Evidence of Murder by Lisa Black Page A

she came here in the afternoon, why didn’t she go farther into the woods? She’s visible from the path. Someone could have found her, even on a cold day. You said yourself there’s always some crazy hiker around.”
    “She
is
visible from the path, and still it took five days for someone to notice her.”
    “But it’s a risk.”
    “Maybe she wasn’t very good at thinking things through. Maybe she was too drunk or high to think clearly.”
    Theresa looked around, and decided that she had done all that could be done at the scene. She pulled out her Nextel to call for the ambulance crew—i.e., the body snatchers. “We’ll just have to wait on tox for that. No drugs or alcohol at the apartment, you said?”
    “A little Michelob Lite. Of course he had time to clean up for our visit.”
    “Or throw the stuff out, if he knew she wasn’t coming back.”
    Frank considered this, then shook his head. “Nah. The husband’s got no record past a speeding ticket or two. If she’s got drugs in her system, then my money is on Georgie. She was lighting up for old time’s sake with her boss and OD’d. He needed to get rid of the body and dumped it here.”
    “Then it’s not murder, exactly.”
    “I know.”
    “And there are a lot more convenient places for someone on West Twenty-fifth to dump a body, starting with the Dumpsters at the West Side Market and moving about a thousand feet to the river.”
    “So what are we looking at here?” He stood next to the oak, his face turned to the silent woman at his feet. Frustration tinged his voice; they both knew that without more information, they could ask questions of each other from then until the next fall and not be able to answer a single one.
    “A little girl who’s never going to know her mommy,” Theresa told him.
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
     
    The autopsy suite in the sixty-year-old medical examiner’s office, scrubbed every afternoon, was the cleanest room in the building. Or at least it appeared to be—the staff took general precautions against cross-contamination but beyond that placed no particular emphasis on sterility. The patients opened up on these tables did not have to worry about infection.
    The room held three stainless-steel tables, two sinks, a central floor drain; small red ceramic tiles covered the floor and half of the walls. Unless a victim’s organs were currently open, it did not smell bad, more like the humid odor of a seedy bar during the day. Autopsies were performed one after the other until the doctors ran out of candidates; sometimes this would be early in the day and sometimes late. The dieners, or autopsy assistants, would then clean the room and go home, a system that provided every incentive to work quickly and efficiently.
    Any new deceased who arrived after cleanup joined the queue for the following morning’s work. Jillian Perry made it in under the wire.
    “Could have been an early day.” Jesse, a skinny black man who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, absently hosed the body as he grumbled. He did not seem at all enamored of the beautiful model; a hot dead girl was no match for paid time off.
    Undressed, Jillian’s body continued to show no signs of violence. No needle marks, no injuries, not so much as a bruise. Lividity, of course, on the buttocks and backs of the legs, but Theresa expected that. She and the pathologist, Dr. Christine Johnson, had already collected fingernail scrapings, a rape kit, and a few hairs and fibers from the skin. Now the ebony-hued doctor held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the mouth.
    “Her throat’s clear. I don’t see any of the foaming you usually get with an OD.”
    Jesse offered his opinion. “She froze to death.”
    Theresa peered down the throat as well. “That would take a long time. It wasn’t
that
cold out.”
    “Just long enough to screw up my day. If she’d been here this morning, I’d be going home by now.”
    Theresa had often proposed a law