pair of platform sandals into the shower and kicked them off. One sandal was in one corner of the shower, the other just in front of her. They must have had four-inch heels. Orange, decorated in a retro flower-power design.
Pastorini didn’t notice any of that right away, though. When he first saw her, there was something about how close her feet were to the floor that made him think they weren’t too late, that maybe they could bring her back. So, he dove into the shower stall and lifted her up and tried to unhook the belt from the showerhead. But at five-foot-seven he had trouble lifting her high enough. That’s when the bigger of the two uniforms had to step in and help.
They gave her CPR on the floor of her room. They tried to resuscitate her for almost ten minutes, even though Pastorini knew the moment he put his mouth to hers that it was hopeless. Her body was still warm, but he thought she must have been dead for at least fifteen minutes and probably longer. Both of the parents were screaming. No, God. No, no, no. And then, when it was clear that nothing could be done for her, everybody and everything just stopped for a moment. Pastorini, on his knees, looked across the room at Bill Kroiter, who’d pulled his wife’s head to his chest, impossibly trying to shield her from the unfathomable. To say anything was pointless.
After he gave them a moment with her, he had the uniforms take them downstairs. Then he himself lifted the girl onto her bed and covered her with a sheet he found in a linen closet down the hall. He was sorry he moved the body, he told Madden. But he just couldn’t bear to see her lying on the floor like that. And since he’d already moved her once, it didn’t seem to matter that he put her up on the bed.
“Can’t blame him,” Greg Lyons, an investigator from the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office, now says. “I probably would have done the same thing, given the circumstances.”
Lyons is standing by the side of the bed, stretching latex gloves over his hands. Not far behind him, Vincent Lee, one of the county crime-scene photographers, is in the bathroom doing his job, and the bursts of light from his flash and the sound of it recharging between shots leak into the bedroom at regular intervals.
“He’s pretty shaken,” says Madden, already gloved. “Been sipping an empty can of Diet Coke for ten minutes.”
“Better that than a full bottle of Jack.”
“True.”
With his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, neatly trimmed goatee, and round, designer glasses, you’d guess Lyons was an artist long before you’d say coroner’s investigator. He unclips his penlight from his shirt pocket and goes to work examining the body. The girl’s face is ashen, her lips a faint blue. Her eyes are closed but her mouth is slightly open, just enough to appear disturbing. Lyons, a former paramedic, starts with the neck, where the classic V-shaped line of a ligature runs across the front just above the larynx. While the natural light streaming into the room isn’t intense, Madden can make out the mark just fine. Still, Lyons plays the flashlight over the line to bring out its detail, then touches her chin and lifts it up, pushing her lips closed. The moment he lets go her mouth springs back to its original position and the gap returns.
“Rigor’s already setting in,” he comments. “How long you been here?”
“Twenty, twenty-five minutes—tops.”
“Where’s Burns?” Lyons asks.
Burns is his partner. He’s in Lake Tahoe for the weekend.
“Skiing at Squaw,” Madden says.
“I didn’t know he skied. The guy can’t stand the cold.”
“His girlfriend’s into it. But he only goes in the spring, when it’s fifty and slushy.”
Lyons nods, then lifts the girl’s left eyelid and shines the light at the eye for a few seconds, then does the same on the right. He shows Madden what they both suspect will be there: the whites of the eyes are blotched with tiny red dots—pinpoint hemorrhages, or petechiae, that are the physical evidence of ligature strangulation. He looks at her cheeks and inside her nose for more, takes a look inside her mouth and ears, then pulls the sheet back and examines the rest of her body—or the parts he can without removing her clothes.
Making a circle with the flashlight, Lyons highlights a discoloration on her right arm—a small bruise in the bicep