The Seance Read Free Page B

good.”
    â€œYeah,” Jerry Dwyer said, adding dryly, “Hell, Doc, we knew that before you told us.”
    Martin grunted and turned the tape recorder back on. Jerry gave Jed a glance, shrugging. He’d warned Jed that they might have trouble. He’d told him right out that if Martin said he had to leave, he had to leave.
    An autopsy was a long, hard business, and Jed knew it. In his five years in Homicide, he’d learned too well just how much had to be done meticulously and tediously. And messily.
    He’d never expected to attend one when his presence wasn’t necessary in solving a case, but the truth was, he didn’t have to be here today.
    Except in his own mind.
    The woman on the table was already out of her body bag. There had been no need to inspect her clothing. She hadn’t been found with any.
    The discovery of her body on the I-4 had been not just a tragedy but a shock to the police and anyone who had been in the area for the original killings twelve years ago. Her name was Sherri Mason; she had come to what the locals called Theme Park Central in the middle of the Florida peninsula because she’d wanted to be a star. The police knew her identity because her purse—holding not just her ID but fifty-five dollars and change and several credit cards—had been found discarded near her naked body.
    She had been found not just lying there but carefully displayed, arranged, stretched out on her back as if she were sleeping, her arms crossed over her chest, mummy-style. They were assuming, an assumption to be verified during the autopsy, that she had been sexually assaulted.
    Just like the other five victims—those who’d been slain twelve years ago.
    The problem was, everyone had spent the past twelve years assuming that the killer of those five young women—found beside the same highway and left in the exact same position—had perished himself. He had been a cop named Beau Kidd, shot by his own partner, who had discovered him with the body of the fifth woman. Beau had drawn his own weapon, giving his partner no choice but to fire. He’d never gone to trial, since he’d been pronounced dead at the site, exhaling his last breath over the body of his final victim.
    Assuming he really had been the killer. Certainly the remaining detectives working the case and the D.A.’s office had thought so, and there had been enough circumstantial evidence to make the case.
    That evidence had been sound, Jed knew. He had investigated the case himself after he left the force. He had interviewed as many people who’d been involved as he could find. His first book, the one that had made his reputation as an author, had been about the case. A work of fiction, names changed, but it had been clearly based on the career of the Interstate Killer.
    Like everyone else, he’d unquestioningly blamed the deaths on the man who had died, one of the detectives assigned to the case.
    Jed put the past and all his doubts out of his mind as Doc Martin went on to make observations and take photographs. The body showed signs of rough handling, with abundant bruising. As expected, she had been sexually assaulted, but, as in the past, the killer had been careful. More testing would be necessary, but every one of them was glumly certain there would be no fluids found from which to extract DNA.
    The majority of the bruising was around her neck. Like the original victims, she’d been strangled.
    Occasionally the M.E. had a question for Jerry, who explained that Sherri had last been seen at a local mall, and that her car had been found in the parking lot there. She had met friends to see a movie, then left alone. When she hadn’t shown up for work the following day, a co-worker had reported her missing and filed the report when the requisite twenty-four hours had passed. On the third day after her disappearance, she had been found alongside the highway.
    Jed realized that