“What are you?—”
“I said shut the fuck up.” I drive one-handed and check my emails, since Fabian will have sent over the file already, then I tap the map included, forward it to Aubree’s cell, and when I’ve cataloged exactly where we’re going, I lock my phone and settle in for the ten-minute drive.
ARCHER
“Can you go over it for us again?”
Drake Banks knows how to turn on the gentle charm. He knows how to work with a witness, and he sure as fuck knows how to smile for the wife-half of a hiking pairing, especially since the husband-half still has a chunk of last night’s chicken stuck in his short beard.
“I know this is overwhelming,” he croons, standing by the back end of an open ambulance and shielding a shaky Emmaleigh Rhodes from the harsh glare of the sun. “I know you already talked to the officers, but if you could just tell us one more time for the record, it sure would help us out.”
“I-I don’t know what else to tell you.” Her cheeks are green, her eyes are glassy, and the stench of a dead woman already sits pungent in the air, so it’s not like I can even blame her. “Ed and I come this way every other day, but we missed yesterday, so today is…” She shakes her head. “If we followed our routine exactly, we wouldn’t even be here today.”
“I think this change in routine was serendipitous,” Banks murmurs.The sly prick.“I understand this is hard for you, Emmaleigh, but if you hadn’t come until tomorrow, she might’ve stayed out here all alone for an entire extra day. It’s not fair you’re the one who found her, since this’ll stick with you for the rest of your life. But for her sake,” he doesn’t sayhername, and he doesn’t point twenty feet behind us to where Aubree andMinka are already working, “For that girl,I’m glad she was found today and not tomorrow. So, you were walking from which direction?”
Breathing noisily through her mouth, Emmaleigh pokes a thumb to her left. “That way.”
“Good, thank you,” Drake makes a note in his notebook. I make a note in mine.Fucked if I’ll rely on his documentation.“So you walked in from the west and… what?”
“W-we saw the taillights. I thought the car was on, because I thought the lights were on. But it was the sun.” Gulping, she dazedly studies her hands. “The sun was hitting them exactly right to make my brain think that. Sometimes people park in these small clearings because they wanna hike, too, so we didn’t even think much of it. We would’ve kept walking, but then I heard the…” Her cheeks glisten with sickly sweat. “I heard the flies. It was like there was a whole swarm of bees or something nearby.”
“So you decided to look a little closer?” I ask.
“Yeah, I just…” She places her hand on her stomach. “I smelled it almost as soon as my brain finished processing, from ‘the taillights are on’, to ‘are we about to be attacked by a swarm of bees?’, to ‘that smells so bad.’ Ed said we should just keep walking, but I…” She exhales a noisy breath. “I looked before I even really thought it through. That’s when I saw all the blood. And then I saw her.”
“Did you touch her?” Drake questions. “Even by accident? Even just a little bit?”
“No, I?—”
“You won’t get in trouble if you did. We just need to know, so we can account for that contact throughout our investigation.”
Still, she shakes her head. “We didn’t touch her. We got about…” She tries to show us by holding her palms apart. “We were about four or five feet from the car. That’s as close as we got. Then I screamed, and Ed…” She gulps.
Ed became a human vomit fountain.
“The police officer touched her,” she adds, tilting her chin toward a set of uniforms standing guard by the road. “They asked us if we touched her, and when we said no, one of them went over to her and…” She presses two fingers to her neck. “Here. To see if she was alive, maybe. Do you think…” She looks desperately from Drake to me. “Is it possible she was alive earlier, but because I didn’t check and I didn’t help?—”
“No.” Drake lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think you could’ve helped her today. Not the way you mean. But you helped her by calling the police, and by staying here with her until we arrived.”
“Detective Malone?” Minka’s soft voice draws my attention. Her professional detachment penetrates my senses second. “Do you have a moment?”
“Yeah.” I bring my eyes back to Emmaleigh and offer a small smile. “We really appreciate everything you’ve done today, Ms. Rhodes. We’ll need you to stay in contact for a little while yet, but you can lie down in the back of this ambulance for a while if you like. Try to get your bearings.”
She doesn’t respond verbally. Just a shaky jerk of her head and her eyes rolling high. Then she flops onto her back and lies on the steel floor instead of the perfectly good stretcher just six inches to her right.
Turning on my heels, I leave Banks behind and cross the dry, dusty clearing where cars have been parking consistently enough over the last few decades that none of the natural shrubbery grows here anymore. I duck under bright yellow police tape and switch from breathing through my nose to breathing through my mouth.
“Recorder’s on, Detective.” Minka peels a pair of white gloves off and drops them into a plastic baggie, while behind her, Aubree leans obsessively close to Sylvia Ryan’s car, since Josey Ryan lies in a bundled heap on the passenger side. “Josephine Ryan is an eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate set to attend Copeland U in the fall.” Minka seals the small bag and sets it on top of a tarp already piled with evidence that’ll make its way back to the lab. “I can confirm this is a homicide, detectives.”
Detectives?
I glance over my shoulder and find Banks a mere foot to my right.
“Already?” he questions. “Without even taking her out of the car?”
“We’ll get her out soon, but it’s clear she died from rapid exsanguination due to a laceration from here,” she points toward her own throat, all the way near the underside of her right ear, “to here.” She stops her finger an inch below her left ear. “Carotid arteries were severed in one fast swipe.”
“So she bled out?” he presses. “Quickly.”