Leslie Glass - Burning Time

He sat heavily, opposite Newt, not smiling now.

“Well?” Newt demanded.

Out there where they found her, Newt and Ray and Jesse had gone over as much ground as they could, looking for some clue as to what happened. A track in the dirt, a scrap of cloth, a weapon, anything. But the girl had no clothes on, and there did not appear to be any disturbance of anything in the area around her. In some other part of the world, they might call in a botanist to examine the plant life under the body to determine, by the changes in the plants, how long the body had been there. But here there was no plant life under her. Milt had initially speculated that whatever happened to her happened somewhere else.

“It looks like she had some injuries, but she didn’t die of them,” he said now.

“What do you mean?” Newt frowned.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what happened antemortem, and what might be postmortem injuries,” Milt said.

“Yeah?” Newt said. He knew that.

“She could have died, and then two ribs and an arm were broken when somebody moved her. You know that sometimes happens when ambulance drivers aren’t careful. It can mess up an autopsy report.” Milt shook his bald head.

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

There was a long pause.

“So, what did she die of?” Newt said impatiently.

“Exposure,” Milt said.

“No kidding.”

“The color and condition of her skin—looks like she was thoroughly burned by the sun. Not just her front, but her back, too. That means she could have been walked around out there. Low temperatures at night. Looks like she starved, fried, and froze.”

“Raped?” Newt asked soberly.

Milt shook his head. “After twenty-four hours with really first-rate samples from a living person, intercourse would be pretty hard to establish, unless there were injuries. Postmortem,” he shook his head again, “not a chance. I do think she was tortured, though.”

“The wounds in her groin?”

“No, that’s postmortem change. That’s what happens in mummification. The skin shrinks. The resulting split sometimes looks like an antemortem knife wound.”

“Mummification?” Newt played with a pencil on his desk. It said Pell’s Apothecary on the side. “Then she must have been there for a while.”

“Nuh-uh.” Milt shook his head again.

“Why so sure?”

“The birds just started. The coyotes hadn’t even gotten there yet. A few days, and there’d only be bones left. In a way we’re lucky.”

“Oh, yeah?” Newt said. “How so?”

“We might still be able to get some prints.”

Milt had finished and didn’t make any going motions.

“What’s bothering you? In particular, I mean?”

“You know that blackened part on her chest?”

“Postmortem artifact?” Newt was proud he knew the word. When he was a rookie years ago, he had seen the blackened patterns on the chest of a person who had died several days before, and thought some madman had murdered him and put them there. It didn’t take long to learn the horrible truth. Humans don’t fare as well as animals in the looks department after death. All kinds of colors and patterns and wounds appear on dead bodies as they go through their many postmortem changes. Sometimes, in three days if the conditions are just right, a human can swell to three times its normal size with gases and putrefaction.

“No, a man-made burn.”

Milt was silent for a long time.

Newt twirled the pencil in his fingers. So, she might have been tortured and left out there. He had a mental picture of her hair, already shrinking away from her scalp, and her nails. The hair was silky and looked like it had been expertly colored; the nails were painted a delicate pink. This was no biker’s girl with crudely bleached hair, roots an inch thick, and black nail polish.

“The thing is,” Milt went on. “You know how ME’s are when we get together. We talk about unusual cases. I have a friend down in Twentynine Palms. A few months ago he had a similar case, a girl burned in the chest with something like a brand and left in the desert. Nobody took too much notice. It was a Mexican.”

“Christ.” Newt groaned.

“I know he photographed the burn for the pattern. In case another one came up. I’ll have to get his report. Now I’m not saying two burns make a trend, but it looks like another one may have come up—” His voice trailed off.

Slowly he got to his feet.

“When can you have the data for me?” Newt asked. He wanted to get the data into the surrounding jurisdictions as soon as possible. They had to identify her before they could start investigating what happened to her.

“Soon,” Milt promised. “They’re working on the X rays and dentals now.”

“Good.” Newt was so distressed by the thought of his California desert getting littered with the bodies of tortured young women that he followed Milt out of the building and watched him drive away.

11

Troland felt bad. He didn’t think he had ever felt so bad. He couldn’t even go to work because of what she did to him. She had been the prettiest, nicest girl in the whole world, the only girl he ever really liked, and he had saved her. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he saved her. He, Troland Grebs, saved her. And now she made a fool of him like it didn’t matter to her at all that he held her in his heart all these years. He hated her.

She was the only girl who was so perfect he had to make special rules just for her. He remembered every one: He could look at her, but not when she was on the beach. He could write letters to her, but not send them. He could draw pictures of her, but not let anybody see them. The most important thing was he couldn’t touch her no matter what. And he never did. He had been good all these years, and she had to humiliate him, curse him, break every rule like the worst whore that ever was.

He lay on the sofa in his apartment two, three days; drinking, staggering to the bathroom, vomiting, passing out—drinking some more. He couldn’t go to work. When he finally got up and cleaned the apartment, he didn’t know why it smelled, why there was vomit on the floor. He just knew he was going to take back all the things he had ever done for Emma Chapman, one at a time.

12

It took Detective Woo three days to find Connie Shagan at a friend of a friend’s house in Florida. It wasn’t easy to locate her with no one in the dorm or the administration office to give her names and numbers. She didn’t work the case on Monday. This week Monday was her day off. She spent it studying for a psych test that evening. She had to take the subway both ways from Queens, since she was without a car, but she thought she did all right on the test.

On Tuesday April had a chance to go back to the dorm and get into the girls’ room. She took Ellen’s photograph with her and held it in her hand as she looked around. She had done this with another missing girl two years before. Lily Dong was twelve, and disappeared from her kitchen in Chinatown when she was home from school having lunch. The whole precinct looked for her. It was the kind of thing that got in the newspapers. A kidnapper called once. Then when he didn’t call again, the family called the police. Three days after the child disappeared, April found a pile of junk in a courtyard across the street. Underneath was a dirty sleeping bag. April hated thinking about unzipping that bag, and seeing the sneakers. She didn’t have to see anything else but the two sneakers to know. The girl was wearing them when she disappeared and was wearing them when she was found. She had been strangled in a panic. It took April a long time to look at any kind of sneakers without feeling terrible about Lily Dong. Very rare for an Asian to kill someone. It was the guy across the hall, Burmese.