If this Jane Doe case looked enough like the other two murders, plus the one in St. Paul, they might be able to convince the brass of the need for a formal task force. In the meantime, they did what they could on their own.

“He said she looked that way when he hit her,” Liska said. “The poor kid is going to see that face in his sleep for years to come.”

“But he isn’t seeing a license plate?” Kovac asked. “A make and model? A parking sticker? Nothing else.”

“He wasn’t paying attention. He was more interested in the two half-naked girls making out in the back of the Hummer.”

“Where are they?” Tippen asked. “I volunteer to interview them.”

Liska broke off a piece of her doughnut and threw it at his head. “You’re such a perv!”

He arched a woolly eyebrow. “This is news to you?”

“Topic, people!” Kovac barked. “It’s as hot as Dante’s fucking inferno in here. I’d like to get out of here sometime before heatstroke sets in.”

“He says there was a box truck ahead of him,” Liska said, “on his left, as the car merged into traffic in front of him.”

They all perked up at that.

“What kind of a box truck?” Kovac asked.

“I had to psychologically beat him like a rented mule to get that much out of him,” Liska said. “And how could that be relevant anyway? The truck was already to his left. The car was only just merging into traffic from the right. And the vic fell out of the car, not the truck. It’s the one thing he’s very clear on. The vic fell out of the car.”

“Would he work with a hypnotist?” Elwood asked. “He’s too traumatized now to want to consciously go after those detailed memories. A hypnotist could be the thing.”

“I’ll ask him,” Liska said. “What’s the harm?”

“Go for it,” Kovac said. “If he can give us a tag number—even a partial—on that car, we could find our whodunit before we even know who he done it to.”

Liska took his coffee and washed down the last of her doughnut, shuddering at the bitterness.

“Oh my God! That’s horrible!” she said. “Start a fresh pot, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’ll put hair on your chest, Tinks,” Kovac said.

“Great. Something more for Tip to fantasize about,” she said, heading for the door.

“And, Tinks?”

She looked back over her shoulder.

“Tell the guy he didn’t kill anyone.”

4

The residents of Minneapolis were waking to a new year by the time Liska finally went home. Waking, or better yet, sleeping in. She had been up for twenty-four hours. Sleeping in sounded like the greatest luxury in the world. Unfortunately, she probably wasn’t going to find out firsthand whether it was or not.

If she could grab a couple of hours before the boys roused themselves, she would be lucky. Kovac was pushing for the autopsy on their Jane Doe to be done ASAP. If he could get an ME to give up New Year’s Day and jump their dead body to the head of the line, they would all be standing around the dissection of a corpse instead of a holiday turkey before the day was out.

She pulled into her driveway, enjoying the feeling of being home that was unique to this house. She had purchased it a year and a half ago—a side-by-side duplex in an established older neighborhood near Lake Calhoun. Built in the 1940s, it was solid and substantial. Renovated in 2000, it had all the necessary creature comforts. She and her boys lived on one side. The other side she rented to the twenty-six-year-old sister of a patrol cop she knew.

Liska felt like she had been an adult for a hundred years, but the day she had bought this house, she had felt like she was just becoming a grown-up all over again. It was the first house she had ever purchased on her own. There was something very important in that.

When she and Speed Hatcher had been married, they had done what all young married couples did—bounced from a cheap apartment to a better apartment to their first real home—a bungalow in a nondescript neighborhood a few blocks off Grand Avenue in St. Paul. There had been some happy times in that house, particularly when the boys were small. There had been plenty of not-so-happy times in that house as their marriage had disintegrated, and after the divorce.

She had stayed there for too many years on a handful of sad excuses. She got the house in the divorce. It was the only home her sons knew. It was convenient for their father to visit.

Speed worked Narcotics for the St. Paul PD. His schedule was erratic at best. Nikki had reasoned it would be better if he could drop in to see his sons when he could. If she moved them closer to her job in Minneapolis, he would have to make an effort to visit. Effort was not Speed Hatcher’s forte, not even where his boys were concerned.

But he had let them down so many times, Nikki had begun to think it would be better if they lived in the other of the Twin Cities. Easier for her to make excuses for him. Instead of blaming their dad for being absent from their lives, they could blame their mom for moving them away from him. Hell of a compromise.

The move had not gone over well. Uprooting a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old had been nothing short of child abuse by the boys’ standards. The adjustment period had been brutal. But R.J.—her youngest—had inherited his father’s easy charm and made friends quickly, and Kyle—her studious one—had immersed himself in his new school. A year and a half later, they didn’t entirely hate their mother anymore.

They had made this house their own, their family of three. There was no Ghost of Speed Past haunting their holidays here. There were no memories of rare happy family times or too-common arguments that ended with doors slamming.

As predicted, Speed’s visits were infrequent, but better to be infrequent with the excuse of distance than infrequent with the excuse of just doesn’t give a shit. Nikki accepted that bargain and considered her short commute to work downtown her consolation prize for the rest.

The house was quiet as she let herself in. She stopped in the powder room off the front hall, as was her habit coming home from a homicide. She wanted to see what she looked like, as if the most recent murder might have left some indelible mark on her—a line, a scar. All the years she’d been working homicides, if they had each left a visible scar she would have looked as much like a zombie as her Jane Doe by now.

She checked herself in the mirror. Purple shadows were smudged beneath blue eyes that had been bright with the promise of a night out New Year’s Eve. All that remained of her eye shadow was a dark line in the crease of her eyelids. Her pixie-short silver-blond hair had been flattened by her Elmer Fudd hat, then had made a halfhearted effort to bounce back with a few swipes of her hands. She looked a little like she might have stuck her finger in a light socket at some point during the evening, or seen a ghost . . . or a zombie.

The thought took her back to the scene on the highway, to the young woman lying like a discarded bundle of rags, torn and stained and forgotten.

Probably not forgotten, she corrected herself. Assuming the killer had been the one driving the mystery car, he must have had a rude surprise when he realized his victim had managed to somehow get out of the trunk.

While there was probably some valid twist of the laws of physics that might have allowed that body to fall out of a moving vehicle and bounce back upright, Nikki was set on the idea that their Jane Doe had still been alive when the Hummer hit her. It was a terrible thought. It would have been less terrible to believe the victim had already been deceased, but she didn’t. That the young woman had been alive when she came out of that trunk was a stubborn notion that had dug its talons in deep and wasn’t about to let go.