The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(7)

She sat on a rolling stool out of Funk’s way. Kins stood beside her, the two of them watching and listening as Funk dictated each step with practiced precision and documented his findings with extensive photographs. Funk had weighed and measured Jane Doe—she was five foot six, though it was difficult to be precise because the body had been manipulated to fit inside the crab pot, and weighed approximately 135 pounds. He took vaginal and rectal swabs to check for semen. He examined the skin for petechiae—pinpoint, round blood spots indicating asphyxia—though the cause of death was readily apparent. Jane Doe had been shot in the back of the head. The killer had likely used a 9mm handgun—not that the gun mattered at this point. Without the bullet, which had passed through the skull, they would not be able to confirm the particular gun, if they ever found it.

Funk’s exterior examination revealed no jewelry, though the earlobes had been pierced, further confirming Tracy’s suspicion the killer had stripped the body. Funk found no tattoos or other distinguishing marks, nor did he find track marks or other signs the woman had been a junkie. He’d taken fingerprints to run through the AFIS database, but unless the woman had been convicted of a crime, served in the military, or had been employed in a job requiring workers to be fingerprinted, the system would not provide an identity. He’d also taken blood and saliva samples for DNA analysis, but similarly, unless the woman’s DNA was in the CODIS database, there would be no hit.

Funk was preparing to x-ray the body.

“You okay?” Kins asked.

Tracy looked up at him from her rolling stool. “Huh?”

“You’ve got that look in your eye . . . And you’re quiet. Too quiet.” After eight years working together, they had become adept at reading the other’s moods. “Don’t make it any more personal than it is, Tracy. This shit is hard enough.”

“I don’t try to make it personal, Kins.”

“I know you don’t try,” he said, fully aware of what had happened to her sister, as well as Tracy’s compulsion when it came to killers of young women.

“But sometimes you can’t change the facts.”

“No, but you can change how you react to them,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, not wanting to sound defensive. “I was just wondering who raises the kind of person who would shoot someone in the back of the head and stuff her body in a crab pot like a piece of bait?”

Kins sighed. They’d had similar conversations. “Think about it from the parents’ perspective. As horrible as it would be to hear this has happened to your child, I also can’t imagine being told I’d raised a child capable of doing something like this.”

“Seems like it’s getting worse, doesn’t it?” Tracy said. “People have no respect for other people’s boundaries. They think nothing of breaking into someone’s car or home. Did you read the stories last December of people stealing Christmas presents from porches and taking lawn decorations?”

“I saw that.”

“Who raises these people to think that’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” Kins said. “When the economy isn’t good, people get desperate.”

“That’s a load of crap,” she said. “There are a lot of really poor people out there who would never think to do those kinds of things.” She looked to the body on the table.

They watched Funk work. “What did you think of Schill?” Kins said.

“I think Faz and Del are right; I don’t think he’ll be poaching crabs again anytime soon.”

“I meant about what Del said—about the odds of Schill hooking on the pot.”

Tracy heard doubt, or at least skepticism, in Kins’s tone. “I don’t think the kid’s capable of something like this.”

“I’m just saying we don’t rule him out yet.”

“Okay, we don’t rule him out, but why would he bring the pot in and call 911 if he was somehow involved?”

Kins shrugged. “He might have gotten cold feet. Maybe he kills her but spooks and can’t go through with it, so he comes up with a different story. ‘I hooked on the pot.’”

“He seemed genuinely shook up.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I say we have Del and Faz ask around, find out if any cats have gone missing in the kid’s neighborhood or if he trolls the Internet for those morbid sites about murder.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s happened before,” Kins said.

“What?”

“Someone finding a body in a crab pot. Two years ago a fisherman found a skull in a crab pot out on the coast near Westport.”

“That was the guy’s pot,” Tracy said, recalling the story.

“Never did find out how the skull got in there though. And then they found that body in the pot down in Pierce County, near Anderson Island.”

“They didn’t find it. The boyfriend confessed and led them to it.”

“Exactly,” Kins said.

“Detectives?” Funk stepped back from the table and lowered his mask. He’d donned full surgical gear, including protective eyeglasses.

Tracy and Kins raised their surgical masks to cover their mouths and noses, though it did little to block the smell.