The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,8
a whirling, boiling gray mass.
* * *
10:45 AM
“All right, so explain this to me again.”
Scotty swiped a sweaty fan of gray hair off his forehead and laid a computer-printed photograph on top of the clutter on his desk. “This is a microscopic picture of the McElvoy girl’s skin cells. The tissue is damaged. Not in a normal way. This is how cells look after a body has been subjected to extremely cold temperatures. The kind of cells we find when somebody’s frozen to death, after the cells have died and then thawed.”
Halloran shot a glance at Chapman, then looked back at Scotty. “But the temperature hasn’t been below sixty probably since she disappeared.”
“I know.”
Chapman took the picture of the cells from Halloran and studied it. The reddish-pink ovals were ringed with rough brown outlines. “So are you saying that somebody killed this girl, kept her body frozen, and then just dumped her in the river a couple of days ago?”
“So it would seem.”
“For what purpose?”
Scott shrugged. “Who knows?”
Halloran blew out a breath and reached for his cigarettes.
“You know you can’t smoke in here, Mike,” said Scotty.
“Come on,” Halloran said, cramming the pack back into his shirt pocket, “you’re stressing me out here. Don’t you have anything else that might help us?”
Scotty shook his head. “I wish I had more. There’s not even anything under her fingernails. They’ve been scraped. Probably by whoever killed her.”
Chapman leaned forward. “Any prints from where she was strangled?”
“No. Perp wore gloves, apparently. I tried to determine the size of his hands from the bruises, but that was inconclusive.”
“What about DNA?” asked Halloran. “Any saliva? Surely there’s blood or semen.”
“Nothing.” He stopped.
“What?”
Scotty cleared his throat. “She was violated with some object. Something blunt and wooden. There were splinters in the vaginal walls. It was done after she was dead.”
Chapman blew out a sigh. Halloran glanced at him, then stared above Scotty’s head at the anatomical charts on the wall. “Do you think that this guy kept her for a while so he could…” He couldn’t bring himself to say what he was imagining.
“Yes,” Scotty said without hesitation. “That’s exactly what I think.”
Halloran rubbed his dry lips, wanting— needing—a smoke. “Holy Christ.”
* * *
11:35 AM
Marla sat at the kitchen table, staring out the screen door to the back yard, across the overgrown field, to the woods beyond. Before her sat a full, untouched cup of lukewarm coffee. Beside it a small piece of notepaper lay unfolded displaying a penciled phone number. On top of the paper, holding it flat, was Wade’s Smith & Wesson thirty-eight revolver, fully loaded.
She had found the paper accidentally this morning while doing the laundry, routinely checking pockets as she always did. She had pulled out the note and laid it in the stack with the coins and other objects she had found in Wade’s and Derek’s clothes, not really paying attention to it until after she had started the washer and began sorting through the discarded items. There was almost a dollar in change, some wadded gum wrappers, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, Wade’s container of Skoal he was always misplacing, and the note.
She unfolded the note and stared at it for a second. 555-8344 Missy. A girl’s writing. At first, she thought she must be confused, that the note had come from one of Derek’s pockets. But she remembered pulling it from Wade’s work pants. She smoothed it out on top of the dryer. Missy.
At first she was numb, trying to decipher it like it was some secret code. And when she realized it was a phone number, she felt the first sparks of hurt and anger. But not surprise.
She carried the note up to the kitchen and dialed the number, and when a groggy, young female voice answered, Marla said, “Is this Missy?”
“Yeah.”
“Hi, Missy. This is Wade Roberts’s wife.”
The line went dead.
It wasn’t as if this had been the first time. Wade had been cheating on her for years, practically since they had been married. The few times she had confronted him, he had at first denied it, then admitted it. Then flaunted it. Then punished her for it.
At first she thought maybe she was to blame, that if only she were a little more inventive, a little less prudish, a little more willing to give him the things he wanted... And gradually she began to understand that it didn’t matter. No matter how much she did for him, he would want something different, more and more extreme. He would