Evidence of Murder by Lisa Black Page B

restricting all crimes to only daylight hours to keep from being dragged from bed, and didn’t blame him. “It sucks to be you.”
    “Not as bad as it sucks to be this chick today,” Christine said, clicking off the flashlight with a brisk snap, similar to the way she discouraged potential suitors. The young, black, brilliant pathologist was too interested in studying for her board exams to be distracted by romance. “It seems we have a rash of people freezing to death in the woods all of a sudden.”
    Theresa said, “Not really. We have a thirty-year-old, half-clothed, throttled prostitute, a warmly dressed fifteen-year-old boy with a single blow to the head, and now a lightly but fully dressed twenty-four-year-old mother dead of—what?”
    “Good question. I’ll let you know what I find.”
    Theresa relinquished control of the body and went next door to the old teaching amphitheater which, by virtue of its size, availability, and the fact that it had a table in the middle, doubled as the trace evidence department’s examination room. She covered the table with fresh brown paper and spread out the aqua sweatshirt, noting its size, color, and brand. It smelled faintly of perfume, a light and undoubtedly expensive floral scent. Would a woman intending suicide wear perfume? Sure, why not? No need to save the good stuff for a special occasion, as Theresa did. She still had perfume from high school.
    Aside from a little dirt and some dead leaves, almost certainly picked up when they rolled the body, the shirt was clean. Theresa turned it inside out—more of the same, except for a smear above the right cuff, on the inside of the forearm. It could have been a minuscule amount of oil. Perhaps Jillian had had something in her hand when she pulled the shirt on? But the victim’s hands were clean, and no spots appeared on the shirt’s waistband, where she would have had to tug downward.
    The pink polo shirt under the sweatshirt had become discolored from the seepage of the decomposing tissues. Theresa hung it on a wheeled rack; when it dried she could tape its surface to pick up any loose hairs or fibers. Odd that it hadn’t been tucked into the jeans underneath the sweatshirt, which would have kept her warmer, but perhaps the victim had dressed in a hurry, or it had something to do with the current fashion.
    The jeans were a designer brand, size four, making Theresa think there might be something to the rumor that clothing manufacturers had downgraded all women’s clothing sizes to make customers feel better about their bodies, and, by extension, better about parting with the cash to clothe them. Jillian seemed slender, but by no means undernourished for her height. A close look at the back pockets yielded a tiny dusting of white powder, which Theresa dutifully scraped into a paper fold to be tested for the presence of cocaine. The left front pocket contained some lint. The right front pocket held a single stud earring—a small cubic zirconium, as near as Theresa could figure—and a phone number with a Cleveland exchange scribbled on a piece of paper.
    Don Delgado poked his head in. “What’s that?”
    “This is what we, in law enforcement circles, call a clue.”
    He dropped his six foot three frame into an amphitheater seat too small for him and ran two hands over his shiny olive skin. “Clue to what?”
    “Maybe nothing. Maybe to whoever left Jillian Perry to freeze to death at the base of an oak tree.”
    “I thought she did that herself.”
    “She probably did. I’m just not so sure.”
    “Why not?”
    She did not own up to any guilt over her first harsh assessment of Jillian Perry; Theresa’s ex-husband had taught her the folly of exposing any personal weakness. So she told Don merely this: “I have a hunch.”
    “You don’t get hunches.”
    “I thought I’d start. It will help me keep up with all those TV detectives.”
    “You’ll have to start wearing high heels and low-cut sweaters