The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,4
two of them made up the tiny investigations unit of the Cedar Hill police department. Right now Chapman looked pale and grim as he watched the preparations for the autopsy.
The examiner, Carl Scott, whom everyone referred to as “Scotty,” was a grizzled little butterball with a gray mustache, and Halloran had dealt with him often. Scotty was cutting away the remnants of Sarah Jo’s t-shirt, purple with a pink cat on it, what she had been wearing when she disappeared. He pulled the cloth back to reveal the blotchy skin beneath. “She’s quite bruised up,” he said. He turned and scribbled some notes on a pad beside the table. “Lots of decay.”
Halloran looked away. “Well, she’s probably been dead three months, Scotty.”
The examiner looked at him over the rims of his glasses. “Not that long.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.” He continued to strip away the cloth, revealing Sarah Jo’s pitiful, barely developed breasts. “If she had, she’d look worse than this.”
“How long, then, you think?” asked Halloran.
Scotty shrugged. “A few days. Hard to say.”
Below the scraps of the t-shirt, Sarah Jo was naked. When the body had been pulled from the river, there was no sign of her jeans or underwear. Her vulva was purple and swollen, sagging open. Scotty was bent over her now, probing with his instruments and speaking into a ceiling-mounted microphone attached to a recording device. “Some bruising and tearing around the vaginal opening,” he announced. “Some massive trauma to the whole area.” He placed his scalpel gently on the side of the table. “She was raped,” he said without emotion. “Very violently.”
Halloran looked from Scotty to the body splayed out before them. He pressed the handkerchief tighter across his nose and blew out a disgusted breath. He had had all he could stand. He motioned to Chapman. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “You call us if you find anything.”
Scotty didn’t look up. “Will do.”
Outside, the evening had descended with suddenness, and the rain that had threatened all day pelted the sidewalks. Halloran and Chapman trotted to the unmarked sedan and slid inside. The air in the car was hot and thick. Halloran started the engine and put the air conditioner on full blast. They both sat there, drained, listening to the rain hammer the roof.
“I hate that,” Chapman said, not looking at him. “I figured she’d been raped.”
Halloran nodded. He’d expected it, too. More often than not, young teenagers who disappeared fell victim to sexual predators who regarded them as living toys to be tortured and discarded. He had hoped that Cedar Hill wasn’t harboring such a beast. Even in the early stages, when it was still a missing persons case, he had told himself that that kind of thing didn’t exist out here, not in such a small community.
Two days after Sarah Jo’s disappearance, Halloran and Chapman were working with other law enforcement agencies (including the Lake County sheriff’s department and the FBI) and volunteers, to launch a massive search operation. In addition to combing the residential and commercial districts, they had questioned a couple dozen or so kids on the Cedar Hill College campus, searched every building. It had taken weeks. Hardly any of the students at the college were commuters; most either lived in town or in the one dormitory. The college was a private school, which meant it was expensive, and most of these kids were from upscale families in this part of the state. The idea that a student (or anyone else for that matter) could have committed such an atrocious act sickened Halloran beyond words.
After a while Sarah Jo had melted into the list of missing and runaway teens, her face plastered on posters in bus stations and truck stops across the country along with countless others.
Beside him, Chapman continued to stare at the rain-washed windshield. Halloran knew Chapman had a daughter of his own, a cute little bug about two, and he wondered if he was thinking about her now, imagining her broken, lifeless body lying on a stainless steel table under the cold lights of the morgue. Halloran reached over and slapped him on the thigh. “Let’s go home.”
* * *
By the time Halloran reached his apartment building, the storm had intensified. Streaks of lightning illuminated the sky as the fireworks had the night before. Just inside the foyer, he wriggled out of his sopping sports jacket and grabbed his mail from the box, then trudged up the stairs toward home.
Mel was meowing on the other side of