Her Shallow Grave (Detectives Kane and Alton)

“Not at the moment.” Kane lowered his voice. “We’re close friends is all.”

Ty wrote, “He wouldn’t care what Jenna thinks if he didn’t like her.” in Jo’s notebook and grinned. Dave and Jenna lived separate lives. Go figure?

Jo shot him an exasperated look and lifted one shoulder. “I see.” She flipped the page on her notebook. “The problem I see, Dave, is that Kim is directing her frustration toward Jenna. She sees her as an obstacle to the relationship she wants with you. Of course, it’s all in her mind. She believes she has a claim on you.”

“Okay, but apart from the messages, I don’t have enough to charge her with stalking.” Kane sounded tired. “The fact I had a drink with her in the middle of the night will be damning.”

Ty rolled his eyes upward. He just knew where this was leading. “Don’t tell me, you walked her back to her room and somebody saw you?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t thinking, her room was on the way to mine and I just wanted to go get some sleep.”

“Uh-huh, if you got a judge to sign the harassment warrant, the DA wouldn’t take it to court.” Ty removed his Stetson and studied it before pushing it back on his head. “He’d say she’s a spurned lover. Problem is, the defense will have the CCTV footage of you going back to her room in the early hours of the morning. Since then, she has an excuse to pursue you. She now can say you’ve shown interest in her.”

“Yeah, I understand the implications and this is why I called, Jo.” Kane’s voice had become concerned. “I need to know more about the personality I’m dealing with and how to get myself out of this mess.”

“What you’ve done so far is good.” Jo blew on her hot coffee and then took a sip. “The problem is recognizing any psychotic behavior before it gets out of hand. Not all people with obsessive behavior escalate into stalkers but some can cause major problems. It seems Kim is aware of your closeness to Jenna, so she’s a potential threat.” She sipped again. “Maybe suggest Kim does something in her spare time to keep her occupied and away from you. She may not have any interests outside her work at the hospital.”

Ty exchanged a meaningful glance with Jo and nodded. Right this moment, Kane was walking on a knife’s edge. He stared at the phone. “Well, I guess you could ask her to dinner and act like a complete ass. It might put her off.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Kane’s voice was like ice.

Jo’s eyes flashed with anger as she looked at Ty and then depressed the mute button on the phone. “Have you lost your mind?”

Ty shrugged. “It might have worked.”

Jo released the mute button and her lips flattened. “Dave, just keep deflecting her advances and try my other suggestions.”

“Okay, I’ll try that angle.” Kane blew out a breath. “I’m concerned she might go after Jenna.”

Ty had seen stalkers turn to murder in the blink of an eye. “Yeah, it’s possible but if she makes any threats toward you or Jenna, you’ll get her on stalking. You’ll have to watch Jenna’s back.”

“I always do.”

Twenty-One

Black Rock Falls

Friday

It was just after nine by the time Wolfe had finished explaining the procedure for autopsying victims who’d been subject to freezing to his daughter Emily and Colt Webber, both interns studying forensic science at the local college. “The need for a complete sterile environment to avoid cross contamination is crucial during the thawing process. This is why I’ll be restricting Jenna and Kane to the viewing area.”

He glanced up as Jenna led Kane into the glass-partitioned section of the room. He pressed his mic button. “Morning. I’ll be starting soon. I’ll pause at the end of each section for questions.”

“Okay.” Jenna’s voice sounded scratchy through the intercom.

Wolfe uncovered the torso of the woman with the severed limbs set out around her. The ghostly bluish-white skin and open staring eyes looked ghoulish even to him. He did a cursory examination. “We have a Caucasian female, approximately twenty years old, well-nourished, five-five, dark hair, blue eyes. I’ve documented tattoos of various designs on arms, small of back, and face. The fingernails are dirty and broken. I’m running a soil comparison analysis on the samples from under her fingernails to discover where she was at the time of death. I can tell the samples from under the nails contain a decaying vegetation mixture usually found in wooded areas but it will take more investigation to determine if it is Scobey soil, which is found in Stanton Forest.” He glanced up at Jenna’s tap on the glass.

“Any sign of sexual assault?” Jenna frowned. “Cause of death?”

Wolfe examined the body and took swabs. He handed the swabs to Emily, who made the slides and stood to one side while he peered into the microscope. He walked back to the gurney. “No sign of sexual assault, no semen in the vaginal cavity. We have no clothing to test for trace evidence and the killer packed her in snow. All the external swabs I’ve taken during the thawing have yielded no foreign human DNA.” He moved to the head of the torso. “There is an exit wound below the clavicle consistent with a gunshot wound. The entry wound is in the back at C5. If she was running away, I estimate the shooter is at least five-ten, as the bullet trajectory is in a downward motion, although the damage to the nails could indicate she fell or was crawling through a forest at the time of death. I will complete a full autopsy to confirm, but this injury has likely severed the spinal cord resulting in immediate paralysis. If this assumption is accurate, she couldn’t have crawled away after receiving the injury. The cause of death in this case would be asphyxiation from the paralysis caused by a gunshot wound.” He glanced back up at Jenna.

“Does the pathology on the victim’s torso indicate she could have been frozen and thawed like the limbs we found?” Jenna’s gaze sharpened. “I’m wondering if he kept the limbs and torsos together?”

Wolfe turned to his interns. “Colt, tell Jenna what we discovered.”

“We evaluated the samples by microscope and an electronic image analyzer. In both victims we found extended extracellular spaces and shrunken cells resulting from the freeze-thaw cycle. In the body parts without the torso, the findings were more pronounced, which would indicate the second victim was frozen for a longer period.”

“Something else significant.” Emily looked up at Jenna. “The flesh on both victims has burns consistent with the use of dry ice.”