Schrum finished the liquor and held the glass out for a refill.

“I saw the hunger in his eyes, Roland. It looked familiar.”

“It’s the same thing, Detective,” Dr Ava Davanelle said, bending low to study a resected section of muscle. “Trauma, blows to the body hidden under char. Other blows were immediately evident, a heavy object striking the victim’s mouth, breaking off several teeth.”

We’d started in the morgue at seven. I’d slept in town last night, figuring that would be the pattern until these cases got solved. Ava had begun the autopsy while I sat in the utility office and had coffee and a bacon-egg biscuit grabbed from a corner market. Belafonte didn’t seem able to eat with a body being dissected twelve steps distant.

Ava nodded to an evidence bag holding teeth, broken and whole. “Maybe forensics can figure the composition of the object that struck them. At least we’ll know if it’s metal or wood, pipe or ball bat or whatever. It might help me figure out the source of the random trauma points.”

“Like a gauntlet, you said with Teresa Mailey. That might indicate several assailants.”

“The blows come from every angle. I’ve found them as low as an ankle, and as high as the suture between the occipital and parietal.”

“Behind the ear,” Belafonte said.

Ava nodded as Belafonte’s phone beeped. “Got to take this,” she said, stepping from the room.

“You getting anywhere on this, Carson?” Ava said.

“Belafonte figured out a possible religious angle, some symbolism with the olive oil, naphtha, and wool. They have Biblical connections.”

Ava’s eyes flickered to the corpse, the skin burned and charred, the face a hideous and misshapen mask.

“You mean like a sacrifice or something?”

“Maybe. But if it’s a religious psycho, the process could mean anything. Their brains are a slurry of twisted symbols.”

We turned to the sound of the door, Belafonte entering. “That was Human Resources at Disney World getting back to me.”

I nodded. “Kylie seemed to know the area, at least according to her mother. Anything?”

“Kylie worked at Disney World for six weeks. It was just over four years ago. She was a character in biblical settings until she showed up one day acting oddly. A mandated drug screen found cannabinoids in her system and she was terminated.”

“You checked—”

“Yep. Teresa Mailey never worked at Disney World.”

I stared down at the tormented body. “I wonder what we’ll find from Jane Doe here?”

“She won’t be Jane Doe long, Carson,” Ava said. “Not if she’s in the system. Like Sandoval, she clutched her hands tight and I sent an unscorched print to forensics a half-hour ago.”

“You didn’t think to tell me?”

“You were eating. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

33

Not a minute after Ava mentioned sending the prints to the lab, we were called over by Nancy Amante, a tech in Latent Prints. Latents was at a far corner of the main lab, a section devoted to fingerprints – known as friction ridges in the trade – and their esoterica. There was chemistry-set gear for raising and enhancing prints, and a computer terminal linked to IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the world’s largest biometric database and the friction-ridge repository of over a hundred million people.

I hadn’t seen Nancy in a couple months. “Been busy?” I asked.

“Last week alone we processed nearly three hundred latents.”

“Menendez,” I ventured.

“Every print found in her house, garage, vehicle and vacation house.”

“And found nothing,” I said. Even the smallest lead would have been leaked to the media.

Nancy simply blew out a breath. “Your case was easier, Detective. We isolated and enhanced a section of the right index and got an arch pattern with some distinctive bifurcations and ridges.”

“You got a hit?” My heart rate seemed to double.

“We got seven hundred and ten possibles.”

I muttered an expletive, wanting to pick up the nearest beaker and fling it against a wall.

“That’s nationwide though. Filter for gender, age and locale and we’re down to three possibles in the Miami area.”

I mentally set the beaker down. “And the winners are?”

Nancy tapped the keyboard. “One, Linda Quinell, Lauderdale, twenty-three, arrested two years ago for stealing an iPhone at her sorority house.”

The sorority-girl aspect was an outlier. “Number two?”

“Dashelle Wilson, passing bad checks. Claimed she did it to make the payment on her Beamer, about to be repossessed.”

I frowned. “The Beamer doesn’t fit, not that it means anything. Next?”

“Darlene Jean Hammond, age twenty-five. Busts include shoplifting, drugs and paraphernalia, public lewdness, failure to appear on warrants, a DUI, and five prostitution busts in the last four years.”

“Bingo,” I said. “Low-level crime, street-corner hustling. It fits with Kylie and Teresa.”

Nancy continued reading. “It seems Ms Hammond found other employment. Her last prostitution arrest was eleven months ago.”

“Maybe she got faster running shoes,” I said. “Or went the outcall route. She listed as a Missing?”

More keystrokes. “Nope. But if she was abducted and murdered in the last few days …”

“She wouldn’t be listed. Got her last-known address? We gotta start somewhere.”

We drove to east Miami Gardens, where Hammond had lived in a shabby apartment building with a dozen units, double locks on the doors and steel grating over the windows. The manager was Letha Driscoll, a woman fighting middle age with the full arsenal: make-up applied with a trowel, jet-black hair dye, the over-reliance on Botox that turns a face into an expressionless mask. She wore a white tube top and red Spandex slacks, poor choices given the effects of time and gravity on human tissue. But I expect Miz Driscoll saw something completely different in the mirror.

She was one of those smokers who stick a freshly lit cigarette between their lips and don’t remove it until ember touches filter, gray tubes of ash falling to the floor as she led us down the dank hall to Hammond’s apartment.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Belafonte said, “but you’re dropping ashes.”

Driscoll turned to me, like Belafonte was invisible. “Darlene’s been on the street,” she said, pushing the door open. “That was over a year ago. It made her sick and she got out.”

We entered an apartment so small that cell seemed more apt, the wallpaper a bilious green, one water-damaged section peeling away. The window air conditioner sounded like a blender full of marbles. The only reading material was pulp astrology mags sold in supermarket check-out lanes.

“You know where she works now?” I said, raising my voice to compete with the AC as Belafonte went to inspect the bedroom.

“Exotic dancing,” Driscoll said, smoke pluming up as ashes tumbled down. “Call it stripping, you want. If you’re not selling yourself, it’s a better way to live.”

I leaned the wall, arms crossed. “Tell me about her.”

“Kept to herself. Live that kind of life, you always got a head full of stuff make a regular person throw up.”

“She have a pimp when she was hooking?”

“A sicko named Flash. I took it he got hisself shot. If so, the best thing that guy ever did was dying.” Driscoll’s coffin nail was done. She pulled the butt from her lips and looked for a place to stub it out.

“I’ll take that,” I said. Forensics needed to get here fast.

She handed me the butt and jammed another cigarette between the red-caked lips. I could have told her not to smoke, but then all she’d be thinking about was getting another hit of the blue drug. I held the smoking butt above my shoulder, looking like the Statue of Liberty. Belafonte exited the bedroom shaking her head, finding nothing.

I handed Belafonte the butt. “Do something with this.”