Джеймс Чейз - The Way the Cookie Crumbles

‘Any girls missing within the past six weeks?’ Terrell asked.

‘Not in our district.’

‘We’ll wait to hear what doc has to say, then you get back to headquarters. We want a description of her in the papers tomorrow and on the radio and TV tonight. You handle that, Joe.’

‘Okay.’ Beigler watched the breeze send swirls of sand moving along the beach. ‘This shifting sand isn’t going to help. We can’t hope to find any prints. He must have brought her out by car and he must have come prepared. The sand there is too hard for him to have dug the grave with his hands. He must have had a spade with him.’

Terrell nodded.

‘Yes, and he didn’t want her identified. A run-of-the- mill rapist doesn’t take the woman’s clothes away. He must have known if she is identified, she could be hooked to him and that means they must have known each other.’

An ambulance appeared up the dirt road and parked by the police cars. Two interns came hurrying across the sand with a stretcher. Hess who had been using the short wave radio joined Terrell and Beigler.

‘The boys are on their way now,’ he said and then went on to speak to the three Homicide detectives who were on hands and knees carefully sifting the loose sand of the grave.

The two interns waited until Dr. Lowis had completed his hurried examination of the body, then at a nod from him, they opened the stretcher, scooped the body onto it, covered it with a canvas sheet and hurried away with it to the ambulance.

Terrell and Beigler moved over to Dr. Lowis who was shutting his bag.

‘Well, doc?’

‘Murder, strangulation with some violence,’ Lowis said briskly. ‘She’s been dead about six weeks. Putrefaction is well advanced. She put up a struggle. What’s left of her face has extensive bruising. I can give you more details when I get her to the morgue.’

‘Was she raped?’ Terrell asked.

‘No.’

Terrell and Beigler exchanged glances, then Terrell shrugged. They now had to find a motive for the murder.

‘What age would she have been, Doc?’

‘Between seventeen and nineteen.’

‘Any identifying marks?’

‘No.’

‘Is she a natural blonde?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Okay. Let’s have your report soonest. She wasn’t pregnant, was she?’ Terrell was still hoping to get at the motive.

‘She was a virgin.’ Nodding, Dr. Lowis set off across the beach towards his car.

‘Okay, Joe, you get off,’ Terrell said. ‘Check with Miami for any missing girl of her age. If they don’t come up with anything, we’ll have to throw the net further. Get the press on the job and alert the radio and TV people. I want lots of publicity on this one. It’s our best chance of identifying her.’

Beigler went off and Terrell joined Hess.

‘Anything, Fred?’

‘She wasn’t murdered here,’ Hess said, looking up. He was squatting on the sand, examining the grave. ‘She must have bled from the nose and mouth, but there’s no trace of blood. As soon as the boys arrive, I’ll get them to search those hummocks.’ He pointed. ‘Could be he did it there.’

‘We won’t be able to do much more tonight,’ Terrell said, looking up at the darkening sky. ‘Another hour and there won’t be light enough to see in there. Well, I’ll leave it to you. I’ll get back to headquarters.’

Four hours later, Terrell still at his desk called his wife, Caroline.

‘I’m going to be late, honey,’ he said. ‘Another couple of hours at least.’ He briefly told her about finding the body. ‘This one’s going to be tricky.’

‘All right, Frank,’ Caroline said. ‘I’ll keep something for you in the oven. Do you know who the girl is?’

‘That’s the trouble. We’ve got no lead on her at all.’ As he was speaking Beigler came in. Terrell raised his eyebrows at him. Beigler shook his head. ‘Well, I’ve got to get on. See you sometime, honey,’ and he hung up.

‘Nothing?’ he said to Beigler.

‘Not yet. Miami and Jacksonville have no missing girl. They’re checking the villages. Got doc’s report yet?’

‘Yes. It’s here.’ Terrell waved to a number of typewritten sheets on his desk. ‘Nothing much to help us. She was strangled violently. The cartilages of the larynx and the hyoid bone were fractured. Her nose was broken. Whoever hit her had a heavy punch. She has no operation scars, no birth marks. She came from a good type of family. Her nails and her hair were well looked after.’

‘How about her teeth?’

‘No luck there. She had a perfect set of teeth. No dental work in her mouth at all.’

Beigler poured himself a cup of coffee from the carton on the desk.

‘Any news of Fred?’ Terrell asked, also helping himself to coffee.

‘He’s still out there. He persuaded the fire brigade to join him with arc lamps.’ Beigler grinned. ‘You know what Fred is like. Once he gets stuck into a killing, he’ll go on until he turns up something.’

‘Yeah.’ Terrell pulled Lowis’ report towards him and began to study it again.

Beigler finished his coffee, lit a cigarette and then pushed himself away from the wall he was leaning against.

‘I guess I’ll get back to my desk,’ he said.

‘There’s one thing.’ Terrell looked up from the report. ‘Not that it helps much. She was killed less than an hour after having had breakfast. So it was a daylight killing.’

Beigler grunted.

‘What was she doing out there so early?’

‘She could have been a late riser and had breakfast late.’

‘Yeah.’ Beigler shrugged. ‘I’ll be around, Chief,’ and he went out of the room.

Terrell relaxed in his chair, his mind busy. As ideas came to him, he jotted them down on a scratch pad. After a while he pushed the pad away, got up and wandered into the Detectives’ room.

Beigler was reading a report. Lepski was pounding a typewriter. Jacoby was talking on the telephone. The hands of the wall clock pointed to 21.05 hours. The three men looked up at Terrell.

‘I’m going home,’ he said to Beigler, ‘but I’ll be back in a couple of hours, then you can get off. There’s not much more we can do tonight. We might get a break from the TV or the papers tomorrow morning. Someone might have seen her, but six weeks is a long time.’ As he turned to the door, it opened and Hess, his fat face shining with sweat, his eyes gleaming, came in.

‘I’ve found where she was knocked off, Chief,’ he said. ‘And I’ve found something else.’ He put on Beigler’s desk a pair of pale blue plastic framed spectacles. The right lens was missing and the left ear piece was broken off short.

‘This was under a shrub about three feet from where she died.’

Beigler got to his feet and peered at the spectacles.

Lepski joined him.

‘Let’s have it, Fred,’ Terrell said, sitting on the side of the desk and picking up the spectacles.

‘We went into the hummocks,’ Hess said. ‘With the lights to help out it wasn’t too bad. After a while we came on a narrow footpath that leads to the dirt road from highway 4A. At the end of the path we found the grass flattened and the sand churned up as if there had been a struggle. There was blood on the sand and on the leaves of a shrub. Not far from the shrub is a dense thicket and behind it we found heel impressions of a man’s shoe. Jack’s bringing the plaster casts as soon as they’ve set. Looks like the killer was hiding in the thicket waiting for her and jumped out on her. His first punch probably knocked her glasses off.’

Terrell squinted through the lens.

‘Quite a lot of magnification here. Lepski, take this down to the lab boys right away. With any luck this could be an out-of-the-way lens. Get all you can on the frames.’