Pretty Little Wife(71)
As the doctor finished typing in notes, Ginny stood by a tray of personal belongings and picked up a small plastic bag. The thin silver bracelet in it had a charm with the number seventeen engraved on it. “Was Karen wearing this?”
Lori glanced over. “Yes.”
“Maybe it was a birthday gift. I’ll have to ask her parents about it when they come back.” After the initial identification, Karen’s parents had been numb and exhausted. Ginny had sent them for coffee and a short break before the rest of the investigative team descended and started asking about Aaron.
“Do we have an official time of death? . . . Unofficial would be fine.” She just needed to know when Karen was killed in comparison to when Aaron went missing.
“Well, that’s going to take a bit longer.” Lori stood between the two tables now, one with Aaron’s body on it and the other with Karen’s. “The decomposition seemed off, and there wasn’t a blood pool for him, which would be consistent with a stabbing death.”
“Maybe someone moved the body.”
Lori nodded. “Definitely. After they thawed it.”
Wait . . . no. “Excuse me?”
The doctor pointed at Aaron’s lifeless form. “My working theory is that he was killed then frozen then thawed then stabbed and put in the vehicle. Stabbing is not the cause of death. He was long dead before someone picked up the knife.”
This case kept taking odd turns. But Ginny had not seen this one coming. “Thawed . . .”
“It’s not going to sound any better if you repeat it.” The doctor picked up a file and flipped through a few pages. “I had an accidental drowning case about a year ago, right when I took over the department. The body had been frozen, so I did quite a bit of research on this. To confirm these bodies had been frozen and thawed, I measured the activity of short-chain—”
“Whoa.” Ginny held up a hand to stop what sounded like gibberish but was really quite important. “Adding a lot of science talk isn’t going to clear this up. Your point is, you know someone killed these two and froze their bodies?”
“Yes.” Lori lowered the file. “I collected samples from inside the standing freezer on the cabin’s back patio, and they confirmed my theory. Both had been in there. Her under him.”
“Any chance you found anything else in the freezer?”
“Sorry, no. No fingerprints or stray hairs or anything.” Lori looked at Karen’s body. “I’ll check her stomach contents to try to backtrack and see if we can match that up and get an approximate time of death for Karen. We don’t have clothes, but her body did give us some clues.”
“Such as?”
The doctor held up a bag. “She had scrapes all over her torso and arms, and her feet were pretty ripped up. Scabbed over in places and new cuts in others. All of which suggests she ran through the woods naked, probably more than once. These needles support the running recently. They were on the bottom of one of her feet.” Before Ginny could ask a question, the doctor took off with more information. “She has ligature marks on her neck that match the rope found in the cabin.”
“Are there fibers, DNA—anything that points us toward a killer? The cabin was clean except for one set of prints on the rocking chair.” Ginny pointed to Aaron. “His.”
“For someone who ran through the woods and got punched and hit with something—maybe a piece of wood, though I’m not sure yet—her body is debris-free. She has broken fingernails and defensive wounds, so she clearly fought back.”
Good for you, Karen. “Did you get anything from those?”
“A speck of human tissue under one nail, which I hope will lead us somewhere. I’ll put a rush on it.”
“Any sign of sexual assault?”
“I can’t rule it out or say it happened, but no bodily fluids.”
In any other case, a defense attorney would be all over the lack of blood and DNA evidence, claiming contamination or some other thing that explained the trace levels pointing to Aaron here. That was the least of her worries right now.
“So you’re saying the evidence suggests someone—and the only ‘someone’ evidence might be from Aaron—stripped her, fought her, chased her through the woods, maybe more than once, beat her, strangled her, killed her, froze her, and then at some point thawed her and placed her on the bed, tied up with the same rope he used to kill her.”
“It’s a lot, I know.”
“But is the series of events right?”
Lori shrugged. “Strange, but I can only tell you what the evidence says. I’m working on the timing for you, but I can’t promise, and I certainly can’t answer the biggest question.”
Ginny was impressed the doctor could narrow it down to only one question. “Which is?”
This time Lori sighed. “If Aaron killed her, then who killed him?”
Chapter Forty-Six
“YOU WANT ME TO BELIEVE THAT MY BROTHER WENT TO A cabin in the middle of nowhere, where a missing woman happened to be, and he got stabbed while someone killed her.” Jared sat up higher in the chair, no longer sprawling and looking half-asleep.
It sounded ridiculous when Jared spelled it out. The connections also stuck out as obvious. “You have the right pieces but maybe not the right order,” Lila said.