Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(5)

From day one, Stu said how paranoid Karen had been throughout their marriage—now Harper sees it for herself. Stu’s ex-wife is imagining something that simply hadn’t happened. At least, not the way she thinks—and what Karen is imagining is in danger of becoming an unsettling obsession.

Harper parks outside the medical examiner’s office and cuts the engine. She gets out of the car, removes her shades, thinking it wasn’t so long ago she attended the autopsy of nineteen-year-old Magnolia Remy. Found in much the same fashion as that morning’s cadaver—raped and strangled. Magnolia’s body had been left in a woodland, bloated and covered in bugs by the time they found her.

It was no easy feat, making it through the whole examination, but Harper did it. Dead bodies rarely bother her—it’s their ghosts that cause the trouble.

Harper walks into the medical examiner’s office, knowing what she will be told. This girl is number two—she hopes she can break the case before the killer claims a third.



A body looks different under fluorescent strip lighting.

The harsh illumination finds every dimple, presents the face as anything but a bland landscape of little feature. Everything looks gray, as if being dead robs you of an essential, humanizing dimension.

Mike and his assistant, Kara, have already been at work on the girl—she has a standard Y incision across the front and down the center of her torso from their investigations. Mike talks Kara through the autopsy while his mic records everything.

“I would posit her age to be mid to late teens,” he says.

“Have you run prints?” Harper asks.

“Yes. Nothing on file. Not that I expected there’d be.”

“No, of course.”

“The victim was hit in the head. There is bruising to her temple, and her jaw.” Mike points to the purple marks on the girl’s neck. “And strangled to death, as we thought. He applied pressure to her throat until she asphyxiated.”

“Poor girl,” Kara says.

“No damage to the mouth. I sent over an X-ray of her teeth. Your people are running the dental records now.”

Even dental records can be hit-and-miss—if a victim doesn’t go to the dentist, there’s no record to be checked against. Harper has the same situation with the killer’s DNA. She has plenty of it to pin someone to the murder scene, but without that DNA being in the CODIS, it’s as useful as teeth no dentist has ever seen before.

The sheet covering the body is pulled down to her abdomen. As clinically detached as Mike can be sometimes, he has respect for the bodies he’s presented with. “As we saw previously,” he says, careful in his phrasing, “the killer was not kind when he raped her. There is significant tearing, and evidence of internal bleeding.”

Harper shakes her head. “Awful.”

What this girl went through . . .

“There was some tissue beneath her fingernails,” Mike says, lifting the young woman’s hand to show Harper. “I’ve scraped it out and sent it over.”

“It’ll match what we have already from his semen, but that doesn’t do us any good until we have him in custody,” Harper says. “No other significant details?”

Mike shakes his head. “Sorry. The toxicology report is fast-tracked, but it won’t come back until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“What do you expect it to say?” Harper asks him.

Mike turns the victim’s head to one side, revealing the puncture mark on her neck. “Dextromethorphan, like the last one. Seems to be his knockout drug of choice. Especially when you consider this girl scratched him in her final moments. You have to be somewhat aware of what’s happening when you do that. Maybe he wants them like that.”

He steps back and Kara covers the girl over with the sheet. The victim slides back into cold storage with awful finality.

Harper winces at the sound. “Anything else, Mike?”

The ME removes his gloves. “Right now, all we’ve got is a killer with an inclination toward raping young black girls. He likes to drug them, so we know he prepares ahead of time. That’s not passion. That’s planning. He hasn’t been caught yet, which means either he is very meticulous, or very lucky.”

“Sounds on point to me,” Harper says. “Samples of hair and everything?”

“CSU finished at the scene. You should get their report by this evening, if they pull their thumbs out of their asses.”

“Doubt they’ll find anything,” Harper says.

Mike shakes his head. “This young woman was just like the last. Killed right where he left her. There was no transportation of the body that I can tell. Once he killed her, he left her where she was. So he transported her while drugged.”

“Otherwise we have to ask ourselves what the hell this girl was doing out in a cornfield in the middle of the night . . . okay, thanks Mike.”

Harper steps back out into the sunshine. Her stomach rumbles. She should grab some lunch, but there’s something about a dead girl in cold storage that makes the thought of a chilled sandwich not so appealing.

She returns to the station and, of course, Mike is right—nothing from CSU to write home about.

John Dudley drops by her desk. “Dental records the ME sent over match those of a girl, east side of the Hill.”