DeAngelo shook his head. “I haven’t seen any.”
The town ambulance pulled into the parking lot and behind it Peter Perkins in his own. car, a Mazda pickup. Two young Paradise firemen who doubled as EMTs got out and walked almost gingerly toward the crime scene. Peter Perkins got out of his truck. He was in jeans and a tee shirt with his gun strapped on and his badge on his belt. A thirty-five-millimeter camera hung around his neck. He went to the bed of his pickup and got his evidence kit. One of the EMTs knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse.
After a moment he said, “She’s dead,
Jesse.”
“Un huh.”
“What do you want us to do, Jesse?”
The EMT was not quite twenty-five. His name was Duke Vincent.
Jesse played softball with him in the Paradise town league. Like DeAngelo, Vincent had seen death. But never 176
IOt‘ ’. Onrr murder. Vincent’s
voice was calm but soft, and Jesse knew he was feeling shaky. Jesse remembered the first time he’d seen it. It was a lot worse than this, a shotgun, close up, he remembered.
“You think her neck’s broken,
Dukie?” Jesse said.
Vincent looked at the corpse again. Jesse knew he didn’t like it.
“I guess so,” Vincent said.
“Yeah, me too,” Jesse said.
“Probably what killed her.
You and Steve stand by with the ambulance for a while.
We’ll have the county M.E. look at her, and there’ll be some state investigators along.“
“Why did he write ‘slut’ on her,
Jesse?” DeAngelo said.
“Maybe the word means something special to him.”
Jesse said.
“So is it the same guy that did the car and Captain Cat?”
“Might be,” Jesse said.
“But wouldn’t he know that it would
connect him to the other crimes?”
Jesse smiled to himself at the TV locution his own officer was speaking in the presence of a murdered person. There were so many cop shows. It was hard for real cops not to start talking like them.
“Might want us to see the connection,”
Jesse said. “Or it might be someone else who wants us to think there’s a connection.”
Most of the rest of the force had showed up, some in uniform, some dressed for off duty. For all of them it was their first murder and they stood by a little uneasily watching Jesse, except for Peter Perkins, who had stretched his crime-scene tape around the murder scene, and was now taking pictures. The other cops looked as if they envied him having something to do.
“John,” Jesse said. “You and
Arthur put up some horses and keep people behind them.”
“There’s nobody around, Jesse.”
“There will be,” Jesse said.
“Suitcase, you talk to the bus driver. Get everything she saw, thinks, hopes, dreams, whatever. Let her talk, pay attention. Ed, go in, talk to the principal. We’re going to have to talk with the kids, maybe we can do it class by class, find out if they saw anything.
We also may have to search the school.“
“For what?” Burke said.
“Her clothes,” Jesse said.
“I’d like to find her clothes.”
“Maybe he killed her someplace else and brought her body here nude,” Burke said.
“We find the clothes, it’ll help us decide that,” Jesse said. “The rest of you spread around and look for her clothes or anything else. Tire tracks, bloodstains. He whacked her around pretty good. But there’s no blood on the pavement.”
“Rain might have washed it,” DeAngelo
said.
“Watch where you walk, go in wider and wider circles around the body. Maybe he hie her with something. See if
