Who did this to you? Who are you?

Kendall always thought of the dryer in the Kitsap County property processing room as a “clothesline of death.” She carefully logged in the victim’s clothes and hung them in the dryer. It was a bulky piece of equipment that functioned more like a warming oven than a spin dryer. Clothing hung limply until it dried to crispness. Body fluids and, in the case of the Little Clam Bay victim, seawater would provide a stiffness like starch.

Heavy starch.

“How’s our girl in the morgue?”

It was Josh.

“She’s still dead,” Kendall said, a little irritated that he’d missed the autopsy. While it wasn’t required to have two investigators there, murders were so infrequent in Kitsap County that an extra pair of eyes and hands would have been useful.

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

Kendall closed the glass-fronted door. “You mean like the fact that some freak cut off her nipples, raped her, and tortured her? That kind of out of the ordinary?”

“You seem pissed off at me.”

Kendall peeled off her latex gloves and threw them in a receptacle.

“I could have used you there, Josh.”

Josh murmured something about being sorry before he made his excuse.

“I had an interview with the paper that I couldn’t get out of. They’ve been hounding me. I’m getting a feature story. Probably front page.”

“I doubt that,” she said, heading toward the door.

“Huh?”

“A dead woman trumps a self-centered cop any day.”

Chapter Twenty-four

September 21, 1:30 p.m.

Port Orchard

Later that afternoon, Kendall Stark fixed her eyes on the autopsy report as Birdy Waterman went about her business going through the department’s supply manifest for new orders. She was low on blades and the heavy needles used for the sometimes hasty and careless suturing of a victim, post-autopsy. Birdy wasn’t like many of her contemporaries who had graduated from medical and law school with the full acceptance that the dead they’d see in the course of their careers should only be viewed as evidence, nothing more. She had gone to medical school at the University of Washington on a scholarship for Native Americans. She never said so, but she was more concerned about helping the spirits of the dead find their way home. A clean autopsy, given with love and respect, was preferred over the crime-fighting approach of so many. She was a scientist, to be sure, but a compassionate one who knew that life was a continuum and death was not the end. For that reason Birdy always ordered the finest-size needles she could, even when the medical supplier didn’t see the need for the tiny stitch.

Kendall looked up from the sheaf of papers. “You’re certain that missing tissue from the victim’s face was postmortem?”

Birdy stopped making hash marks on the supply list. “There are some indicators that she’d been battered on her face, but it’s hard to say with complete certainty.”

Kendall locked her eyes on the pathologist. “Cause of death?”

“Manner of death: homicide, for sure,” she said. “But she’s been in the water for some time, and it’s hard to say if she was suffocated or strangled. I’m concluding asphyxiation. Found adhesive around her cheek area, indicating she was gagged with tape, most likely good old duct tape.”

“Tortured?” Kendall asked, although she knew the answer.

“Raped vaginally and anally. No semen. My guess is the perp wore a condom.”

“Considerate of the bastard.”

“More likely careful. At any convention of my ilk you’ll find a symposium on the CSI effect. Perps are boning up by watching forensic TV shows to find out how to avoid detection.”

“So I’ve heard,” Kendall said. “We can thank Hollywood for that.”

Birdy nodded, and Kendall followed her into the chiller, indicating she had something she wanted to show her. She held up the dead body’s right arm. “See the discoloration there?”

Kendall noted the faint purple and black striations that ringed the thin, delicate wrists.

They’d discussed them at the autopsy.

“Wire, not rope. You can see how the binding dug into the skin, nearly slicing it?” She flexed the wrist and nodded for Kendall to come closer. “You don’t even need a scope to see that despite the fact that the water plumped her skin up a bit and softened the grooves, there are several rows of indents.”

“I see. Bound with wire. Postmortem too?”

Birdy let the wrist rest on the stainless table. She set it down gently, as though the body could still feel the chill of the metal.

“Not at all. My guess is that she was bound with wire for a time, and then the wire was removed. There was some tissue healing. Then, of course, she was put out of her misery by the perp.”

Kendall felt a chill and pulled her sweater tighter around her torso. She let her hands retract tortoiselike into her garment’s long sleeves.

“Are you saying she was held captive?”

“Stomach is empty. In fact, I have no indication that our victim has eaten anything for at least five days. Nothing.”

“Anything that will help ID her?”

Birdy shook her head. “Not really. No tattoos, decent dental work, no nothing that would give us a leg up to run any kind of check in the system. Anyone matching her in your missing-person’s database?”

Kendall shook her head. “Not so far.”

“There’s also this,” Birdy said, pointing to some tiny specks lifted from the victim’s vaginal walls. It was hard to say exactly what they were. Dr. Waterman narrowed her focus as she twisted a swab into the light next to her autopsy table. There were six small flecks. They appeared opaque, not transparent or translucent. It was hard to say what color they were. One side seemed off-white; the other a reddish hue. She deposited the swab into a plastic bag and secured it.

“This one’s for the lab team in Olympia,” she said. “Who knows where this will lead, but in the meantime you might need some extra help to ID this one. Help of the artistic kind. Who is this girl?”

In the basement of the tidy white house on Sidney Avenue, Birdy Waterman covered up the morgue’s sole dead body while Kendall Stark looked on. The two of them silently pushed her into the chiller.

Neither woman spoke, although both were thinking the same thing.

You were someone’s daughter, sister, maybe even a wife. You are being missed by someone. Someone out there-besides the killer-is wondering where you are right now.

If no one claimed the body in a week, they’d bury her in a Port Orchard cemetery, in the no-man’s-land that local law enforcement from Seattle to New York called Potter’s Field.

PART THREE. Skye