girls on the streets.
“You need to see it for yourself. Don’t think we’re going to get much here-too many guests, too little cleaning-but I have my best cops canvassing. Called in the night manager, because the day manager swears he never saw the girl.”
“You believe him?”
Genie shrugged. “Eh. We’ll see. Don’t know that anyone here is going to tell the truth, they don’t like cops, don’t want to get involved, don’t want to squeal.” She glanced out the door at the crowd, bitterness sharpening her crisp tone. “Don’t matter the crime, they clam up.”
Genie handed them sterile gloves from a box on the dresser. Lucy put hers on, the routine familiar and calming. She looked around more carefully now, focusing on what Noah had probably already taken in while she quietly panicked in the doorway, which had nothing to do with the crime scene itself.
The blood-soaked mattress had been grimy even before the murder. “She died here?” Noah asked.
“Found on the floor.” Genie indicated a numbered card on the floor next to the bed. “Partly wrapped in a sheet.”
Lucy said, “With this much blood, she bled out on the bed.”
“Like I said, he cut her so deep he nearly decapitated her.”
Genie gestured to the blood spatter on the wall behind the bed, the castoff to the left. “The killer was left- handed, our CSU said. From the trajectory, we deduced they were both standing. He probably killed her, dropped her to the bed, she bled out. The manager who came in and found her swears she was on the floor when he got here and that he didn’t touch anything, but who the fuck knows?”
Without comment, she pulled out her coin purse and moved another quarter.
“Why?” Lucy asked rhetorically. She surveyed the room. There were no suitcases or anything personal. “Was there luggage? Toiletries?”
“No suitcase, no purse. Several travel-sized bottles of shampoo, lotion, soap, toothpaste, things like that were in the bathroom. We bagged and tagged them. But no clothing. Just the T-shirt she wore and sandals next to the bed.”
“That’s odd,” Noah said. “She didn’t walk in here wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.”
“I’ve seen stranger things,” Genie said.
“The killer may have walked off with her belongings.” Noah made a note. “But why? Did she have something valuable? Why take her clothes?”
“I’ve been a cop for twenty-nine years and all I can say is that most killers are stupid,” Genie said. “Who knows why they do what they do?”
The motive of the killer and victimology were equally important psychological clues to solve crimes. “If it were rage, I’d expect to see more brutality,” Lucy said. “Multiple stab wounds. Blood everywhere. Evidence of struggle. This scene looks too…” she scrambled for the right word.
“Efficient,” Noah said.
“Exactly.”
“When the victim was arrested last year, did she have a pimp?” Noah asked. “Do you have the file on her?”
“Never admitted to having a pimp, but she was probably lying. She wasn’t a regular-said she came from Jersey. Cops there have nothing on her, either. Probably lied about that, too.”
“Do you have a current address?”
“I’ll shoot the file over to you as soon as we’re done here, if you want the case.”
“You
“Well, not hand it over lock, stock, and barrel, but I’ll give you lead if you keep me on board. I have twenty- three active cases I’m working right now, and Lord knows how many inactive files. While I don’t like you feds swooping in and taking over whenever you want, I know when I can use help.”
“We have a heavy workload, too,” Noah said. “I don’t know what you think we can do that your more-than- capable department can’t accomplish.”
“Maybe,” Genie said. Lucy watched Genie’s eyes drift from Noah to the bloody bed. She could practically hear Genie’s thought process.
Lucy couldn’t bear the thought of Nicole Bellows’s murder going to the bottom of anyone’s workload. A black hooker in a bad area wasn’t going to get much attention. Genie was a good cop, but if she didn’t get any leads in the next seventy-two hours, the case would be cold, replaced by three others.
“But we
Noah jerked his head toward her, eyes wide, surprised and angry in a way she had never seen him. She realized she’d contradicted him, and she wanted to apologize, but couldn’t bring herself to back down. If she didn’t fight to prioritize Nicole Bellows’s death, who would?
“Genie said the killer left a message, shouldn’t we look at it before we just cut loose?” Lucy said, almost tripping over her words to get them out. “This isn’t a simple robbery. What if it matches with a cold case? What if the killer is targeting other prostitutes? How many of these young women have to die before people pay attention? Wendy James has the media all over the place, but a black prostitute in the slums isn’t going to get an inch of column space, let alone featured on the five o’clock news.”
She’d overstepped big-time. Noah’s fists tightened just once, but for a man who rarely showed his temper, she noticed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I don’t know where that came from.”
But she did know exactly where her outrage came from: fear. Fear that victims like Nicole Bellows would be forgotten. Panic that more victims would follow and no one would care. That if they couldn’t solve this murder and put the killer in prison, Nicole Bellows would haunt her. Worse, that she couldn’t stop the violence.
Noah didn’t say anything to Lucy. He turned to Genie. “Where’s the message?”
Genie’s expression showed her curiosity over the exchange, but she simply replied, “The bathroom. You can’t miss it.”
Noah walked into the small bathroom first. There wasn’t room for both of them, so Lucy waited. When he came out, he said, “I’ll call my boss.”
He walked out of the motel room without looking at Lucy.
Lucy stepped inside. The stained and bloody pedestal sink had no counter. Inside the cracked basin lay a good-sized rat, dead and gutted. The poor creature’s internal organs had been pulled half out of its body, a bloody mess Lucy could barely identify.
The butchered rat was bad enough. But a message had been written in blood on the aged, cracked mirror.
Six blind mice
See how they run
Then Lucy noticed the rat’s tail had been cut off.
CHAPTER NINE
Lucy ignored the people hanging around outside the motel, though their numbers seemed to have increased during the fifteen minutes they’d inspected room 119.
Noah had stepped away to talk to Slater, and Lucy hoped he wasn’t irrevocably angry.
Noah had always been supportive of her career, had stood up for her even when her ideas went against protocol. He cared about victims, but didn’t wear his compassion on his sleeve like she did.
Were there six victims? Was Nicole the first? The last? Would there be more to come?
