“You trust me, right?” she said quietly after a while.
“You’ve got to trust a partner.” He stole another glance at her. “Your partner is the guy who has your back.”
CHAPTER 30
The incident room was hot and thick with the scent of bodies, wet coats, stale cigarette smoke that lingered in clothing and damp hair. Combined with the cheesy, yeasty, garlicky, pepperoni smells of the pizza slices softening their cardboard containers, it was making Angie feel sick. She poured herself a glass of cold water and took a seat up front, near the whiteboard, her mother’s strange words churning around and around in her brain. And that hymn—a supposedly beautiful Christmas song of praise to the Virgin Mary. She’d looked up the English translation on her phone before entering the incident room.
Ave Maria
Virgin of the sky
Sovereign of thanksgiving and loving mother
Accept the fervent prayer of everybody
Do not refuse
To this lost person of mine, love ...
Was the discomfit that this song seemed to awaken inside her because of this case—the religious overtones? The Virgin Mary symbolism? Because Gracie Drummond had been laid at the feet of a stone Madonna? Or was everything—her hallucinations, the voices inside her head, her possible PTSD, her sexual conflict over Maddocks, her anxiety over her mother’s mental illness—curdling with the facts of this homicide case and her past rape cases? Was her ever-increasing fatigue further scrambling her mind?
Her thoughts returned to her mother’s odd mention of Italy. Combined with the discrepancies of the dates on the backs of those photos and the snippets of memory seemingly returning from the car accident when she was a child ... it was eating at Angie. And those phrases that she kept hearing in her brain?
Uciekaj, uciekaj! ... Run. Run! ... Wskakuj do srodka, szybko ... get inside. Siedz cicho! ... stay quiet!
What in the hell language could that be? Why did she seem to understand what the words meant?
Buziak resumed his place in front of the whiteboard at the head of the room and rapped his knuckles on the table like a gavel. A large monitor had been brought in and mounted beside the board, which was accumulating more graphic photos and information as results came in from various aspects of the investigation. A male who looked to be in his late fifties—dark hair, John Lennon glasses—was fiddling with a laptop at a table near the monitor, gearing up for some kind of presentation as he brought a desktop image up onto the screen. Fitz was there, too. Sitting in his chair against the wall again, observing.
As the other detectives began to seat themselves around the room, the seat beside her remained vacant, as if she was some kind of pariah. It was Maddocks who eventually took it. As he sat, his arm bumped up against hers. Angie involuntarily tensed. She couldfeelhis heat, his solidity beside her. And again a memory of him naked in the red room pulsed into her darker, twisting thoughts. She inhaled deeply.
Desire was a tricky beast.
Lust was her addiction. Anonymous sex was easy. But this ... this other thing she was beginning to feel—this vulnerability, this need for his approval, this budding sense of ... affection—she needed to get out of his proximity. She needed a new partner. She couldn’t handle losing another friend. And she could certainly not find herself slipping into another intimate relationship with a colleague. Instinctively she knew she was not in a good headspace to deal with any of this right now.
“Okay,” Buziak said. “What do we know so far? Let’s start with the postmortem lab results ...”
The heat and stifling atmosphere in the room thickened further as he spoke. Angie’s brain began to buzz and her vision started to narrow. Buziak’s words drowned into an unintelligible monotone. She tugged at the collar of her sweater, trying to pull his words back into focus.
“... undigested gastrointestinal tract contents indicate that Hocking had eaten two to three hours before death,” Buziak was saying. With shock, Angie realized she’d completely tuned out, and she had no idea how long she’d been absent. Panic kicked through her.Focus, dammit.
“... DNA analysis on the contents of Hocking’s GI tract indicate she consumed a meal that includedTuber melanosporum, black truffles—which are native to parts of southern Europe—and Kobe beef, specifically from the Tajima-gyu breed of cattle found in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture.” He glanced up from his notes. “Our floater ingested a very pricey meal two to three hours before she was killed.” He scanned further down the pages of the report. “We’re still waiting on further expert analysis, but the animal hair found inside the tarp is goat. Domestic. Both the outer winter guard hairs and softer underfur. There was also human hair trace found in Hocking’s pubic combings. Nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests, plus light microscopy, show the hair to be Caucasoid, black, and originating from the pubic, lower abdomen, and thigh areas of two specific male donors. Neither of those two DNA profiles match anything in the system.
“Additional body hair from one of those profiles was also found on the decedent’s body. So, two unidentified male subjects ...” He pursed his lips as he skimmed more of the report and turned a page. He found what he appeared to have been searching for.
“The pieces of leaves—Quercus garryana—commonly known as Garry oak. And the seed found in the tarp is from an agronomic grass species. Combined with the Garry oak, it likely represents one of the rare scrub oak ecosystems found on shallow soils of the southern island and Gulf islands—we have a botanist attempting to narrow down an area for us.”
He took a sip from a glass of water. “We got nothing more from a canvass of the area around the Blue Badger Bakery. The regular commuter who gets off at Drummond’s stop checks out, has alibis. No one could identify the second passenger who also got off at that stop the previous Saturday evening. The forensic ident guys, however, did find hair and blood evidence in the gasworks alley that is a DNA match to Drummond, as well as a button from her coat. The trace from Drummond’s clothing, including what appears to be some blonde head hair, is still being processed.” He looked up.
“Various tire imprints were located in the adjacent lot, both sedan and SUV, recently made. This is all consistent with the theory that Drummond was surprised and attacked in the gasworks alley, subdued, and then transported by vehicle to the site where she was sexually assaulted and mutilated, before being transported once again and placed on the Ross Bay grave site. Video surveillance footage obtained from the 7-Eleven opposite the cemetery shows a dark SUV driving slowly past the top entrance shortly before midnight Sunday. Our experts have identified the model as a Lexus LX 570. Recent. High-end. Footage enhancement shows a partial plate—registration looks like it could start with BX.”
A murmur rippled through the detectives. This could prove to be a breakthrough. Buziak stuck a grainy black-and-white of the Lexus up on the board. He followed this with a second even grainier image of the plate partial.
Something began to niggle at Angie’s memory as she stared at the images.
“The 7-Eleven surveillance footage,” Buziak said, “is consistent with witness evidence obtained during a canvass of the surrounding Ross Bay Cemetery residences. A female senior with insomnia was looking out of her window shortly before midnight and saw a dark SUV parked down near the side entrance of the cemetery, closer to where Drummond was discovered.”
He placed his knuckles on the table and leaned into them, his dark eyes intent on his detectives. “Forensic techs are presently combing through footage secured from a new highways department camera mounted on the Johnson Street Bridge to see if they can pick up this Lexus and plate traveling west or east around the time Drummond was abducted in Victoria West.”
