The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag Page A

an orgasm. And I
did
have a date, thank you very much.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ve got news for you,” Kovac said. “If that’s what you were wearing, you weren’t gonna get laid either.”
    “Shows what you know,” Liska shot back. “I’m bare-ass naked under this coat.”
    Kovac barked a laugh. They’d been partners for a long time. While she could still make him blush, he was never surprised by the shit that came out of her mouth.
    The uniform didn’t know what to make of either of them. He might have been blushing. Then again, his face might have been frozen.
    “So what’s the story here, Junior?” Kovac asked.
    “The guy driving the Hummer says a zombie jumped out of the trunk of the vehicle ahead of him,” the kid said with a perfectly straight face. “He hit his brakes but couldn’t stop. The Hummer hit the zombie. The Lexus rear-ended the Hummer. The Caprice rear-ended the Lexus. No serious injuries or fatalities—other than the zombie.”
    “You had me at ‘a zombie jumped out of the trunk,’” Liska said.
    “A zombie,” Kovac said flatly.
    Shaking his head, he walked toward the small knot of people hovering around the body in the middle of the road. The crime scene team was taking photographs. A couple of state troopers were working the accident, taking measurements of the road, of the distances between the vehicles.
    Steve Culbertson, the ME’s investigator, spotted Kovac and started toward him. He was lean and slightly scruffy, with salt-and-pepper beard stubble and the narrow, shifty eyes of a coyote. He always had the look of a man who might open up one side of his topcoat and try to sell you a hot watch.
    “Steve, if I got called out here for a traffic fatality, I’m gonna kick somebody’s ass,” Kovac said. “It’s too fucking cold for this shit. The hair in my nose is frozen.”
    “Tell me about it. Try to get an accurate temp on a corpse on a night like this.”
    “I don’t want to hear about your social life.”
    “Very funny.”
    “So a zombie falls out of the trunk of a car . . . ?”
    “I don’t have a punch line, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Culbertson said. “But I will quote my favorite movie: This was no boating accident.”
    Kovac arched a brow. “My vic was attacked by a great white shark?”
    Culbertson cast an ironic look at the giant white Hummer. “Hit by one. But I don’t think that was the worst of her problems. Have a look.”
    Kovac had seen more dead bodies than he could count: men, women, children; victims of shootings, stabbings, strangulations, beatings; fresh corpses and bodies that had been left for days in the trunks of cars in the dead of summer. But he had never seen anything quite like this.
    “F-f-f-f-uck,” he said as the air left his lungs.
    Liska was right beside him. “Holy crap. . . . It
is
a zombie.”
    Half of the female victim’s face appeared to have melted. It looked as if the skin and flesh had been burned away, exposing muscle and bone, exposing her teeth where her cheek should have been. The right eye was missing from its socket. The skull had shattered and cracked open like an egg. Brain matter had already frozen in the dark hair and on the pavement.
    “The car hit one of these craters we call potholes, and the body bounced out of the trunk. The limo driver says she was upright and facing him when he hit her,” Culbertson explained. “So the head hit the pavement and busted open like a rotten melon.”
    “The back of the head,” Kovac said. “What about this face? What caused that?”
    “You’ll have to ask the boss,” Culbertson said. “Looks like some kind of chemical burn to me, or contact with something hot under the car. I don’t know, but look at this,” he said, pointing a gloved finger at the victim’s upper chest. “She didn’t get stabbed repeatedly by that Hummer, so my money is on a homicide.”
    Kovac squatted down for a closer look. The damage to the face was so horrific, it