Cover-up Read Free

obscured by low bushes and dripping ferns. Only her lower legs and feet stuck out,twisted oddly inward. The right leg was completely naked and glowed a dead white punctuated by dark clumps of dried blood. The left leg was partly bare and partly twined in a coiled mess of blood-sopped khaki pants and underwear, its foot still clad in a tan moccasin.
    “We photographed the area with the leaves covering her, just like this, which is how we found her. Then we held ’em aside and took pictures of the wounds. After the ME bags her and hauls her off, we’ll cut away all the brush and do a final sweep for anything we missed because of the ground cover.”
    “Okay, good,” Melanie forced herself to say. Part of her wanted to run, and part of her knew she needed to stay now and bear witness to this horrible crime. God, human beings were evil.
    “He taped her hands and mouth. Plain packing tape like you could buy in any hardware or moving-supply store. We can try to print it, but again, he wore gloves, so my guess is we’ll come up empty. I’m gonna show you her face so’s you trust my ID, but I’m warning you, it ain’t pretty. Ready?”
    Melanie nodded mutely, and Butch used his probe to sweep aside the wet ferns that obscured the victim’s head.
    Suzanne Shepard’s mouth, visible through strips of blood-smeared plastic packing tape, was twisted into a grimace of the starkest horror. Her blue eyes were open and vacant, but wide with shock, and the black blood that had sprayed up to dot her face looked like so many flies swarming. She’d died in agony; you could see it in her expression, and yet the cool, beautiful TV star was still recognizable in the gruesome corpse. Seeing a celebrity in the flesh always felt surreal. Melanie’s occasional close encounters—Mary Tyler Moore buying a sweater at Bendel’s, Kelly Ripa eating ice cream with her kids—had been disorienting just because it was bizarre to realize that television stars existed in real life. But a famous person dead, and brutally, horribly so? Beyond weird.
    “It’s definitely her,” Dan said. He took Melanie’s arm to steadyher, looking concerned, and she managed a nod to let him know she was okay. Butch was right. She did have a strong stomach. She could handle this, and she liked that about herself. She took a deep breath through her mouth so she could get oxygen without inhaling the stench of blood.
    “Here’s what we think is a stun-gun mark,” Butch said, using his pointer to indicate three tiny burn marks arranged in a triangular pattern on the side of Suzanne Shepard’s elegant neck. “Public place, it makes sense he would stun her and gag her to reduce noise.”
    “How long would a stun gun knock her out for?” Melanie asked.
    “It wouldn’t knock her out at all,” Dan said, shaking his head. “To make somebody lose consciousness, you have to maintain the electrical connection between the stun gun and the skin for several seconds. That’s harder than you’d think. Probably he just shocked her enough to get the jump on her.”
    “Now get a load of this,” Butch said. “The main event. This part, I need to be careful, because it’s important. We took pictures, but the ME’ll want it clean for the autopsy.”
    Butch knelt down and carefully held aside a low-lying branch that had concealed the woman’s torso, then shined his flashlight beam directly on it.
    “Jesus!” Dan exclaimed, recoiling.
    Melanie gasped and jerked her eyes away, closing them instinctively to shield herself from the monstrous sight. But it stayed with her anyway, vibrating against her eyelids, so after a moment she opened them again, swallowing hard to fight back the sour taste rising in her throat.
    A pink cotton sweater was bunched up near the victim’s underarms, and a lavender brassiere hung loosely down from her right shoulder. She’d been stabbed many times with tremendous force. Her left breast was half-severed. Gaping slash wounds covered the rest