Tyler’s smile broadened.
“I should have figured,” he said with a shake of the head. “Theapple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.”
“I don’t guess it does,” Ann Marie said.
Riley felt thoroughly dumbfounded now.
Who is this kid? she wondered.
And why the hell does she know so much about corpses?
But now was no time to sort all that out. She still knew next tonothing about what they were doing here.
She asked the sheriff and the M.E., “Has the cause of death beendetermined?”
“Maybe so,” Sheriff Wightman said.
“We’re not sure, though,” Tyler added. “I’ll show you what Imean.”
Riley crouched down beside the corpse with Ann Marie and Tyler.
Tyler pointed to a place where the costume had been cut open toreveal a wound in the center of the chest.
“She was stabbed through the sternum, straight into the heart,”Tyler said. “But not with a knife.”
He fingered the peculiar wound and added, “As you can see, theopening is almost perfectly round. It looks as if she were stabbed by somethingextremely sharp and cylindrical.”
A stake through the heart? Riley wondered as Ann Mariesnapped a picture of the wound.
Surely not.
But the details about this murder were striking her as weirderand weirder by the moment.
Riley asked, “Do you have any theories about what kind of weaponmight have been used?”
Before Tyler could reply, Ann Marie gasped.
“Oh, look at these!” she said.
Now she was taking pictures of indented marks on the costume.
Tyler said, “Yeah, those are really strange. Take a look righthere.”
He showed Riley and Ann Marie another place where he had cut thecostume for a better look at the flesh underneath, revealing that the marks inthe costume were matched by indentations in the body. It looked like the bodyhad been beaten by something heavy and hammer-like.
What really struck Riley was the odd shape of the marks. Theywere sort of pear-shaped, but they were divided down the middle. Before Rileycould bring to mind exactly what they looked like, Ann Marie spoke up.
“They look like hoof prints.”
“I think so too,” Tyler said.
Riley felt a prickle of confusion.
She asked, “Are you saying the woman was trampled to death bysome hoofed animal?”
Tyler shook his head. “I’m not saying anything just yet. I’mstill not sure whether these marks were made before or after the wound to thechest. But my hunch is that they came afterwards, after the victim had alreadybeen stabbed.”
Ann Marie gasped again.
She said, “And the object that stabbed her was shaped like ahoofed animal’s horn! Like she was gored to death!”
“It does look that way,” Tyler said.
Riley could hardly believe what she was hearing.
She said, “Are you saying this woman was gored in the chest bysome large animal, which then trampled her body?”
Tyler shrugged, “Like I said, I’m not saying anything yet.”
Ann Marie asked, “But what kind of animal might we be talkingabout?”
Sheriff Wightman spoke up with a surprising note of certainty.
“A goat.”
Riley looked at the sheriff. She could tell from his expressionthat he meant exactly what he said.
“I don’t understand,” Riley said.
“Neither do I,” Wightman said. “But I am pretty sure more peopleare going to wind up dead if we don’t put a stop to this. I’ll show you whywhen we get back to the station. I’m hoping you BAU folks can help make senseof it. Do you think it’s OK for Tyler and his team to take the body to themorgue now?”
“That would be fine,” Riley said.
As Tyler began giving orders to his team, Wightman said to Rileyand Ann Marie, “Let’s go on over to the station. You can follow me in your car.When we get there, I can brief you completely on what we know so far.”
Riley’s mind boggled as she and Ann Marie headed back towardtheir vehicle. This murder was much stranger than she’d imagined—too strange,she suspected, for the local police to deal with on their own.
Was this going to turn out to be a true FBI case after all?
As she and her new partner got into the car and started drivingbehind the sheriff’s vehicle, something else nagged at Riley—Ann Marie’sbehavior at the crime scene. It seemed as though the chief M.E. knew more aboutAnn Marie than Riley did. That situation had to change.
Riley tried to think of a tactful way to broach the subject. Buther impatience got the best of her, and she blurted aloud to Ann Marie, “Who areyou, anyway?”
CHAPTER SIX
As those four blurted words seemed to echo through the car, Rileyimmediately regretted the bluntness of her question.
“Who are you, anyway?”
Ann Marie was staring back at her with surprise. The rookieseemed to be trying to understand what Riley was asking.
Riley stammered, “What I mean is … you know so much about deadbodies … and the M.E. seems to know who you are … and …”
Ann Marie broke into a smile.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, I guess I must have seemed kind of,you know, ghoulish back there. Well, I grew up around corpses.”
“Huh?” Riley said.
“My dad runs a mortuary in Georgetown—Esmer’s Funeral Home.”
Then she laughed and added, “It’s a thriving business, believeme. Rich people die as much as everybody else. Who’d have thought it, huh?Anyway, Dad’s got a really good professional reputation throughout this area,so even a lot of forensics guys know who he is. That’s why the M.E. recognizedmy name.”
Riley tried to keep her eye on the road and the car she wasfollowing. But she couldn’t help glancing at Ann Marie, trying to imagine heras a child—maybe even a toddler—hanging around a funeral home. What kinds ofthings had this fresh-faced kid witnessed in her life so far? Had she maybeeven watched as her father carried out embalmings? If so, how young had shebeen the first time?
As if in reply to Riley’s unspoken questions, Ann Marie said, “Iguess I know the business pretty much backwards and forwards. Which is why Dad’sstill not happy that I decided to go into law enforcement. ‘There’s no money init,’ he keeps telling me. What he really means is, he always wanted me to takeover the family business someday.”
Ann Marie shrugged and said, “Which I used to think would be finewith
