Forgotten in Death(9)

“No.” Yee, an Asian woman who barely hit five-two, shook her head. “Workers tossing things in the dumpster are going to be wearing work gloves, and whoever wrapped the body sealed up or wiped down. We got what might be a shoe or boot print on the plastic, but it’s going to be too smeared to give us anything. Blood, hair, fiber on the inside of the plastic, but at on-site exam, it looks like the victim’s. We’ll turn it over to Harvo.”

If there was a speck of hair or fiber not the victim’s, Eve knew Harvo would find it.

“Any good news?”

“We found the kill site.”

“Thought you would. Toward the southwest, near the security fence.”

Yee smiled, nodded. “You must be a trained investigator.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Me, too.” Yee turned to lead the way. “Blood trail starts here, due to crappy wrapping job. So the plastic loosened enough for her to drip out after he/she/they carted her along the fence line, through the gate, and into the dumpster. It’s just over twelve feet.”

Near the southwest corner of the security fence, beyond its gate, its cams, Eve studied where Alva Quirk died.

Blood soaked into the ground, spattered over the fence, through it to where a sweeper took samples of the spatter on the side of a large backhoe.

“Some overgrowth on this side,” Eve observed. “She’d be out of the lights, the cams, be able to snuggle in pretty good. Is this area cleared?”

“On this side, yeah.”

Eve moved over to the fence, crouched down, scanned. “Good view from here. She could see the city, and she’d see anybody who, say, walked in or out of the gate. Can’t see the access from the street from here, but if anybody walked to or toward the gate, she saw them. Unlikely the killer arrived armed with a roll of plastic sheeting or a crowbar. I bet they’d find both in that equipment shed over there.

“Peabody.”

“I’ll go find out.”

“I assumed you’d already looked. I’m sending sweepers in there next.”

Eve shook her head at Yee. “We got called to another murder just south. Another construction site.”

“I heard something about it. What gives?”

“Human remains closed off in a portion of what was supposed to be a wine cellar of a post-Urban-built restaurant. DeWinter’s on it.”

Interest bloomed on Yee’s face. “Do you want me and my team to take that one? We’re about finished here, and can send a runner to take what we’ve got to the lab.”

Save time, potentially, and she knew Yee’s work was top-notch and thorough. “Yeah, tag your dispatch and clear it. You’re going to need to rappel down about ten feet from where they broke through the top of the basement—cellar. Ask for Mackie.”

“Got it. Give me a second.”

Yee turned away as Peabody came back through the gate.

“Storage shed, tools, small equipment. Organized,” Peabody added. “I saw rolls of plastic sheeting. Crowbars, sledgehammers, wedges, shovels, picks, nail cartridges, cutters.”

“Yee will get some of her people to process it. The victim sees you, or hears you—or both. You’re doing something you shouldn’t be, saying something you shouldn’t say. Quirk gets out her book. Has to write down the infraction or crime, describe the perpetrator or perpetrators. Let’s have EDD check out the security on the gate, see if it’s been compromised. If not, they had a way in, they had access. They see her or she makes her presence known. ‘Sorry, but I have to report this.’”

She circled the kill spot.

“What do you do? Maybe you try to intimidate, charm, threaten, maybe you offer her a bribe. Maybe, but it comes down to she’s a witness to something you can’t afford a witness to. So you’ve got to know you can get a weapon and the sheeting in the shed there. You’ve got to have a way through the gate.”

Closing her eyes, Eve ran it through in her head.

“Got to be two of them. At least two. One has to keep her engaged, keep her right here, keep her talking while the other goes for the weapon. She wasn’t a big woman, why not just beat her down or strangle her? Takes time maybe. But a couple bashes is pretty quick. Cut some plastic off the roll, wrap her up—but you gotta get gone, so you rush it. Dump her in. Maybe it buys you a day or so. Crew tosses shit in. Why would they look in there? Another day or so before she starts to smell, right? Or maybe before that, they haul the dumpster off to the recycling center.”

Eve gauged the ground again. “You can’t see the blood unless you look straight over here from the gate. You don’t see it from the work area inside the fence until you move the heavy equipment. You take her backpack, whatever she had—especially that book. Do you take time to clean the murder weapon and replace it? Smarter if you take it with you, shove it into the backpack, get rid of all that somewhere else. We’re not talking big smarts here, but maybe smart enough for that.”

“We’ll check any tools for blood traces,” Yee told her. “I’m going to leave a couple of my team here to finish, and the rest will start on the second site.”

“Appreciate it. You’ll be able to tell which roll they cut from. They hadn’t started any work this morning, so it would be the freshest.”