14

Tuesday, December 16

6:40 a.m.

Taylor rose early, gritty-eyed from the lack of sleep. She left Baldwin in the bed, tucked a pillow in his arms, and felt her heart break when he smiled and murmured into it. Seeing him like that, remembering what he’d done to finally get her to sleep, made all her worries about the wedding seem silly.

Long legs ensconced in a pair of jeans, she slipped into her favorite old Uggs and pulled on a creamy cable sweater. She stopped in the kitchen briefly, grabbed a banana and a granola bar, then got in the 4Ru

The neighborhood was beautiful, sheer and pure, a white only produced by snow fallen from a crisp wintry sky. She felt like she was in the mountains; the decidu

ous trees masquerading as heavy evergreens with black 42

J.T. Ellison

trunks and feathery limbs coated in ice, the sky cerulean, a shade rarely seen during a Southern winter. The beauty cheered her, and she left the quiet subdivi

sion in a good mood. Moved by the weather. Sheesh. She was getting soft.

Out in the suburbs, the side roads were unplowed and impassable to all but four-wheel drives, but the main roads were relatively cleared and not yet icy. She was careful, made her way to the Starbucks drive-through, got her now standard nonfat, sugar-free vanilla latte and headed toward work.

The autopsy of Janesicle was scheduled for seven, and Taylor intended to witness. Maybe Sam would have the results back from the LCMS tests. If this was definitely victim number four, it would be a hard secret to keep. She flipped on the XM, used the remote to scroll through the stations until she found some music she liked. No talk radio for her this morning, and she’d given up on the holiday cha

Sam’s offices were housed in a corporate-looking building up the road from the Te

tigation. Taylor had been here so often that Sam had issued her a badge that allowed her access after hours. Or before 14

43

hours, when necessary. They’d have a skeleton staff on a day like today, but Taylor knew Sam would be there. And she was, already prepped. Taylor could see her, distorted through the crisscross wire embedded in the glass of the industrial door. The air was cool and clean in the compartmented vestibule where she slipped out of her clothes and boots, sliding blue plastic clogs and doctor’s scrubs on. She put her street clothes in a locker. No sense making her clothes reek for the rest of the day. With the new gear in place, she went through the door into the autopsy suite. The chemical scent of death greeted her like an old friend. She hardly noticed it anymore. Sam nodded as she entered the room, already dictating into a hands-free mike clipped to her headgear. The body of Janesicle Doe lay on the cream-colored plastic slab that encased the stainless-steel table under

neath. She was so white; cold, clammy flesh, with that big, black grin across her throat. Taylor felt the gorge rise in the back of her own throat and swallowed hard. Inappro

priate reaction. She hoped Sam hadn’t noticed. Taylor was as detached as the rest of them, but something about this girl was breaking all her protocols. The individual murders hadn’t bothered her in the be

gi

“Taylor, did you notice? She’s got that same stuff on her temples.”

Taylor stepped closer, bent over the body. On either side of the girl’s face, two smears of a whitish substance glis

tened under Sam’s light. They looked like streaks of moon

light.

“Appears to be identical material. Any chance the labs are back on it?”

44

J.T. Ellison

“We should have an answer by the time I finish her up. We didn’t get anything usable from the earlier samples, they were too degraded.” Sam started working her way systematically through the Jane Doe’s hair.

“You said it wasn’t biological.”

“Right. No DNA to obtain. There was plenty of it on this body, though, nice and fresh. I put it into the LCMS.”

“That’s your special little machine that spits out the chemical compositions, right?”

“Special little machine? How about liquid chromatog

raphy mass spectrometer? I’d like to spend more time, do some sophisticated testing to see its composition, but I need a comparison sample with the actual material that’s leaving the marks to be sure. In the meantime, we have enough to at least get an idea of what we’re working with.”

Sam continued her examination, and Taylor stood beside the body, lost in thought.

Two months ago, Taylor had been called on the murder of Elizabeth Shaw, a senior at Belmont University. Eliza

beth had disappeared walking home to her apartment from class. The city buzzed, searches were initiated, but it was all too late. Her body was found in the tall grass in a gulch off of Interstate 24. Thrown out of a car door like litter, she’d lain in the gulch for at least two days. The post

mortem damage to her body had been animal related. The biological evidence was copious; her arms and legs were hog-tied. They hadn’t determined where she was actually killed.

Elizabeth Shaw’s murder scene didn’t look precisely like the original work of Snow White, but during her autopsy, flakes of red Chanel lipstick were recovered from her mouth. They reexamined the knots on the ropes, found 14

45

them to be much more complex than they originally appeared. And in a touch that alarmed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, a two-decades-old newspaper clipping about the first murder in the original Snow White case had been pulled from her vagina. All thoughts of this being a simple murder flew out the window, and the homicide team found themselves quietly reopening a twenty-year-old case.