“Thought the globe was supposed to be getting warmer, notcolderand stormier.”
The tech shrugged.
“You think our perp chose last night because of the storm?” Holgersen said. “Because he could use it to hide? Because everyone was locked up cozy indoors?”
Angie did not reply. Instead, she stilled a moment, trying to breathe it all in—the dark, wet tombstones. A mausoleum to her right. Dead flowers, some in plastic cones, poking through the layer of snow on the internment plots. A black stone angel peered down at her, wings hanging like a vulture. The trees around them were gnarled and twisted giants, some coniferous, other deciduous, their bare branches draped with green witch’s hair. With several entrances to this cemetery, Jane Doe’s attacker could have come in from several directions.
“Wouldn’t catch me doing no ghost tour in this crap,” Holgersen said, turning in a slow circle beside her, following her gaze. “When did the city last have a snowstorm like this one anyway?”
“It’s because the wet front coming in is clashing with the colder air from the arctic outflow that’s been locked over us since late November,” she said quietly. “The snow won’t last long now as the warmer front moves in.”
Officer Hickey and the tech started back down the path, taking them toward the twisted, leafless hedge of trees that bounded Dallas Road and the ocean below. Here the wind was icier, angrier, and the sound of waves crashing in Ross Bay grew loud. Angie’s coat snapped sharply about her calves. Her eyes watered in the cold. Her thoughts turned again to the little girl in pink she’d seen on that road below last night. An involuntary shiver chased through her.
“This is where Constable Tonner and I found the paramedics working on her,” Hickey said, stopping in front of a grave site. “The ghost tour group had come down via that entrance.” He pointed. “And stumbled across our vic lying here.”
The ground was a slushy mess, tracked out with prints and pinked with blood. Forensic ident personnel in white Tyvek jumpsuits had started working the area around the interment plot, scraping back snow, searching for trace evidence, photographing and sketching the scene.
The tech said, “The scene was compromised by the paramedics, the ghost group, the first responding officers, aCity Sunphotographer who apparently arrived later—we’ll be lucky if we find anything uncontaminated.”
Angie’s gaze tracked up from the bloody slush on the ground to the granite pedestal upon which a large stone statue had been mounted. She read the inscription on the pedestal below the statue.
Mary Brown, 1889–1940.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me.
Her attention moved from the epitaph and up to the statue itself. The blank stone eyes of the mother of God gazed sightlessly down at the ground where the victim had lain. Sculpted robes draped her body, and she held her arms out slightly at her sides, palms up. Suppliant. Angie’s blood turned cold at the symbolism.
“Our circumcised Jane Doe was left at the feet of the Virgin Mary,” she said softly. Turning to Hickey, she said, “How exactly was she lying?”
“On her back, face up,” Hickey said. “Her head was there, right at the base of the pedestal, and her arms were folded over her breasts, one hand atop the other, like this.” He placed his hands over his heart.
As if in prayer ...
“And her legs were splayed open, displaying her bloodied crotch.” He cleared his throat. “She was drenched. And the snow was starting to settle on her. How she survived, I ... I don’t know.” He coughed and cleared his throat again.
“She was posed,” Holgersen whispered, staring at the bloodied snow.
A noise like a gunshot cracked behind them. They all jumped and spun around. A tree branch came crashing down in the wind, bits of bark and moss exploding off it as it hit a gravestone and then tumbled to the snowy ground.
“Shit,” Holgersen said, shaken.
Hickey looked white. He was shivering harder.
“And there are no ponds or anything nearby?” Angie said, her attention moving from the broken branch back to the grounds.
“Negative,” said Hickey.
“So she had to have been immersed in freshwater somewhere else, then brought here, where he carefully arranged her as if in prayer at the stone feet of the virgin mother of God.” Angie’s mind went to the Ritter and Fernyhough cases, the crucifixes that had been drawn onto their foreheads after they’d been sexually assaulted by a masked assailant. In both cases the girls had been drunk, and they were vulnerable because of it. They’d both left social gatherings solo. Both had been attacked from behind, smashed down into the ground, and raped facedown, a knife held to their throats, before receiving blows to the head. Both remembered their assailant saying the same words as he fisted their long hair with a gloved hand and held his blade to their throats.
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?
Do you reject Satan and all his works ...
He’d forced them to sayI do ...before he penetrated them from behind.
