talking back.
Have mercy on us.
Have mercy on us.
Have mercy on us.
Nothing was coming to me, goddamn it. I clutched the photographs as if I could squeeze something useful from them. Work with me, girls.
Lastly I got to Jessica’s picture. Disappeared August 1, 2004. This photo was different from the others in that it was taken years rather than days after her death, her body a brown husk. There was nothing of the woman I had known in that picture.
Only lastly was not Jessica after all. Here was the photo of the other mummy that had been found in the abandoned car. The only victim of the Route 66 murderer that had gone unidentified, unnamed. I remembered wondering who she was, and why no one cared about her.
You were the first, we know that now, that Patricia Stanbaugh wasn’t the first after all. You still have both your ears and your tendons weren’t slashed. You were killed before the killer had designed his MO and signature. That was different. Was that the difference the killer meant? Too obvious.
You were killed before the killer knew he could get away with killing. Maybe it was unplanned, maybe it was spontaneous. Maybe he knew you. If I knew who you were, I might know him.
I remembered George Manriquez from that morning when Zach arrived to view Jessica’s body, how kind George was to Zach. How he had said with a sigh that he’d moved here from Florida looking for a change of pace, but only switched from Haitian floaters to Mexican mummies. It had given him pain, I could see. He was one of those people in the business who hadn’t lost their feelings. He might care about this woman whether she was a prostitute or not. I flipped to the medical examiner’s report. Sure enough, he had done a complete autopsy on the Jane Doe.
No organic disease that could be ascertained. The other victims were healthy, too.
Method of death: strangulation. That wasn’t different either.
X-rays showed her dental work in the event records could later be found to match them. George pronounced her teeth and state of her jaw in keeping with good hygiene and nutrition. So far not the sort of thing you’d find in a low-class prostitute, certainly not an addict. No difference there—all the victims had been wholesome sorts.
The body had been dumped in a car and naturally mummified in the dry desert heat. Different.
No noticeable marks, tattoos, or the like. Pierced ears. Arline Blum had the tattoo on her ankle. All the victims had pierced ears.
Bone structure indicates ectomorph, a small, slim build even before her flesh had desiccated.
Skull indicates African American descent.
I read the line again. Now that was different.
I swiveled Coleman’s chair back to the computer and went back to www.findthemissing.org. In the unidentified-remains database I keyed in the little information I had before: sex, geographic area, year she went missing. This time I changed Caucasian to African American.
Then I cross-checked my entry with the missing persons part of the database. There was only one African American missing in that year. Just to double check, I keyed in a date range of three years. She was the only African American to go missing from the area during that whole time. There was a photograph of her, a high school graduation photograph. And she had a name. Her name was Kimberly Maple.
She was not an unknown prostitute. At least she had a name. Kimberly Maple.
I had an inkling, but quick went to a population-statistics site and searched for African Americans in Arizona. Less than four percent. If you reduced that by half to eliminate the males and reduced again for Kimberly’s probable age at time of death, it was less than one chance in fifty. The waitress at Emery’s Cantina was black and had a relative who was the victim of a violent crime. Not quite two bombs on a plane but maybe close enough.
I picked up Coleman’s phone again and dialed directory assistance. Yes, there was a number for a woman named Cheri Maple. But why would Emery say that her sister was the victim of a violent crime? Why wouldn’t he say she had disappeared? Unless Cheri told him that because she knew Kimberly was dead.
A female serial killer? Cheri killed her sister and found out she liked doing it enough to keep doing it?
You’re tired and you’re desperate, I thought. Stop and think some more. I breathed in and out a few times, pictured Sigmund. Always