“Howdy,” Elliot greeted her. “Interesting setting to kill someone, huh?”
“Yup,” Kay replied, wondering why the killer chose it. Did it carry a meaning to him or her? How was the unusual setting relevant? “Let’s take a look.”
Sitting on a large boulder to the side, a couple of tourists huddled together, the man’s arm wrapped around the woman’s shoulders. She was crying bitterly, trembling under a blanket borrowed from the coroner’s van.
“Morning, Detectives,” Deputy Hobbs greeted them. He was chubby and jovial, and he’d managed to break a sweat in the cool November breeze, most likely exerting himself on the slopes surrounding the crime scene, setting a perimeter, and searching for evidence. “I got some boots for you over there.” He pointed at one of the vehicles. “Dr. Whitmore said to bring you in as soon as you got here.”
Kay’s eyebrows instantly rose, lines crinkling on her forehead. “In?”
“Um, yeah, there’s a cave behind the falls,” Hobbs said, “but don’t worry, you won’t get wet.”
She wasn’t worried. She stared at the couple who sat on the boulder and wondered why the woman sobbed. Of course, finding a dead body on your vacation hike was disturbing, but those sobs seemed personal, as if her heart was breaking. Was the victim someone they knew?
“They found the vic?” she asked, gesturing toward the couple.
“Yeah,” Hobbs replied, surprisingly grinning. “Can you imagine? Dude came over here to propose. That’ll be an engagement they’ll never forget.” He leaned forward, going through several pairs of rubber boots until he chose one. “What are you, a seven?”
“Eight.” She sat on the edge of the SUV’s bumper and removed her shoes, then slid the ugly, smelly boots on and tucked her jeans inside the calves to keep them dry.
“Eleven,” Elliot said, taking her place as soon as she stood up.
“Doc’s in there?” she asked, pointing at the cave entrance.
“Yeah,” Hobbs replied. “He’s been in there a while.”
The closer they got to the falls, the louder they had to shout to make themselves heard, their voices muffled by the roar of the falling water. She entered the dark cave and stopped almost immediately, taking a moment to adjust her vision to the darkness slit open by powerful light beams coming from field LED lights installed on portable tripods.
Three of the beams converged on the body, still submerged under the cold, restless water. The ripples pushed in by the falls ebbed and flowed with her hair, undulating it rhythmically around her face, covering it almost entirely. The body shifted slightly, a ripple washing the hair off her face, and Kay gasped. It was as if the victim was still alive, staring at her with an unspoken question in her eyes. Shimmering water made her pupils seem as if they were moving, following Kay’s motions, while the gaping laceration across her throat contradicted that impression. Kay willed herself to look away from those haunting eyes, and turned to speak with the medical examiner.
Dr. Whitmore was hunched over the body, his hands immersed to the elbows, looking for something.
“Finally,” he said when he heard them approach. He stood and shook the water droplets off his gloved hands. “It’s not that warm in here, and these boots don’t do anything for the damn cold. It gets to my bones.” He shifted sideways to make room for them to draw closer. “Here,” he pointed at the girl’s body. “I wanted you to see how she was found, weighed down like that, with a large boulder. I’d say, about a hundred pounds heavy, that rock.” He beckoned the technicians waiting by the cave entrance, and the two men carefully removed the boulder and set it aside.
The girl’s body remained submerged, but started drifting away, carried toward the back of the cave by the movement of the water. Then the technicians brought a foldable stretcher and set it up, unzipping a body bag and laying it on top.
Dr. Whitmore grabbed the girl’s wrist and bent her arm, checking the flexibility of her elbow joint. “No rigor whatsoever,” he said. “Environmental conditions are a factor. We won’t be able to use that for time-of-death estimation.” He opened his kit and extracted a small device fitted with a long, sharp probe at the end of a blue tether. “Let’s see liver temp instead. Please put her on the stretcher,” he said to the two technicians.
They lifted the body carefully, and Dr. Whitmore had to step in to support the girl’s head. Her throat had been slashed open from side to side, a death that must’ve been almost instantaneous.
A locket hung around her neck, and the medical examiner carefully removed it and placed it inside an evidence pouch. Kay took it from him and scrutinized it through the clear plastic. The wooden locket was unusual, an elongated hexagon with rounded corners, and appeared to have been hand carved. The shape was imperfect, the red dye and lacquer of the finish uneven, like handcrafted jewelry found at county fairs and rural craft shows. The chain was also cheap, the type a child would wear, bought from a dollar store.
When she raised her gaze from the locket, she found Dr. Whitmore by her side, staring at the strange design. He took the pouch from her and studied it closely.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, turning the locket on both sides. “I know I have.” He chuckled lightly, then turned to Kay and Elliot. “I might be old and semiretired, but my mind still works. It was a missing person case from years ago. I don’t believe there are two of these lockets alike. This is handmade, unique.”
“A missing person?” Kay asked. “Do you remember her name? Or when she went missing?”
He almost scratched his scalp with his gloved hand, but stopped just in time, before his wet fingers touched his white hair. “Oh, it was at least ten years ago. Her age would be a match, I believe; this girl is sixteen, seventeen tops. The girl
