Dying Echo A Grim Reaper Mystery - By Judy Clemens Page 0,4
you should look at the pictures.”
Casey held out her hand. “I’m not a little girl.”
“I never said you were. I just…she didn’t go easily.” Don turned the top photo right-side up and held it just out of her reach.
Death sucked in a breath, peering over Don’s shoulder. “I can vouch for that. Her killers didn’t hold back. And don’t yell at me for not telling you before. I didn’t know who we were dealing with until I saw the picture just now.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name was Alicia McManus,” Don said. “Don’t know her middle name. Cops got what we know from the landlord.”
Death leaned further over Don’s shoulder, and Don shuddered.
“That’s not right,” Death said. “Her name wasn’t Alicia. It was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Paige Mann.”
Casey swiveled the file toward her. Don gave only token resistance before letting her have it. She scanned the top paper. “You sure about her name?”
“Dead sure,” Death said.
“It’s the name everyone gave the police. Her landlord, her coworkers.” Don cleared his throat and played with his pencil. “Ricky.”
Casey turned over one of the photos, since Don was still holding on to his. It showed a woman lying on a carpet. Her face was beaten, so much so that Casey couldn’t tell tell if she was young or old, pretty or plain, dark or light. Her body lay on its side, her neck at an impossible angle, her clothes barely covering her.
“She was dead when the police arrived,” Don said. “It was lucky they even found her when they did. She could have lain there for days.”
Casey glanced at Death, who shrugged. In and out at the death scene to take the woman’s soul, and that was all the information Death had gotten from the earthly authorities. Everything else had to come from a woman newly dead, who wasn’t exactly at peace with how she’d gone.
“Any clue who did this to her?”
Don shifted in his seat.
“Other than Ricky.”
Death squinted onto the dark street between the blind and the window trim. “Don’t know any names. But she called them the Three.”
“There were three of them?”
Don blinked. “Three of who?”
Casey sat there, mouth open, unsure what to say. So she flipped over another photo, this one showing some burn marks on the woman’s stomach, probably from a cigarette, or maybe a lighter, or a match, if the shape of the wound meant anything. Nasty. “So how did they find her?”
Don leaned his elbows on his desk and rubbed his forehead. “She didn’t go in to work on Friday morning, and her manager called her. When he didn’t get an answer, he got in touch with her landlord.”
“Why? Did her landlord keep tabs on her?”
“No, not really. It was just…she didn’t have many friends. Sort of kept to herself. They didn’t know who else to call.”
“No emergency contact in her employee file?”
Don looked out at her under his brows. “Let’s say her employer doesn’t keep the best records.”
Not all that unusual. “So the landlord went looking for her?”
“He said he was worried. That maybe she was sick. It was unlike her to miss work, and I guess he felt sort of fatherly toward her.”
Casey snorted. “Which means she was pretty?”
“No. I mean, sure, I guess she was, from what people say, and from seeing photos from before, but that’s not what his deal is. He seems like a decent guy.”
“Don’t they all?”
“I do have some sense of people, Casey.”
“I know, I know.” She waved. “Go on.”
“So he went looking. Her door was locked and there was no response to his knock, so he let himself in and…found her.”
“I assume he did the normal thing and called the cops?”
“After running to the bathroom to throw up.”
She nodded, understanding. “Anything unusual about the scene?”
“Other than a woman who’d been beaten and tortured to death?”
She looked up from the third photo, which showed a close up of ligature marks on the woman’s neck. “Was this what actually killed her? She was strangled?”
“I believe so,” Death said.
Don nodded. “Medical Examiner says it was the fatal injury, but, as you can see, it was only one of many things that was done to her.”
“Other torture?”
“You can’t even see her back in those photos. Or her feet.”
“Raped?”
Don’s lips pinched together, which she took as a yes.
“So could they find DNA from her killer?”
He shook his head. “No. they just found residue from condoms—the same kind as on the ones in her trash.”
Casey digested this bad news as she turned over several more grotesque crime scene