Guppo led Maggie up a shallow slope under the evergreen trees, around the rear wall of the cinder block dairy, and into the small grassy field behind it. Twenty feet away, the medical examiner's team was zipping the woman's body into a black vinyl bag.
'Hold on a minute, guys,' Maggie called. She turned back to Guppo. 'Kasey confronted them here?'
'Right. The perp held the vic with a garrote around her neck. Kasey took a shot. Pretty ballsy move, if you ask me. It was foggy, and she didn't have a good angle on the killer.'
'She missed?' Maggie asked.
'Yeah, but the perp got the message, dropped the vic, and ran. Kasey says she took one more shot and missed again. He sprinted toward the highway and disappeared. We're still trying to figure out where he parked his car, in case he left anything behind. Kasey tried to revive the victim, but she was already gone. Two minutes earlier, and she would have been the big hero.'
Maggie shoved her hands in her pockets and marched over to the dead woman in the wet grass. 'What's her name?'
'Susan Krauss.'
'Married?'
'Divorced. She's got a teenage son in Florida with his dad.'
'What did she do for a living?'
'She was a personal trainer at the Y.'
'Have we found anything that ties her to the other victims?'
'Not yet.'
Maggie pushed her black bangs out of her eyes and stared at the body of Susan Krauss. She looked violated, the way murder victims do, probed by the technicians in white, stripped of dignity by the men who hunted through the grass around her as if she weren't even there. Her skin leached of color. Her hair wet and messy. Her clothes ripped, exposing most of her private parts. Her neck, slashed open and practically severed by the wire that had killed her.
'OK,' Maggie said quietly, nodding to the medical techs. 'You can take her.'
''Susan Krauss. Number four.
The first was Elisa Reed in mid-October. Single, never married, twenty-three years old, a first-year teacher. She'd lived with her parents on a farm three miles north of here. Elisa vanished on a Tuesday night while her parents were vacationing in San Francisco. They'd called her that night, but she didn't answer, and when they hadn't reached her by Thursday, they decided to call the police. There was no evidence of Elisa in her bedroom, other than traces of blood on the sheets and a smashed alarm clock on the floor.
Two weeks later, on Halloween night, Trisha Grange disappeared, becoming the second victim. Thirty-five years old, married seven years, mother of two. Her husband Troy had taken their oldest daughter to a Halloween party, leaving Trisha at home with the baby. When he returned at ten o'clock, the baby was sleeping, but Trisha was gone. They'd found no blood this time, but they found Trisha's shoe in the field behind their farmhouse and strands of her blonde hair caught in the screen door that led outside. She'd lived seven miles northeast of Susan Krauss.
The third victim had disappeared only six days ago. Another farm, barely a mile away. Barbara Berquist was a widow in her early fifties who didn't show up to her job at the Duluth Library. That was enough to trigger suspicion, given the two earlier disappearances, and Maggie and her team had checked out the farm without waiting forty-eight hours to see if Barbara showed up somewhere else, alive and well. They'd found blood again. Lots of it. But no body.
'What did you find inside the house?' Maggie asked.
'We think the perp came in through a basement window with a broken lock. It looks like Susan Krauss was awake and in her bathroom when this guy made his move. That's probably what bought her a few more minutes. There's blood and evidence of a struggle near the doorway. Looks like she got away from him and bolted outside.'
'OK, keep at it. Inside and out. This guy's plan got screwed up this time, so maybe he made a mistake during the chase.' She added, 'I better go talk to the redhead.'
'Hang on,' Guppo replied.
He peered over her shoulder at the whitewashed stone wall of the dairy. He crouched down with a heavy breath, studying the ground where Susan Krauss now lay in her body bag, and then his eyes traveled up to a high section of the dairy wall.
'Anyone got a step stool?' he called.
One of the evidence technicians produced a stool from the trunk of his car, and Guppo opened it next to the wall. He climbed up the two steps, and Maggie winced, hearing the metal joints groan under Guppo's weight.
'Shine a light up here, OK?'
Maggie obliged, illuminating a peeling section of white paint in front of his face. Guppo slid a magnifying glass out from his pants pocket and squinted through it. When he climbed down, his face was flushed, and he was smiling.
'Spatter,' he said.
'From the victim?' Maggie asked.
'Based on the angle and location? I don't think so. I think Kasey winged a piece of our killer after all.'
Kasey Kennedy looked young, which was a reminder to Maggie that she wasn't so young herself anymore. Kasey was twenty-six and had served on the force for three years. Maggie recalled seeing her in City Hall, but that was only because Kasey and her neon-red hair were hard to miss. They had never met. Kasey's features were plain, but she had fresh, freckled skin and a body that was skinny and toned, and the overall result was attractive. She was an odd combination of girlish and intense. Her blue eyes looked lost. Her left knee bounced up and down nervously, and her fingernails were cotton-candy pink. She looked like a naive kid in need of rescue, and yet this kid had nearly chased down a killer on her own in the middle of the fog. Maggie couldn't accuse her of lacking courage.
'Here,' she said, handing Kasey the badge that Guppo's team had found near the river.
'Oh, you found it. Thanks.'
'How are you doing, Kasey?' Maggie asked.
The young cop hung her head and squeezed her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. 'I'm sorry, Sergeant. I screwed everything up.'
'Call me Maggie. And you didn't screw up.'
Maggie told her about the blood trace that Guppo had found on the dairy wall. 'The best case is, we get a hit in the DNA database and we ID this guy. Even if he's not in the database, we can tie him directly to the murder scene when we do nail him. Thanks to you.'
'Except the real best case would have been for me to kill the bastard, right?' Kasey said. 'I let him get away.' Her voice had a lilting pitch that could have come from the mouth of a teenager. It sounded strange to hear her talking about killing someone. She should have been gossiping about boys and sharing make-up advice.
'Don't second-guess yourself,' Maggie told her. 'It took guts to do what you did. You could have been the one to wind up dead here. You know that, right? You took a hell of a risk.'
'I know.'
'Why didn't you call for backup?'
Kasey rolled her eyes. 'No cell phone.'
'Now that was stupid.'
'Yeah, I was charging the battery in my bathroom, and I forgot to grab it before I left. I had to drive home to call nine one one, and then I came right back here.'
'Do you live nearby?'
Kasey nodded. 'I'm just a couple miles away, but I could have been on the moon tonight. I had no idea where I was.'
Maggie leaned on the open door of the squad car. 'So how'd you wind up in the middle of this mess?'
'I got lost,' Kasey told her. 'I drove up to Hibbing after work to hang out with a girlfriend, and I got a late
