The 5th Horseman (Women's Murder Club 5)

If you can’t expand your chest, you can’t breathe.

And the victim’s body shows little or no sign of trauma.

I buckled up as Claire backed the car out and headed to Susie’s.

“It was a horror show for this girl, Lindsay,” Claire told me. “What I’m thinking is, while one perp sat on her chest, another freak slipped a plastic bag over her head and smothered her. Rolled up the edge of the bag good and tight. That’s where the ligature mark came from. Maybe he pressed his hand to her nose and mouth at the same time.”

“She had two killers?”

“If you ask me, Lindsay, that’s the only way it could have been done.”

Chapter 13

SAN FRANCISCO’S BUSINESS DISTRICT slipped by as Claire piloted the Pathfinder through evening rush-hour traffic. We were silent for a few minutes, the eeriness of that young woman’s death filling the space around us.

Images shifted in my mind as I tried to put it together one grisly piece at a time.

“Two killers,” I finally said to Claire. “Working as a team. Posing the victim inside a car after the fact. What’s the point of that? What’s the message?”

“It’s cold, for one thing,” Claire said.

“And sick, for another. The rape kit?”

“Is at the lab,” said Claire, “along with that pricey outfit Caddy Girl was wearing. By the way, the lab found a semen stain on the hem of her skirt.”

“Was she raped?”

“I didn’t see the kind of vaginal tearing or bruising you’d expect from a rape,” Claire mused. “We’ll have to wait to decide about that.”

Claire braked the car at the Muni rail crossing, and together we watched the train rattle by. Night was closing in over the city of San Francisco, and the commuters were all going home.

Questions were still flooding my little mind. Lots of them. About who Caddy Girl was. Who had killed her. How she and her killers might have crossed paths.

Had the killing been personal?

Or was Caddy Girl a victim of opportunity?

If it was the latter, we could be looking for a ritualistic killer, someone who liked to kill and was equally excited by patterns.

Someone who might like to do it again.

Claire made a left across a break in the oncoming traffic. A moment later, she executed a careful parallel-park maneuver between two cars on Bryant, right outside Susie’s.

She turned off the engine, turned to face me. “There’s more,” she said.

“Don’t make me beg, Butterfly.”

Claire laughed at me, meaning it took even longer for her to get it together and tell me what I was dying to know.

“The shoes,” she said. “They’re a size eight.”

“Couldn’t be. That little girl?”

“Could be and are. But you’re right that it’s crazy, Linds. Caddy Girl probably wore a size five. Those shoes weren’t hers. And the soles have never touched pavement.”

“Huh,” I said. “If they’re not her shoes, maybe those aren’t her clothes, either.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, Lindsay. I don’t know what it means, but those clothes are brand-new. No sweat stains, no body soil of any kind. Somebody carefully, I want to say artfully, dressed that poor girl after she was dead.”