“I feel the same way. Don’t try to take this once-in-a-lifetime mind-bender away from me. It’s mine. Hey, I’ve got something here for us to ponder.”
“Hit me with it.”
“I found blood in one of the holes, made me think that was our fresh Jane Doe’s grave. If I’m right, this necklace was probably hers.”
He held the baggie up to the light.
“A trinket,” he said. “A necklace. But no neck to hang it on.”
The necklace was made of glass beads on a waxed string with a cheap metal clasp, the kind of costume jewelry commonly found at street fairs. What made this one special was that Jane Doe had handled it. There was a slim chance we might be able to lift her fingerprints from the beads.
Maybe her killer had left DNA on them too.
Charlie Clapper was saying, “I found other doodads. This one,” he said, holding up a baggie. “It’s a pendant. Could be an amethyst set in a gold bezel. The rest of the artifacts have been moldering in the ground too long for me to say what they are or to get anything off them.
“But they are trophies, wouldn’t you say?”
A lightbulb went on in my mind. I was finally getting the picture.
“What if the he
ads are the trophies?” I said to Clapper. “I think this place is a trophy garden.”
Chapter 13
THAT NIGHT WE all met in Claire’s domain, the Medical Examiner’s Office, which is right behind the Hall of Justice.
All four of us — Claire, Cindy, Yuki, and me — sat around the large round table Claire used as a desk, ready for a four-way brainstorming meeting of what Cindy had dubbed the Women’s Murder Club.
Normally when we meet to talk about a case, we worry about Cindy reporting something she isn’t supposed to know. If you forget to say “Off the record,” your words could be tomorrow’s headline. But tonight I was more worried about Yuki.
Yuki is an assistant DA and I knew anything we said was off the record — but was it off the pillow?
Yuki was dating Jackson Brady.
Yuki was sleeping with my boss.
I said, “Don’t tell Lieutenant Wonderful, okay? He wouldn’t like this.”
“I hear you,” Yuki said, grinning at me. She patted my arm. She promised nothing.
Claire turned up the lights, passed out bottles of water, told us that the six skulls were in paper bags to prevent condensation and that the long-haired Jane Doe’s remains were in the cooler so that the soft tissue didn’t decompose further.
Claire said, “I’m going to give all seven heads a thorough exam in the morning, but I also hired a forensic anthropologist to consult. Dr. Ann Perlmutter from UC Santa Cruz. You’ve heard of her. She was a special consultant identifying bodies in mass graves in Afghanistan. If anyone can work up identifiable faces on bald skulls, Ann can.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
Claire shrugged. “Days or weeks. Meanwhile we’ll work with Jane Doe’s face. Photoshop her a little bit. Put her on our website.”
“I can create a Facebook page for her,” said Cindy.
“Not yet,” I said, trying to rein in Cindy’s racehorse tendencies. “Give us a chance to ID her in real life, keep her parents from finding out that she’s dead by seeing her page on the Web.”
I told Cindy and Yuki about the numbers 104 and 613, showed them a photocopy of the index cards we’d found with the first two heads. No numbers had been found with the other heads.
“So, two numbers only. Maybe it’s a game,” said Yuki.
“So you think the killer is into Sudoku?” I said.