“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 was difficult to get his brain to accept that this was a real human being he was looking at and not some Halloween prop. She lay like a broken doll, limbs at unnatural angles to the body. Young, he thought, looking at her arm and hand—the smooth skin, the blue nail polish. Several of the fingernails were broken. A couple were torn nearly off. There were cuts and scrapes on the knuckles, indicative of defensive wounds. She had fought. Whoever had done this to her, she had fought.

Good for you, honey, he thought. I hope you did some damage.

She was naked from the waist down. The left leg was badly broken. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and throat. The top she wore was torn and drenched in blood.

Who hated you this much? Kovac wondered. Who did you piss off so badly that they would do this to you?

“Any ID on the body, Steve?” Liska asked.

“Nope.”

“Great.”

Kovac straightened to his feet, knees and back protesting. Even the fluid in his joints was freezing.

“What time is it?” Liska asked.

He checked his watch. “Eleven fifty-three. Why?”

“I want this year to be over.”

They had started the year just a few miles from where they were standing, New Year’s Day, on a callout to a dead body, a young woman who had been brutally murdered, her body chucked out of a vehicle into a ditch. No ID. A Jane Doe. Their first of the year. The press had dubbed her “New Year’s Doe.” It had taken weeks before they were able to match their unidentified body with a missing persons report out of Missouri. The case remained open.

And here they were, twelve months later, standing over the body of a murdered female with no ID. The ninth Jane Doe of the year.

Doe cases generally got names fairly quickly. They often turned out to be transients, people on the fringes of society, people who had minor criminal records and could be ID’d from their fingerprints or were matched to local or regional missing persons reports. Their deaths were related to their high-risk lifestyles. They died of drug overdoses or suicide or because they pissed off the wrong thug. But this year had been different. This year, of their now nine Jane Doe victims, three had fit a very troubling pattern.

Jane Doe 01-11 had turned out to be an eighteen-year-old Kansas girl, Rose Ellen Reiser. A college student, she had been abducted December 29 outside a convenience store in Columbia, Missouri, just off Interstate 70 while on her way back to school in St. Louis.

Jane Doe 04-11—found on the Fourth of July—had eventually been identified as a twenty-three-year-old mother of one from Des Moines, Iowa, who had gone missing while jogging in a park near Interstate 35 on July first.

A Jane Doe found Labor Day weekend had yet to be identified. The body had been found near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, making it a case for the St. Paul PD, but the obvious similarities to the two prior cases in Kovac’s jurisdiction had earned him a phone call to consult.

He had dubbed the killer Doc Holiday, a name that had stuck not only with the Minneapolis cops but also with detectives in agencies throughout the Midwest where young women had been abducted—or their bodies had been found—always on or around a holiday, always near an interstate highway. Over the months, it had become clear that the Midwest had a serial killer cruising the highways.

“She came out of the trunk of a car,” Liska said.

The prevailing theory was that Doc Holiday was a long-haul trucker. The serial killer’s dream job. His chamber of horrors ran on wheels. He could snatch a victim in one city and dump her in another with no one questioning his movements. Victims were readily available all along his route.

“So he’s a traveling salesman,” Kovac said. “I don’t care what he’s driving.”

He cared that he was standing over another young woman who would never have the chance to become an old woman. Whoever this girl was, she would never have a career, get married, have children, get divorced. She would never have the opportunity to be successful or make a shambles of her life, because she didn’t have a life anymore.

And no matter if she had been the perfect girl or a perfect bitch, somewhere tonight someone would be missing her, wondering where she was. Somewhere on this New Year’s Eve a family believed they would see her again. It would be Kovac’s job to tell them the hard truth. If he could manage to figure out who the hell she was.

On the sidelines, the reporters had begun to get restless, wanting details. One of them called out, “Hey, Detective! We heard there was a zombie. Is that true?”

Off to the southwest the sky suddenly exploded with color. Fireworks over the burbs.

Kovac looked at his partner. “Happy freaking New Year.”

3

“I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop the damn Hummer,” Jamar Jackson said. He had the look of a man who had seen a ghost and knew that it was going to haunt him every night for the rest of his life.

“That thing is like driving the fucking Titanic!” he said. “You can’t just stop! I hit the brakes. It was too late. She popped out of that trunk and bam! I just hit her. I killed her! Oh my God. I killed somebody!”

He cupped his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table, holding him up. He was sweating like a horse. As cold as it had been at the scene, it was equally hot in the interview room. Something had gone haywire with the heating system, and no one from the maintenance staff was answering their phones on New Year’s Day.

Liska had stripped off two layers of clothing and she still felt like she was wearing her parka.

Jackson had jerked loose his bow tie and opened the collar of his tuxedo shirt. It was clear he was replaying the memory of the accident in his mind over and over. Liska tried to picture it herself—driving down the road, the trunk of the car in front flies open, and like a scene from a horror movie, out pops a body.

“What kind of car was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said impatiently, as if he didn’t want his macabre memory interrupted. “Black.”

“Big? Small?”

“Big. Kind of. I don’t know.”

“American? Foreign?”

“I don’t know!” he said, exasperated. “I wasn’t paying attention!”

Liska gave him the hard Mom look. “You’re a limo driver. You’re paid to get your passengers from one place to another in one piece, and you weren’t paying attention?”