we were on the scene. Conklin and I looked at each other across the front seat. Neither of us felt sunny-side up today. We’d failed Adele Saran and were heartsick about it.
I said, “Okay, Rich. Ready or not, time to go.”
He badged the uniform at the tape, and as soon as we had ducked under it, Clapper appeared. We shared both shock and banalities as he walked us to the big oak tree, ten yards in from the edge of the road.
Hanging from the outspread branches was the body of a young woman, pretty, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt with the words Pacific View Prep. She was barefoot and had been hanged by the neck with what looked like a length of white telephone-type wire.
Clapper said, “We’ve got our pictures, and I have two teams going through the woods looking for God knows what. She’s been up there long enough. Agreed?”
I nodded okay.
Claire came up behind me and stood next to me as a van backed up to the tree. A couple of CSI techs climbed to the van’s roof and very carefully, reverently, cut the wire below the knot and brought the dead twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher down.
CHAPTER 75
Joe and I were watching the eleven o’clock news, lying close together on the sofa, with Martha breathing deeply on the floor beside us.
I held the remote control.
I wanted to talk to Joe, but first I had to see how the media was treating the death of Adele Saran.
The headline stories on all channels, mainstream and cable, focused on the tree where Adele Saran had been found hanging. There were close-ups of the knot, the tree, the coroner’s van leaving the scene, the men in white CSI coveralls bringing evidence to the tent for bagging and tagging. All of this activity was accompanied by the crackle and screech of car radios.
Press setups were dotted around the immediate area, outside the tape. Television reporters faced the camera and told their audience of the horror at the murder scene. A peppy young woman interviewed Paul Harwood, the hiker who had discovered the nightmare on Hicks Road early this morning and called the police.
Harwood told the reporter, “I didn’t believe what I was seeing, that I can tell you. I thought at first it was some kind of prank. A store dummy or something like that. But I had a bad feeling, so I pulled over to make sure. And there that poor girl was, strung up like that …”
I muted the sound as the video switched back to the studio anchor.
Joe said to me, “So, go on with what you were telling me.”
“Where was I?”
“With Claire.”
“Right. Rich and I followed Clapper and Claire back from the crime scene, and we all went straight to the morgue.
“Claire sidelined everything but our victim and got right to the external postmortem. Time of death, approximately nine o’clock last night. Joe, she was alive last night!”
Joe said, “Oh, God,” and then I told him what else I had learned from Claire.
“It’s not for the record yet, but for the moment Claire is saying Adele’s cause of death was the same as Carly’s.”
Joe said, “She was strangled first and then hanged. She had wounds from a throwing star?”
“Exactly,” I said. “And this time it wasn’t guesswork. The damned thing was still sticking out of her back. There was another deep wound in her right shoulder. Neither was fatal. She had bruises on her torso, inner thighs, around her neck below the ligature. Also, as with Carly, there was no discernible physical evidence on the body that would lead to the killer or killers. No skin cells or blood under her nails; in fact, her hands were tied tightly together.”
“What about the rope she was hanged with?”
“It was coated copper wire.”
“Telephone wire. You’re not going to get prints off that.”
I said, “Whoever hanged Adele Saran was a tidy son of a bitch. Wore gloves. Wore a condom. Clapper took blood, sexual assault kit, swabs, and clothes to the lab. Maybe the killer was sloppy and left saliva on her skin, or bled on her clothes.
“But I’m not feeling lucky.”
Joe hugged me, and I burrowed in under his arm and took some deep breaths.
“Anything else?”
He always listened to everything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and I was glad to tell. Maybe Joe would notice something I had missed.
I said, “Okay, well, here’s something a little different. CSIs found three or four sets of human tracks through the woods, coming from