area.
“Someone could have grabbed her hard there,” he says. “Looks pretty fresh.” He moves the flashlight down to her wrists.
“No signs of self-mutilation. And her hands look OK.”
Madden nods. “I’ll bag ‘em when you’re through.”
They put paper bags on victims’ hands to preserve any trace evidence. Usually, but not always, if there was some sort of struggle, you could tell from the victim’s hands. If you were lucky, you’d find them clutching a hair or two. But the girl’s hands look clean; her nails appear to be in pretty good shape, though her nail polish, an opalescent color, is chipping in places. Later, in the crime lab, the coroner will scrape the underside of her nails for debris, then clip them and package each hand’s nails separately.
Madden watches Lyons turn the girl on her side and take a cursory look at the back of her neck and arms, paying extra attention to the area where the bruise is. The skin is discolored almost all the way around the arm, though not quite. That’s the only thing that gives the appearance of a struggle—that, and the heel of her right foot, which is also bruised.
“She might have kicked it back against the shower wall,” Lyons says, fishing a rectal thermometer out of his bag to take the body temperature and make a rough estimate of time of death. However, before he lowers the girl’s light blue, terry-cloth-style sweatpants, Madden says, “How ’bout we make sure there isn’t any trace evidence first? We’ve got the time of death pretty much nailed down anyway.”
Lyons nods. “You got some reason to suspect foul play?”
“Just being cautious, Greg. There are some extenuating circumstances.”
Without elaborating, Madden turns away and looks out the window, which faces the front of the house. Outside, another squad car has pulled up and a few curious neighbors are loitering on the sidewalk in front of the residence. But Pastorini’s efforts to limit the spectacle—for the sake of both the family and their investigation—seem to be paying off. He’s told officers to stay off their radios and he used his cell phone to call in a minimum number of personnel. If this was a homicide, he might call in all four general crimes detectives and even the department’s two narcotics-enforcement detectives, who are primarily assigned to drug- and gang-related cases but are also trained to assist in homicide investigations. The narcotics sergeant might show up, and even the division commander. However, in a situation like this, where they’re looking to avoid any media attention, the fewer people traipsing around the premises the better. It also doesn’t hurt that Vintage Oaks is gated and can be easily sealed off.
“Anybody interesting out there?” Lyons asks, making some notations in his notebook.
Madden glances at his watch. “Not really. Ambulance won’t be here for another fifteen,” he says, and just then Vincent Lee comes out of the bathroom. He’s a tiny man, no more than five-foot-three, who has a crew-cut and a diamond stud in his left ear. He went to the same high school as Madden, Woodside—or Weedside, as locals sometimes call it, deferring to the nickname that stuck from the peak pot years of the 1970s. But Lee, who’s in his early thirties, had graduated twenty-five years after Madden.
“I’m done in the bathroom, Hank,” he says. “You ready for me in here?”
Madden nods. “We’ve got a couple of bruises. And since the body was moved, let’s get some shots with the belt next to the ligature marks on her neck. I want to make sure everything matches up. Oh, and give me a couple of Polaroids of the bruises. Close-ups, OK?”
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a few shots as well,” Lyons says.
With digital SLR cameras becoming affordable, it had become easier—and a lot cheaper—to document crime scenes. Everybody these days seemed to have a decent camera. Even Madden had one out in the car, a Canon, that he kept around for back-up.
After Lee shoots the body, Madden tells him to shoot the rest of the room, starting with the desk, where the poem, along with the girl’s cell phone, is resting to the left of the computer’s keyboard. To describe the room as that of your typical suburban teen girl wouldn’t be a stretch, but on certain levels it feels more mature than that. Perhaps Madden’s getting that vibe because on one wall there’s a giant French movie poster with an almost life-size image of the actress Renée Zellweger in black