Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Bible was all business now. He didn’t speak. He just knelt down and gently pulled away the sheet.

Someone gasped. Andrea was so damn proud that it wasn’t her.

Still, her stomach tightened like a fist.

She had seen corpses at the Glynco morgue, but she’d been given ample time to prepare for the experience. The decedents had all donated their bodies to science, so it had felt like there was an understanding between you and the dead. Everything had been solemn and predictable. You were there to learn. They were there to give you that opportunity.

Now, Andrea felt the shock of sudden death wash over her.

As with Judith’s collages, at first she could only process the emotion, which bordered on overwhelming. Andrea forced herself to see the details. An empty prescription bottle on the ground. Dried pink foam around the mouth. Dirty blonde hair. Deathly pale skin. Blue fingertips curled into the palm of a red-stained hand. The woman had lain in the field for hours. Gravity had settled her blood into the parts of her body that touched the earth. The sheet had bunched up around her feet, but there was no mistaking her for sleeping. She was very clearly dead.

“Jesus,” someone whispered.

Andrea breathed through her mouth as the smell hit her. She reminded herself that she was a cop. She knew what to do.

Analyze, understand, report.

The nude woman was lying on her side.

That was wrong.

The victim was not a woman. She looked like a girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. The sharp angle of her left hip jutted into the air. Her pubis was shaved bare. The dark aureoles of her breasts were almost blackened by the early stages of decay. A yellow dress was folded up like a pillow under her head. One arm was reaching out. The other was wrapped around her tiny waist.

The most startling part was the state of her emaciated body. Andrea had taken an anatomy class for figurative drawing during her first year of art school. She was reminded of the diagrams that illustrated a three-dimensional view into the body. The girl’s bones were visible beneath her skin. Her joints were like doorknobs. An outline of her teeth showed in her sunken cheek. Her hair was filthy. There was a bruise underneath her right eye. Her lips were light blue. Starbursts of broken blood vessels spotted waxy, paper-thin skin. Pink scars crisscrossed her wrists.

She had tried this before.

“Oliver.” Bible’s tone was sharp. “Get some pictures.”

Andrea knelt beside the girl. She took her iPhone out of her pocket. Her thumb moved to select the camera. She used the tips of her fingers to pull the sheet away from the girl’s feet.

The fact that her feet were bare was not the most shocking discovery.

There was a metal band around her left ankle, the circumference so tight that the skin had rubbed away from the ankle bone. Three gemstones were at the center—an aquamarine flanked by two blue sapphires. The bracelet was almost like a piece of jewelry but for the smoldering line where it had been permanently welded around her ankle.

Andrea saw an inscription etched into the silver band.

Bible saw it, too. He asked, “Who is Alice Poulsen?”