cypress stump located ten feet off the trail.
The deputies were a Mutt and Jeff combination, one tall and slender, the other short and beefy. Harry introduced himself. Vicky did the same, as Harry studied the ground leading to the body. It was soft and spongy and there were footprints leading in and out. He counted four or five sets, some appeared to be the same size, making the exact number hard to determine on first glance. He turned back to the deputies.
“How many of you went in there?” he asked Jeff, who seemed to have the sharper eyes of the pair.
“Let’s see,” Jeff said, counting mentally. “We went in.” He nodded toward the other deputy. “So did Morgan, the deputy you met coming in. And so did the park ranger. He was first. He went straight in after the bird watcher told him there was a body out here. Then he called us.”
“What about the bird watcher?” Harry asked. “Do you know if she went in?”
“When Morgan questioned her, she told him she didn’t. Just saw the leg stickin’ out and went for the ranger. But she’s still up at the preserve office with another deputy if you want to talk to her.”
“The deputy at the office, did he go in?”
Both deputies shook their heads. “He came later-after us; after the crime scene was set up. He was sent to guard the witness; never got out here at all.”
Harry nodded. “Okay, good work. Now, I’d like one of you to call the office and make sure our witness stays put. I’m also gonna need to get the shoe sizes of everyone who went in to the body, and later, when the crime scene techs gets here, I’m going to want casts and photographs of the soles of everyone’s shoes. We’ll have to eliminate all of you from any prints the perp might have left. Also, I need to know if anyone touched the body.”
This time it was Mutt, shaking his head. “None of us,” he said. “Morgan was the first one here and he made sure no one did. The park ranger said he felt her wrist for a pulse. I don’t know why he bothered. Her throat’s cut back almost to her spine. Same as O.J.’s wife.” Mutt shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by the comparison he had just made; then added: “At least that’s what they said at Simpson’s trial.”
Vicky looked away and rolled her eyes. “Morgan told us she’s wearing a mask. Did anybody touch it?” she asked, turning back to the two deputies.
“Not after we got here,” Jeff said, taking over again. “Morgan got here first and made sure nobody touched anything. I can’t swear about the ranger, but he says he only touched her wrist.”
“Okay,” Harry said. “We’re going in to check the body, but we’ll circle wide to avoid adding our footprints to the mix.”
“Watch where you step,” Jeff warned. “There’s a few cottonmouths around these swamps.”
Vicky wrinkled up her nose and gave a small shudder. “Snakes, alligators, and a dead woman in a Mardi Gras mask-I’m really starting to love this case.”
Harry studied her for several moments. The toughness was well established behind her eyes, and that charnel house humor was a definite plus, a necessary survival tool for a cop working homicide. Yeah, he thought, she’ll do just fine. He gave her an amused smile. “Tomorrow we get vampires,” he said.
“I’ve got to wait until tomorrow?”
“They only show themselves on Thursdays.”
What about werewolves?” Vicky said.
“Never saw one in Florida-too hot for all that fur.”
“Damn. And I could’ve sworn I’d dated a few.”
They moved toward the body in a wide circle, looking not only for the snakes the deputy had warned of, but also for any evidence the killer might have tossed out into the thick undergrowth from the immediate crime scene. The walk in proved uneventful, but a more thorough, wider search would be made later. Right now they needed to learn all they could from the body.
The body lay on its back on a rich, dark bed of rotting vegetation. The woman had been clothed in a straight black dress that would have stopped just above the knees had someone not used a knife to slice open the entire front. Black thong underwear was the lone undergarment and it had been pulled aside exposing a neatly trimmed blond pubis, the same shade as the woman’s hair. Her breasts were also exposed and they were full and round and pointed rigidly up.
“Implants,” Harry observed.
“You betcha,” Vicky said. “Even when all the muscles go soft and slack, these boobs will not sag or lose their shape. Plastic surgeons should use that line in their advertising.”
“I thought they already did,” Harry said.
The flip words didn’t carry to their eyes. Each pair remained grim and focused. It was the charnel house humor again, two detectives forced to witness daily human carnage, trying to maintain their personal sanity.
Harry took a Polaroid camera from his crime scene case and took two photos of the body in situ. He took another of the woman’s feet, which were shoeless and relatively clean except for a dusting of beach sand, indicating both that she had been carried into the swamp and had recently visited a beach. Then he took a minute to study the area around them. It seemed peaceful and threatening at the same time, the way only a primal forest can, and except for the intrusion of the body of a young, modernly dressed woman he might have been standing in a place that had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. He let his eyes roam. Spread out before him were several large cypress stumps, like the one that stood next to the body, each one rotting with age; each probably there since the turn of the last century when loggers scoured Florida lands searching out and cutting all the mature cypress they could find. To the left were several Southern live oaks, their boughs heavy with Spanish moss. Between the oaks were small groupings of young pond cypress, many with butterfly orchids and resurrection ferns attached to their trunks. Larger patches of swamp fern grew in dense clusters across the black, spongy ground, their toothed edges providing protective shelter for small animals, and as Harry watched a cotton rat scurried from one patch to another, scaring up a pair of common yellowthroat, the small birds darting off in search of safer cover. In the distance he could hear the gooselike grunts of tree frogs and the high-pitched chirping of cicadas, and up in the trees he could see several parula warblers and white-eyed vireos flying from tree to tree.
He felt a hand on his arm and turned back. Vicky was staring at him strangely.
“You lost in thought, or just enjoying a Discovery Channel moment?” she asked.
Harry ignored the question and asked one of his own. “Why bring her here? We can be reasonably sure the killer drove a car in, at least as far as the swamp. But why risk it? Why risk being seen? He could have been spotted by a park ranger driving on a trail, or by any number of hikers. Why risk any of it when there are so many places to dump a body? The beaches, at night; all the thick pine forests in the middle of the state. He obviously didn’t kill her here. He brought her body here and posed it in this setting. Why? Why was that part of the overall plan, or does this place have some special significance?”
Vicky looked back at the body and the area around it. It was as the deputy had said. The woman’s throat was cut so deeply that the head was nearly severed from the body. It told her that the killer was either very powerful or very angry to use that degree of cutting force. But there was no blood splatter on the cypress trunk or the cluster of swamp ferns that grew beside it. Somewhere there was a large pool of blood that had pumped from her body when the carotid arteries had been severed, and had kept on pumping until her heart stopped beating. When they found that pool of blood- if they found that pool of blood-they would have the real crime scene. Harry’s voice brought her back.
“You’re the sex crimes expert. You see any indication she was raped?”
Vicky looked at the body more closely. “I see what looks like a small amount of dried semen in her pubic hair. But I don’t see any signs of violence. There’s no bruising or cuts or scratches.” She pointed to the woman’s right hand. “She’s got two broken fingernails, but that could have happened while she was being killed. I’m just not seeing what’s usually there when somebody’s raped. Maybe the autopsy will tell us more.”
Harry nodded. He was squatting next to the body, studying the Mardi Gras mask that covered the woman’s face. He took out the Polaroid again and took two more photos. Vicky squatted on the other side, joining him. The mask was a deep iridescent purple, with highlights of silver. There were cat’s ears at the top and whiskers sprouting from the cheeks and small, dark red plumes rising from high on the forehead. Clouded green eyes looked out blindly through the holes in the mask, giving the only hint of the face that lay beneath. The mask was not held in place by any band. It had simply been placed on the face, so Harry carefully lifted it, using one finger of each hand, and laid it on the woman’s chest.
When the woman’s face was exposed an audible gasp escaped Vicky’s throat and Harry’s head snapped back. They knew this woman. Like most of the people in the United States they had seen her picture countless times in
