The 9th Girl Read Free Page B

never seem to die,” Tippen pointed out. “Which to me implies that they can’t be killed because they’re already dead.”
    “You have to kill a zombie by killing its brain,” Elwood explained. “It’s not that easy.”
    “You can’t shoot it through the heart with a silver bullet?”
    “That’s werewolves.”
    “A stake through the heart.”
    “Vampires.”
    “Elwood,” Kovac interrupted. “Get a fucking life. Go out. See people. Stop watching so much cable television.”
    “Oh, like you should talk, Sam,” Liska scolded. “You live like a hermit.”
    “We’re not talking about me.”
    Kovac took a drink of the coffee and made a face like someone had just punched him in the gut. “Jesus, how long has this shit been sitting here?”
    “Since last year,” Tippen said.
    “Vampires and werewolves have roles in classic literature,” Elwood said.
    “And zombies?”
    “Are a contemporary pop culture rage. I like to stay current.”
    “I like to stay on point,” Kovac said. “And I don’t want to hear any more about fucking zombies. The phones are ringing off the hook with reporters wanting to talk about zombies.”
    “Zombies are news,” Elwood pointed out.
    “Zombies aren’t real,” Kovac said. “We’ve got a dead girl. That’s real. She was real. We’re not living in a television show.” He turned his attention back to Liska. “Did you tell him he probably didn’t kill her?”
    “No,” she said. “Because I think he probably did.”
    “She has, like, twenty stab wounds in her chest,” he pointed out.
    “That doesn’t mean she died from them. Jackson says the trunk popped open and the victim sat up.”
    “That could be what he saw,” Kovac conceded. “The car hit a pothole, the trunk wasn’t latched so it popped open, the body bounced and appeared to sit up. That doesn’t mean she was alive.”
    “She was upright when he hit her,” Liska said. “A dead body falls out of a trunk, it hits the ground like a sack of wet trash.”
    “I think if I fell alive out of the trunk of a moving car, I would hit the ground like a sack of wet trash,” Elwood said. “Who gets up from that?”
    “Depends on how fast the car was going,” Tippen said.
    “Depends on how bad I want to stay alive,” Liska said. “If I’m alive coming out of that trunk, you can bet your ass I’m doing everything I can do to get up and get out of the road.”
    “Tinks, you would kick down death’s door and beat its ass,” Kovac said. “But that’s you.”
    “And maybe that’s our zombie girl too,” Liska argued. “We don’t know her. That’s for the ME to tell us.”
    “It’s a moot point,” Kovac said. “I’m never gonna charge the limo driver with anything. Our vic is dead because of whoever put her in the trunk of that car and whatever that person did to her.”
    “What did the limo driver say about her face?” Tippen asked.
    They had all taken a look at the digital photos Liska had snapped at the scene. Kovac had called in Tip and Elwood because of the possible connection to the Doc Holiday murders. The four of them had formed their own unofficial task force on the two previous cases in their jurisdiction. That enabled them to keep the engine churning on cases that were essentially going cold.
    The general rule of thumb in the Homicide division was three concentrated days working a homicide. If the case wasn’t solved in three days, it had to take a back burner to newer cases—homicides and assaults—and the detectives had to work the old cases as they could. With four of them doing follow-up, the cases kept moving. Even at a snail’s pace, it was better than nothing.
    If this Jane Doe case looked enough like the other two murders, plus the one in St. Paul, they might be able to convince the brass of the need for a formal task force. In the meantime, they did what they could on their own.
    “He said she looked that way when he hit her,” Liska said. “The poor kid is going