldn’t bear to look at the bloodstains any longer. “No one should die that way.”
“The medical examiner’s preliminary assessment,” Newton said as she pushed to her feet, “indicated that the victim was alive while her lips were sewn closed.”
Kale didn’t want to hear this. He’d seen it in his dreams every night for almost a week.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it,” Newton continued as she moved around the place where Valerie Gerard had gasped for her final agonizing breath. “She lived through more than a hundred lacerations and gouges. Some seemingly pinpointed to nerve centers to optimize pain.”
“That’s right.” His heart pumped harder with each passing second. He wanted to puke each time the images from that morning floated before his eyes.
“And yet, no real evidence was left behind. Just a few footprints. Too indistinct or contaminated to make a decent impression.”
That was partly his fault. He’d been so shocked, he’d rushed to help. The chief had tried to hold him back. The next thing Kale remembered,there were people everywhere and things got out of control. He’d never seen grown men cry like that; then he’d realized he was crying, too.
He felt sick.
