Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(12)

*

Cowan was in his late forties, never married, with a solemn demeanor and awkward social manners. He didn’t get cop humor, rarely smiled, and had a difficult time participating in conversations that didn’t involve dead bodies. He considered himself a physician for the dead. He had confided to Josie that he’d tried his hand at private practice, but the social aspect of practicing medicine for the living made him miserable. He’d said he was better equipped to work for dead people. She respected his self-awareness and had wondered if she was that aware of her own shortcomings.

Many of the police officers, especially Otto, found Cowan to be overbearing and unfriendly, but Josie had always liked him. He was a man who cared deeply about the job he performed, and she appreciated that.

Cowan answered his phone, but just barely. The line was connected, but it was several seconds before he spoke, and his hoarse voice sounded confused. If she hadn’t already known Cowan didn’t believe in what he called “imbibing,” she’d have guessed he’d gone to bed drunk.

“Yeah, yes,” he said. “Who is this?”

“Cowan, this is Josie. I’m sorry to wake you like this. We’ve got a dead body.”

He cleared his throat, and after another moment he finally said, “What’s happened?”

Josie gave him a brief summary and asked how long it would take him to arrive on scene.

“Give me thirty minutes.”

*

Training the lights from her jeep between the road and where the body was found, Josie and Nick slowly walked a twenty-foot section of pasture from the body to the road, searching for evidence, including tracks or footprints, but found nothing.

Next, Josie took photos of the area surrounding the girl and again noted there were no footprints. Nick walked concentric circles, searching with his flashlight for anything the killers may have dropped. Josie began photographing the scene from various angles. This was all part of the initial walk-through. The body wouldn’t be touched until the scene had been documented with video and photographs.

Next, she knelt beside the body and examined her clothing for signs that it had been torn in a scuffle, or even removed and the girl later re-dressed, as might be the case with a rape victim. She studied all sides of the body and found nothing to dispute what appeared to be the obvious cause of death: a gunshot between her shoulder blades.

Josie used a ballpoint pen to lift the girl’s long black hair away from her face and grimaced at the swollen discolored sight. She took close-up shots of her face and neck before she stood, turning her back on the body and taking a deep breath.

After Josie had graduated from the police academy, she worked for the Indianapolis Police Department for three years before moving to Texas. Initially, her intent had been to work CSI, but her roommate had been a crime scene specialist for the PD, and she’d come to understand the stress the techs endure. Josie had watched her roommate go from a well-adjusted new recruit to a woman suffering from nightmares and relying on prescription sleep aids and vodka shots to erase the visions from her head long enough to sleep a few hours each night. After the horrors of what her roommate had experienced—the smell of blood and death, touching the flesh of a dead body, being at the scene with the dead victim long after everyone else had left—Josie had changed her mind. Now, in a small-town department without the funds to pay a crime scene tech, the job fell to her anyway. The TV shows were far from reality. There was nothing exhilarating about lifting a dead girl’s hair to view her bloated face. Only sorrow.

Josie’s thoughts returned to her roommate and she wondered if she still worked in law enforcement. Josie contemplated when she would hit a wall and no longer be able to face the nightmarish scenes that occasionally accompanied her job.

“Josie,” Nick called.

She turned and saw Nick on his hands and knees, staring down at the ground. “I found a casing.”

Josie counted her steps off. The spent case lay on the ground approximately twenty-three feet from the body. “Maybe she was gaining ground on them. They gave up the chase and shot her.”

Nick stood and brushed off his hands on his pants. He looked tired at the sight of one more statistic to log in his memory. “The sad thing is, she’s probably better off now than if she’d been caught.”

Josie took a photo of the casing and its relationship to the body. She then took measurements and drew them on a crime scene template that she would later log into her computer using a drawing program. As she was getting the location of the body oriented to the position of the road behind her, she saw a car traveling down Schenck Road toward her house. She and Nick both turned off their flashlights as a precaution. Otto and Roy were in the barn where they couldn’t be seen. She radioed Phillips. “That’s probably Cowan. Tell him to leave the hearse on the side of the road. The tires will get hung up in this sand.”

“Will do.”

*

While Cowan made his way over to the body, Josie called the mayor to fill him in. In the past he’d made it clear that he should be called in the event of any major crime that could affect public safety. She wasn’t sure this crime fit that description, but better safe than sorry. He didn’t answer his cell phone, so she left a message and said she’d call later with an update. She’d begun to wonder if the anonymous call left on the mayor’s answering machine could have something to do with the body.