Karen Rose: Silent Scream

David knew. “She’s dead?”

Scotty nodded. “Yeah.”

Jeff’s hand clasped his shoulder. “Sorry, buddy.”

“Me too.” David remembered the handprints on the window. “Check her hands.”

Scotty knelt next to the gurney holding the body of a girl David could now see was no more than a teenager wearing ratty jeans and a thin T-shirt. What a waste.

Scotty was frowning at the girl’s hands. “They’re covered in some kind of gel.”

David’s captain and two uniformed cops joined them, the three of them bending over the gurney to see her hands.

“What is this shit on her hands?” one of the cops asked.

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it reflects light. I saw her handprints on the window,” David told him. “My light hit the glass and the prints shone. Fire investigator’s going to want to sample it. If she set this fire, she got stuck up there and panicked. There were lots of fist-sized prints, like she pounded, trying to get out.”

“If she didn’t do this fire, it’s murder,” the other cop said. “I’ll make the call.”

“Tell them it’s a double,” a female voice said behind them. Carrie Jackson stood behind them. Her engine team had been spraying the west side of the structure, next to the lake. “I was laying line and nearly tripped over the guard. He was shot in the chest.”

Scotty stood up. “I’ll go check him out.”

Carrie shrugged. “Go ahead. But he’s definitely dead. Has been for a while.”

“I believe you,” Scotty said. “But it’s regs. Show me where he is.” Together, Scotty and Carrie set off around the building with the first cop.

The second cop straightened with a sigh. “I’ll get Homicide, the ME, and CSU out here. They’ll want to talk to all of you. Especially Hunter, since he brought her out.”

Homicide. David’s throat closed as the word left the cop’s mouth and for a moment another thought scrambled to the top of his mind. There were lots of detectives in Homicide. Odds were it wouldn’t be her. And if it was? I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. He cleared his throat harshly and nodded. “Of course. Whatever they need.”

“As soon as we’re done,” Captain Casey added. “We’ve got to get the second floor under control. Hunter, you and Zell go back in. Search the upper floors. Find out if anyone else was where they shouldn’t have been, and make sure we got no fire in the walls.”

“Will do,” Jeff said.

David pushed homicide detectives from his mind and took a last look at the girl on the gurney. What the hell was she doing in there? Why wasn’t someone taking care of you? But he knew all too well that life wasn’t nearly that idyllic. “I’ll check where I found her, see if I can find some ID. She’s just a kid. She’s got to belong to somebody.”

“Don’t touch anything,” the cop said and David fought the urge to roll his eyes. Cops treated them like damn kindergartners sometimes. “Got it?”

“Don’t worry. I got it.”

Monday, September 20, 1:15 a.m.

Homicide detective Olivia Sutherland flashed her badge at the uniform guarding the condo’s construction entrance and drove through the gate, past the news vans and cameramen, acutely aware of all the flashing bulbs at her back. By the questions the press were shouting, they’d already correctly concluded it was arson.

Her churning gut tightened further. Just by being here she’d stirred up their recent collective memory. Amid their shouted arson questions were targeted references to her last big case. It was inevitable, she knew. Didn’t mean she had to like it.

“How’ve you been, Detective?” A reporter she knew and at one time hadn’t despised ran along side her car until the uniform stopped him cold. “Are you over the Body Pit yet?” the reporter shouted at her back. “Still seeing the department shrink?”

Olivia gritted her teeth. She’d been to the shrink three department-mandated times and this guy made it sound like she had a standing appointment with a couch.

With a cold glare Olivia raised her window, not slowing down until she reached the bank of parked official vehicles and rolled to a stop next to her partner’s Ford. A piece of her settled. Kane was here. He’ll know what to do.

The thought startled her. “And so do I,” she said aloud. Firmly. “Get a grip.” But she was afraid she couldn’t. Because her breathing was changing, hitching up in her lungs and her heart was racing. Because the three department-mandated visits to the shrink hadn’t helped. She still wasn’t over the body pit, the mass burial pit they’d discovered in the basement of a serial killer seven months before.

In four years on the homicide squad she’d seen a lot of bodies, but nothing could compare to the serial killer they’d chased last February. Dubbed the “Red Dress Killer” by the press for the way he’d dressed his final victims, he’d been quietly murdering for thirty years and burying his victims in a lime pit in his basement. It wasn’t until he’d stepped up his pace that he’d made mistakes and they’d caught him, discovering his grisly secret.

And it had fallen to Olivia and her partner, Kane, to process the dead. There had been blocks of days when she hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t done anything but process the dead, inform their families, and return to the pit for more. Lime was not kind to human flesh. She didn’t need nightmares. The reality was plenty bad enough.

The press could call him what they wished. In her mind he was “Pit-Guy,” because it was the pit that ruled her dreams-dark, bottomless, and filled with the dead.

She kneaded her steering wheel, taking deep breaths, trying to will the panic away. Because seven months and dozens of bodies later, she froze every time she knew a new victim waited. A wee bit of a problem for a homicide detective, she thought bitterly.

“Get out of the car,” she muttered. “Do your job.” Clenching her jaw, she pushed her door open and forced her feet to move, her lungs to take one more breath. Then forced her face to look like she didn’t harbor a thought that didn’t have to do with this scene. This night. These two victims. A middle-aged guard and a teenaged girl.

Think about them. Think about justice for them. Do your damn job.

She drew another breath, grimacing at the stench of smoke. It had been a bad fire. Two companies had responded to the scene-two pumpers, an aerial tower truck, and the two rescue squads they wouldn’t be needing after all.

Only the morgue rig would be transporting tonight.

As her feet moved, she found herself searching the fire trucks for station numbers, another habit she’d picked up in the last seven months, one she found nearly as distasteful as her new fear of dead bodies. That she even knew which truck was his was completely humiliating. Like she should care if he was here or not. But of course she did. How pathetic am I? Pretty damn.

She winced when she saw the L2I painted on the side of the tower truck with its aerial platform. He was here. Or his firehouse was, at least. Don’t let him be on duty tonight. Just find Kane. Do your job.

She easily found Kane in the crowd. Her partner was a big man, even compared to the firefighters and cops, standing head and shoulders above everyone else. He was also the only one in the crowd wearing a black fedora. It was his fire fedora, she knew, the one he always wore when he knew he’d be going to an arson. It smelled like stale smoke, and his wife Jennie made him keep it in their garage.

All of his other fedoras were kept with care on Styrofoam heads in their guest room. Every man in the homicide division wore fedoras on the job, a nice tradition someone had started long before her time. It was a symbol, a connection to detectives past, and now it was part of local lore. Homicide was known around town as the “Hat Squad.”