Lorie O - Strong, Sleek and Sinful

There was no vehicle in the garage. It was empty.

Too much time had passed to chase down the girl. Nonetheless, Perry drove around the neighborhood after returning to his Jeep, searching yards and looking for any sign of anyone. There wasn’t as much as a single soul walking along the sidewalks.

The clock on his dash told him it was almost one o’clock in the morning. He turned at the next intersection, realizing he headed toward Kylie’s home instead of his own. His cell phone rang and he jumped, grateful it hadn’t rung while he’d been alongside the garage. He’d forgotten to put it on vibrate.

“This is Flynn,” he said, his voice sounding scratchy when he answered the call from Dispatch. He was off duty and it was the middle of the night; there couldn’t be anything good coming from this phone call.

“Flynn, Lieutenant Goddard asked me to call you.” Cliff Miller, the dispatcher, spoke quickly and sounded out of breath, which he often did when he was upset. The guy never moved out of his chair at the station, but when an urgent matter came through the man would sound as if he’d just run a mile. “They found another teenager over on Antioch, near the mall.”

“Fucking hell,” Perry growled, understanding now why the Suburban wasn’t in the garage. Peter had been busy. “What is the exact location?”

Miller gave him the address. “Flynn, there is a situation, which is why Goddard wanted me to contact you personally.”

“What’s that?”

“He asked you to get there ASAP. He said it’s personal.”

Perry didn’t have a hard time finding the crime scene. After he turned onto Antioch, flashing lights from several police cars and an ambulance grabbed his attention. He pulled up and parked not too far from the crime scene tape and hopped out of his car. No one said anything when he climbed over the tape and walked over to Pete Goddard.

“What do we have here?” he asked Goddard, a decent cop who’d been on the force about as long as Perry had been.

Pete Goddard was fair complected, with strawberry blonde hair that was closely shaved to his head. He was tall and lanky and his uniform always looked as though it was half a size too big.

“It’s pretty ugly.” Goddard shifted his attention to a body, which lay crumpled up against the side of the building. “She had ID on her.”

“Oh, yeah?” Perry walked up to the girl, who didn’t look a day older than Dani, and stared at her half-nude and bloody body. “Who reported her?”

“Anonymous nine-one-one call.” Goddard moved in next to Perry, holding a clipboard and staring grimly at the dead girl. “We’ve cataloged all the personals found on her, which were basically a purse, a wallet with seventeen dollars on her, and makeup, along with a cell phone.”

“She wasn’t robbed.” Perry followed Goddard over to the back of Goddard’s squad car where Baggies were spread out in an open briefcase, already tagged and numbered and ready to be taken to the station. “What was her name?”

“Elaine Swanson.” Goddard sifted through the evidence Baggies and picked one of them out, then held it at eye level. “This letter indicates she went by ‘Lanie.’ ”

Perry glanced past the hood at the crumpled body, another teenager robbed of life before given the opportunity to really start living.

“And look at this-grades.” Goddard sounded disgusted, but it wasn’t from the report card he held up in another bag. Elaine, or Lanie, made all A’s and B’s. “She was a sophomore. My son is a junior, still a virgin, hasn’t been out on a real date yet. That girl was a child. To kill someone like her.”

His tone registered the anger radiating from him. Perry looked at Goddard, whose reddened complexion made his strawberry blonde crew cut stand out and look more white than light red. His light green eyes darkened as he met Perry’s gaze.

“This whole thing turns my stomach.”

“It’s fucking sick as hell,” Perry agreed.

After glancing at the case filled with evidence bags, Perry walked around the patrol car, leaving Goddard to talk to his partner. Perry noted Goddard didn’t have blue eyes, not that he would have guessed the cop was Peter. Goddard was a churchgoing man, with a good-sized family and a sweet little wife who adored him. Criminals came in all shapes and sizes, though. Perry knew from many years on the force that attending church every Sunday didn’t mean a man wasn’t capable of murder.

“You got an extra pair of gloves?” Perry asked the officer squatting next to the body.

She glanced at Perry and then straightened, interest or at the least acknowledgment that she liked what she saw registering on her pretty face. “Sure. I know you, don’t I?” she asked, standing and making a show of smoothing her uniform before walking over to the forensics kit sitting on the asphalt not too far away.

Perry noticed how she bent over, took her time pulling out a spare pair of latex gloves, and how she straightened. She had a nice ass, narrow waist, and mousy brown hair cut short in a pageboy. Although she wasn’t his type with her tomboy figure, small breasts, and petite frame, another time Perry would take time to talk to her. He wasn’t sure he’d seen her before, but she wasn’t ugly and Perry never discriminated against a lady just because she didn’t meet his definition of a perfect 10.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” he said, accepting the gloves and donning them, then turning back to the body.

“Gracie Pierre,” she offered, making a show of offering her hand to shake but then laughing and pulling back her gloved hand, which was soiled with blood.

Something about the fact that she could make jokes and be so carefree and flirtatious while the two of them squatted over a mutilated, murdered teenage girl’s body didn’t sit right with him.

“Nice to meet you, Gracie,” he said, but then turned his attention to the body. “Any speculation on the cause of death?”

“Oh,” she said, squatting next to him, her leg brushing against his as she leaned forward and lifted the girl’s arm, which had been over her face. “I just gather any evidence off the body. I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV.” Again laughing easily, obviously finding herself very amusing.

“Regardless of your role in this crime scene, you’ll learn what evidence to gather if you focus on the whole picture,” he snapped, wondering how long she’d been on the force. “The evidence you seek out would be different if someone was attacked by a dog than if they were brutalized and murdered.”

He didn’t bother checking out her reaction to his biting her head off. But the silence that grew between them told him she probably thought him a little less attractive than she had a few minutes before.

“I might just be a rookie,” she finally said, sounding more hurt than mad. “But I looked at the big picture well enough to suggest to Goddard he contact you after tagging the picture that was rolled up in her hand.”

Perry did look at Gracie then. She frowned at the dead teenager, her lips pressed into a thin line. He would guess Gracie was in her early twenties, younger than Kylie, and not as well built. It wasn’t just that her breasts were smaller; everything about her was smaller. Possibly that made her look younger. If anything, he thought, returning his glance to Lanie Swanson and reaching with his gloved hand and attempting to cover her exposed breasts with her torn and dirty shirt, Gracie didn’t look much older than their victim.

“What was rolled up in her hand?” Perry asked. “And which hand?”

“Why does it matter which hand?”

He didn’t take the question as sarcastic, even if that was how she meant it. “I don’t know if it matters or not. Was her other hand always here?” he asked, sticking his index finger into her curled fingers resting at her side.