“This your first floater?” I said gently. He nodded.
“We don’t catch much worse than junkie ODs or bar fights, ma’am. I was going off shift and I heard the call.”
“Take a break,” I said. “I’m sure my detectives and the CSU team could use some coffee.”
“Okay,” he said, and got into his patrol car, backing away from the pier. It’s all about delegating at the crime scene—an officer who’s losing his shit is worse than worthless for actual police work. Plus, everyone needs coffee.
“Sawbones is here,” Batista said. “And I’ve called in.”
“Great,” I said absently. I was watching the second car behind the ME’s black city Lincoln. It was a pale green hybrid, the sort of thing that Will—and me, too, I freely admit—would have dismissed as a “chick car.” Sure enough, a chick was driving it, and she got out from behind the wheel in a swirl of Columbo-esque tan trenchcoat.
“Lieutenant Wilder?” she called. I sized her up as she came over. Brown hair, carrying about twenty over her ideal weight, flattering, flaw-minimizing pantsuit, makeup that was way too good for this time of night.
“Help you with something?” I said.
“I’m Detective Lane, with Special Victims,” she said. “You can call me Natalie, though.”
I cocked my eyebrow at her. “Right. Good to know. Was there something you wanted?”
“Oh, yes, actually. I got the call that there was a minor homicide.”
“I appreciate you coming down,” I said perfunctorily, “but we’ve got it under control.”
“If the victim is under eighteen that makes it SVU jurisdiction,” she said. “The rules are in place for a very specific reason, mostly to prevent cross-contamination of sensitive investigations…”
“Detective Lane.” I held up my hands. “I appreciate that your captain yelled at you and made you drive down here, but the dead girl is a were. That makes it an SCS case.”
“Actually,” she said, “it was Deputy Chief Beck. Your boss? He requested someone from Special Victims liaise this case to cover all of the bases.”
I shut my eyes for a second, praying for self-control. Beck never did a thing with the SCS unless he was haranguing me for something he figured I’d done the wrong way. He preferred to cozy up to the lieutenants and captains in Vice and Narcotics, who were men and didn’t turn fuzzy on the full moon.
I hated the guy, but if he’d set this perky soccer mom with a badge on me, there wasn’t much I could do except act bitchy and complain a lot.
“All right,” I snapped, since complaining never did anything for me. “If I’m stuck with you, hang back and don’t expect a warm, friendly group hug from the rest of my squad.”
LaneI got the feeling shesorry, Natalie—blinked. I got the feeling she was used to her sweet round face and perky demeanor making people nice and cooperative. “I … All right. You’re the ranking officer.”
“What do you know. You can recite protocol.” I was probably being nastier than I strictly had to be, but I resented Chief Beck sending some white-bread kiddie cop to babysit me. I was good at my job—two years on the street, five in Homicide and nearly a year heading up the SCS.
Ignoring for the moment the suspensions, write-ups and general chaos that had categorized my time as a detective, I went to meet Bart Kronen, the night-shift medical examiner.
“Only the good die young,” he greeted me. “I’ll wait for CSU to take a few scene photos and then we’ll get her out of the water.”
The techs showed up in short order and once they’d documented the scene, Kronen laid out a body bag and then got one of the patrol officers to lend him a rope from his prowler car.
“A bit of help, if you please,” he said to the scene at large. No one moved, so I came over.
“We will attempt to slip the rope around her torso to avoid unnecessary damage to the skin,” he said. We laid down on our stomachs, the girl’s face staring back at us. The rope looped around her skinny torso, and Kronen drew it tight. “Pull, Lieutenant Wilder. If you please.” We got to our feet and drew the girl up and out of the dark water. Even waterlogged as she was, she weighed barely enough to strain my arms.
I’m stronger than a human, but even Kronen only gave a slight wheeze as we lowered her into the body bag. He crouched, unzipping his portable kit. Lane crowded at my shoulder.
“Poor girl. She can’t be more than seventeen.” She bent down to examine the body and Kronen cleared his throat loudly. I reached out and pulled Lane back by the shoulder of her coat.
“Let the doc work. Save the Oprah moment for later.”
“Cause of death appears to be mutilation to the left upper chest,” Kronen said. “She most likely bled out, accounting for the lack of lividity in her skin.”
He took a pair of tweezers and plucked at the edges of the wound. The top layer of skin sloughed off, with a sound like wet paper bunching. Lane’s face lost color and she let out a small, choked sound. Kronen had the grace to pretend not to notice. “By the condition of her dermis, I would estimate that she’s been in the water at least twelve hours. Time of death will be difficult to fix because of the condition of the body.”
He probed the wound further, and his forehead furrowed. “Hmm. That’s odd.”
“What?” I said. Kronen finding things “odd” was never good. After twenty years as a Nocturne City ME, he was about as hard to rattle as an android.
“Her heart,” he said. “It appears to be missing.”
“You mean it’s hacked up?” Lane said. “That wound looks pretty severe. Maybe she got impaled on something.”
“No,” Kronen said.
