the hole was roughly a quarter the size of a drinking straw. Sara immediately thought of the awl in a Swiss army knife. The round, pointed tool was ideal for punching holes in leather. Her father used a similar device called a counterpunch to sink the heads of nails in fine carpentry work.
When Sara pressed against the puncture, a watery, dark brown liquid wept out.
Ingle asked, “Is that fat?”
“Fat would be more rubbery and white. This is cerebrospinal fluid,” Sara said. “If I’m right, the killer used a metal tool to rupture her spinal cord. He sliced the nerves of the brachial plexus to immobilize the arms.”
“Hold on a minute.” The practiced calm had left Ingle’s tone. “Why would anybody wanna paralyze this poor little girl?”
Sara knew exactly why, because she had seen this kind of damage before. “So she couldn’t fight back while he raped her.”
Grant County—Tuesday
5
Jeffrey walked down the main college drive toward the front gates. Rain blew sideways under his umbrella. The sky had broken open while he was in the dean’s office receiving a lecture on optics. Kevin Blake was a walking encyclopedia of corporate double-speak, whether he was taking a 10,000-foot view, steering the ship, thinking outside the box, or advocating a holistic approach.
Translated into English, the dean wanted to release a rah-rah, go-team statement about moving past the tragic accident in the woods and helping the student body embark on a healing journey. Jeffrey had made it clear that he wasn’t yet prepared to make that journey. He had asked for the week. Blake had given him until the end of the day. There was not much else to say after that. Jeffrey’s choices were limited. He could walk in the rain to cool down or he could throw Blake out the window.
Walking had narrowly won out, despite the deluge that had started pouring down while they were back in the woods waiting for the ambulance. Now, Jeffrey was halfway to the gates and his socks were already soaked through. The heavy police-issue umbrella was wearing a divot into his shoulder. He gripped tight to the handle. Four hours had passed since that moment in the woods, and his hands still could not shake the jarring memory of bone breaking inside the girl’s chest. Jeffrey wasn’t used to taking orders, but everything Sara had told him to do, everything they had done together, had saved a life.
Whether that lifespan was counted down in hours, days or decades remained to be seen.
The girl’s name was Rebecca “Beckey” Caterino. She was nineteen years old. She was the single child of a widowed father. She was majoring in Environmental Chemistry. She might never wake up from surgery after what was to all appearances a tragic accident.
The accident part was the source of Jeffrey’s disagreement with Blake. No matter Sara’s SLFs, TBIs or BLTs, Jeffrey wasn’t right with the girl landing on her back. Add to that the troubling phone call he had gotten from Caterino’s father. The man had arrived at the hospital within thirty minutes of his daughter. He had relayed some medical information that Jeffrey needed Sara to interpret. The upshot was that there was no way Beckey Caterino had managed to turn herself over in the woods. Either she had fallen on her back or someone had put her there.
Jeffrey couldn’t quite articulate why he believed the latter was a possibility. None of the evidence pointed to foul play. But he had done this job long enough to know that sometimes your gut could see better than your eyes.
He ran through the timeline he’d put together. Caterino’s roommates said she left around five. The 911 call had come in an hour later. The student was a frequent runner. Jeffrey had looked up the stats. A woman in Caterino’s age group could generally do a twelve-minute mile. Assuming she ran straight to IHOP and didn’t take a detour or stop, the mile and a half run would’ve taken eighteen minutes.
That left forty-two minutes for something bad to happen.
If Caterino had been targeted, then the next step would be determining who would want to hurt her. Was there an old boyfriend who was angry with her for cutting things off? Or was the opposite scenario the case, where an old boyfriend had a new girlfriend who wanted to erase the past? Did Caterino argue with a roommate? Was there an academic rival? Was there an obsessed professor who didn’t like being told no?
Jeffrey had sent Frank