about it for a moment. “I can test for saliva remnants with fluorescent spectroscopy.”
“Do you think he was experienced at what he did?” Zoe asked. “Or was he just jabbing the needle wherever he saw a vein?”
“It’s hard to say, since it looks like she resisted. Even a professional nurse would have found it hard to use a needle in that situation. But a professional would have probably targeted the median cubital vein. This looks like the job of someone who saw how to do it, perhaps online, but never tried it himself and was never guided professionally.”
Dr. Terrel pointed out some additional minor details, but Zoe was only half listening. In all his murders, Glover had never demonstrated any interest in the victims’ blood, never mind consuming it. Like all the previous leads they’d investigated in the past week, this one led to a dead end.
CHAPTER 6
“You were right about the necklace,” O’Donnell said as soon as they left the morgue. “He probably did put it there after he killed her.”
Zoe didn’t seem to be particularly thrilled about it. The profiler seemed much more tired than the day before. Well, that made two of them. O’Donnell was exhausted. Part of it was the autopsy. Those always made her feel like she just ran an unpleasant, foul-smelling marathon. But the last day had taken its toll as well.
Door-to-door questioning of the neighbors had resulted in nothing. No one on the street seemed to have heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, and none of them knew Catherine Lamb particularly well. O’Donnell spent a few hours talking to two of Catherine’s closest friends. In the past few months they’d been seeing less and less of Catherine. She told them she was busy with her church work. They both said that whenever they met with her, she seemed unusually tired. One of them thought she might have been depressed.
O’Donnell didn’t interview Catherine’s father again. Her mother, it turned out, had died three years earlier. She’d been the church administrator, and when she’d died, Catherine had taken over, first unofficially, and it had later been made official.
She had a quick conversation with the other religious counselor in the church, a man named Patrick Carpenter. He was still shocked by the news when she talked to him, but he had a crisis of his own—his wife had been hospitalized due to a sudden scare with her pregnancy a week before. He hadn’t seen Catherine for a few days but had talked to her briefly on the phone on Friday, several hours before she died. When O’Donnell asked him if Catherine seemed sick or tired lately, he answered that he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. O’Donnell asked him for a list of the people they’d counseled, at which point the conversation became chilly. He refused to give her any names outright and finally agreed, quite reluctantly, to talk about it on the following day.
“Let me buy you two a drink,” O’Donnell now offered.
“Thanks,” Tatum said. “But we should really—”
“It will only take a moment.” O’Donnell walked over to the vending machine across the hall. She swiped her card and bought a Coke for herself. She pulled the tab, the satisfying hiss already promising sugary goodness. She took a long swig that helped settle her nausea and headache. Then she turned to Zoe and Tatum, who were looking at her, bemused. “What’s your poison? I need some sugar after an autopsy.”
They both asked for Cokes as well. For a few seconds, the three of them sipped silently from the cans outside the morgue. This was great advertising material. “Coca-Cola, a fresh taste after seeing a brain being scooped out of a skull.”
Maybe it needed a copywriter for a better catchphrase.
Her phone rang. It was Kyle.
“Yeah.” She answered the phone in a tone meant to clarify to her husband that now was not the time to talk.
“Mommy?”
O’Donnell immediately softened. “Hey, baby,” she said. “I can’t really talk right now. Is everything okay?”
“No.” Nellie sounded close to tears. “It’s an emergency.”
Nellie was five years old, but she already knew what an emergency was. Because she was only allowed to call her mother in case of an emergency. So an emergency meant any situation that warranted calling Mom.
O’Donnell sighed. “What is it, baby?”
“Daddy can’t find my purple pants. And I need those pants for Anna’s tea party, I told you I need them, and you said that you will wash them and that I could wear them, so Daddy