see the girl. At that, the pilot nodded and left us alone.
By then a couple of agents had draped a blue tarp over a tree limb above her. They didn’t look happy.
I stepped around them and looked at her.
She was nineteen or twenty. Caucasian. Blonde hair. She lay propped up with her back against a tree, posed, her hands still bound tightly behind her, probably with the same type of rope that was embedded into her neck. She still had her blue jeans and T-shirt on, which was consistent-there hadn’t been a sexual angle to any of the previous murders. I was thankful for that much at least. The cotton of her gray T-shirt was stained dark from the stab wounds in her torso.
The killer had tied a length of yellow ribbon in her neatly brushed hair. She was barefoot, just like all the victims had been, and had a toe ring on the third toe of her left foot. Some soil clung to the indentations on the ring. Mud.
I inspected her ankles, gently pulling back the hem of her jeans. No ligature marks or bruises. Her feet hadn’t been bound.
“Has she been moved?” I asked Ralph.
“No,” he said.
So, this was how the killer had positioned her.
I gently tipped the body to the side. Touching her like this, moving her, felt like some kind of violation. I heard a voice in my head asking her to forgive me, to accept my touch as long as it would help me find the person who’d done this to her.
There was no dirt or debris on her back like there would have been if she’d been raped out here or dragged along the trail. I looked around. If he didn’t drag her, did he carry her? All the way up here? Was this the primary crime scene after all? Did he meet her here, maybe?
Somewhere behind me the chopper roared to life, but its sound was quickly drowned out by the howling wind of the coming storm.
Daylight was dying around us. I pulled my Mini Maglite flashlight out of the sheath on my belt, flipped it on, and studied the girl’s face. Her ocean-blue eyes were open, staring forward. Forever staring forward. No longer bright and alive, now cloudy and opaque. I leaned over and looked deeply into her sightless eyes. The eyes that had seen the man who killed her. Had watched him. There was an old wives’ tale that the eyes of the dying record, like a photograph, the face of the killer. But there was no face captured on her eyes.
“She has contacts,” I said, still staring at her.
I heard Sheriff Wallace shuffle in close behind me. “Huh?”
“Contacts. This girl wears contact lenses.”
“So?”
“The information Ralph sent me didn’t mention contact lenses.”
Agent Hawkins glared at the crime scene technicians. “I guess we didn’t notice.”
“Does it matter?” asked Wallace.
“Everything matters,” I said. The wind flipped a wisp of the young woman’s hair across her face. I pushed it back. “I worked one case where the killer put contacts into a girl’s eyes after he killed her. He left fingerprints on the lenses. Everything matters.”
I carefully removed her contact lenses and put them into an evidence bag. Then I examined her neck and cheeks and sighed softly. “He tortured her.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words aloud until Agent Jiang leaned over beside me. I caught the scent of her shampoo. Vanilla.
“How can you tell?”
I pointed. “See those tiny dots? Around her eyes there?”
“Those purplish reddish ones?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Some kind of hemorrhaging?”
“Petechial hemorrhaging-caused from asphyxiation. Usually, even in strangulation, the dots are small- sometimes only the size of a speck of dust, and only appear around the eyes or eyelids. She has them all across her face, even down here around her neck and shoulders. See?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” said someone behind me, “he didn’t just strangle her, he choked her into unconsciousness and then revived her again. Over and over. It must have gone on for a while.”
I glanced over my shoulder.
A strikingly handsome man in his late twenties knelt beside me. “Special Agent Brent Tucker,” he said. “Forensics.” Dark hair, neat, trim. He looked serious about his work and moved with the confidence of someone who’s used to getting things right the first time.
“Yeah,” I said to Agent Jiang. “That’s what it means.”
“You’re Dr. Bowers, aren’t you?” Agent Tucker asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s an honor to meet you.”
“You too.”
A chess piece lay in the palm of the girl’s right hand. A black pawn.
“What do you estimate for her time of death?” I asked Tucker.
He glanced at his notepad. “Hmm… They took her temp sixty minutes ago… she’s clothed”-he was thinking aloud-“it’s cool and windy on this mountain, and she wasn’t in direct sunlight… I’d say sometime this morning. Maybe between eight and ten.”
I nodded.
Sheriff Dante Wallace shook his head. “I can’t believe our guy carried her to the top of this mountain. How do you know he didn’t do her up here?”
Ralph deferred to me, and I pointed to the girl. “There’s no sign of a struggle,” I said. “The ground isn’t disturbed. And look at her hair. It’s clean and neatly combed. No leaves. No dirt. She was probably killed indoors.” Probably, I thought. But this guy might be toying with us. I’m not sure about anything yet.
I turned to Ralph. “You said some hikers found her?”
“A couple locals, yeah,” he said, “just before I called you. We took them in for questioning. So far they look pretty clean.”
“Do we know her name yet?”
Ralph shook his head. “No ID. But there was a girl from Black Mountain reported missing yesterday named Mindy Travelca. We think it might be her. We’re checking.”
“He wanted her found,” I said.
“Then why did he bring her all the way out here?” Agent Tucker asked.
That’s what I’m here to find out, I thought. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. I just knelt there and stared at the unblinking eyes of a girl who should have been making out with her boyfriend or studying for her college exams or eating a pizza with her roommate or chatting with her friends online instead of lying dead on top of this mountain.
Someone’s daughter. Someone lost his daughter today.
Just like me, I thought, even though Tessa was alive and well and wasn’t exactly my daughter at all. Someone just like me.
I reached down and gently closed the eyes of the girl who might have been named Mindy just as the first raindrops began to fall, like tears from the eyes of God, splattering on the tarp above me.
4
The Illusionist watched as they carefully wrapped and removed the body, as the rain began, as the storm arrived. Everything was going according to plan. Everything!
It would take them at least half an hour to carry the body down the trail to the ambulance. He wished he could stay to watch the show, he really did, but with the storm rolling in and so much work to do, he would have to
