can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do.'
Wexler looked away from me and picked up the check the waitress had left. Then he downed the rest of his drink and slid out of the booth. Standing, he looked down at me and let out a heavy breath redolent of bourbon.
'Come back to the office,' he said. 'I'll give you one hour.'
He held his finger up and repeated himself in case I was confused.
'One hour.'
In the CAPs squad room I used the desk my brother had used. No one had taken it yet. Maybe it was a bad-luck desk now. Wexler was standing at a wall of file cabinets looking through an open drawer. St. Louis was nowhere to be seen, apparently choosing to have nothing to do with this. Wexler finally stepped away from the drawer with two thick files. He placed them in front of me.
'This everything?'
'Everything. You got an hour.'
'C'mon, there's five inches of paper here,' I tried. 'Let me take it home and I'll bring it-'
'See, just like your brother. One hour, McEvoy. Set your watch, because those go back in the drawer in one hour. Make that fifty-nine minutes. You're wasting time.'
I stopped belaboring the point and opened the top file.
Theresa Lofton had been a beautiful young woman who came to the university to study for an education degree. She wanted to be a first-grade teacher.
She was in her first year and lived in a campus dorm. She carried a full curriculum as well as working part-time in the day care center at the university's married-housing dorm.
Lofton was believed to have been abducted on or near the campus on a Wednesday, the day after classes ended for the Christmas break. Most students had already left for the holiday. Theresa was still in Denver for two reasons. She had her job; the day care center didn't close for the holidays until the end of the week. And there was also the problem of her car. She was waiting for a new clutch to be put into the old Beetle so she could make the drive home.
Her abduction was not reported because her roommate and all her friends had already gone home for the holidays. No one knew she was missing. When she didn't show up for work at the day care center on Thursday morning, the manager thought she had simply gone home to Montana early, not completing the week because she wasn't due to return to the job after the Christmas break. It would not be the first time a student pulled this kind of stunt, especially once finals were over and the holiday break beckoned. The manager made no inquiry or report to authorities.
Her body was found Friday morning in Washington Park. The investigators traced her last known movements back to noon on Wednesday when she called the mechanic from the day care center-he remembered children's voices in the background-and he told her the car was ready. She said she would pick it up after work, first stopping at the bank. She did neither. She said good-bye to the day care center manager at noon and went out the door. She was not seen alive again. Except, of course, by her killer.
I only had to look at the photos in the file to realize how the case could have grabbed Sean and put a leash around his heart. They were before-and-after photos. A portrait shot of her, probably for the high school yearbook. A fresh-faced young girl with a whole life ahead of her. She had dark wavy hair and crystal-blue eyes. Each reflected a small star of light, the flash of the camera. There was also a candid of her, in shorts and a tank top. She was smiling, carrying a cardboard box away from a car. The muscles of her slender, tan arms were taut. It looked as though it was a slight strain for her to stand still with the heavy box for the photographer. I turned it over and read in what I guessed was a parent's scrawl: 'Terri's first day on campus! Denver, Colo. '
The other pictures were taken after. There were more of these and I was struck by the number. Why did the cops need so many? Each one seemed like some kind of a terrible invasion, even though the girl was already dead. Theresa Lofton's eyes had lost their brilliance in these photographs. They were open but dull, webbed in a milky caul.
The photos showed the victim lying in about two feet of brush and snow on a slight incline. The news stories had been correct. She was in two pieces. A scarf was tightly wrapped around her neck and her eyes were sufficiently wide and bugged to suggest this was how she died. But the killer apparently had more work to do afterward. The body had been hacked apart at the midriff, the bottom half then placed over the top half in a horrific tableau suggesting that she was performing a sex act on herself.
I realized that Wexler was at the other desk watching me as I looked at the gallery of ghastly photos. I tried not to show my disgust. Or my fascination. I knew now what my brother was protecting me from. I had never seen anything so horrible. I finally looked at Wexler.
'Jesus.'
'Yeah.'
'The stuff the tabs said about it being like the Black Dahlia in L.A., it was close, wasn't it?'
'Yeah. Mac bought a book about it. He called some old horse in the LAPD, too. There were some similarities. The chop job. But that one was fifty years ago.'
'Maybe somebody got the idea from that.'
'Maybe. He thought of that.'
I returned the photos to the envelope and looked back at Wexler.
'Was she a lesbian?'
'No, not as far as we could tell. She had a boyfriend back up in Butte. Good kid. We cleared him. Your brother thought the same thing for a while. Because of what the killer did, you know, with the parts of the body. He thought maybe somebody was getting back at her for being a lezzie. Maybe making some kind of sick statement about something. He never got anywhere with it.'
I nodded.
'You've got forty-five minutes left.'
'You know, that's the first time I've heard you call him 'Mac' in a long time.'
'Don't worry about it. Make that forty-four minutes.'
The autopsy report was pretty much anticlimactic after the photos. I noticed that the time of death was set on the first day of Lofton's disappearance. She had been dead more than forty hours when her body was found.
Most of the summary reports dealt with dead ends. Routine investigations of the victim's family, boyfriend, friends on campus, coworkers and even parents of children she cared for, turned up nothing. Almost all were cleared through alibis or other investigative means.
The conclusions in the reports were that Theresa Lofton had not known her killer, that her path had somehow intersected with his, that it had simply been bad luck. The unknown killer was always referred to as a male, though there was no positive proof of this. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. But most violent murderers and mutilators of women were men, and it was believed it would have taken a physically strong person to cut through the body's bone and gristle. No cutting weapon was ever found.
Though the body had nearly completely bled out, there were indications of postmortem lividity, which meant some time had passed between the victim's death and the mutilation. Possibly, according to the report, as long as two or three hours.
Another peculiarity was the timing of when the body was left in the park. It was discovered approximately forty hours after investigators believed Theresa Lofton had been killed. Yet the park was a popular running and walking spot. It was unlikely that the body could have been in place in the open park field for that long without being noticed, even though an early snow considerably cut down on the number of people who passed through. In fact, the report concluded that the body had been in place no more than three hours when it was spotted after dawn by an early morning jogger.
So where was it all that time? The investigators couldn't answer that question. But they had a clue.
The fibers analysis report listed numerous foreign hairs and cotton fibers that had been found on the body and combed out of the hair. These would primarily be used to match a suspect to the victim, once a suspect became known. One particular section of the report had been circled. This section dealt with the recovery of a specific fiber-kapok-found on the body in large quantity. Thirty-three kapok seed hairs had been removed from the body. The number suggested direct contact with the source. The report said that while similar to cotton, kapok fibers were uncommon and primarily found in materials requiring buoyancy, such as boat cushions, life vests and some sleeping
