The first time he’d seen the navel ring he’d been at the Sand Shack and she’d walked in, off-duty, wearing a bikini top and short-shorts. He stared, he couldn’t help it. It was like a light was shining on her, a bright light, and everything became clear.

He knew Angie. She and his online fantasy were one and the same.

He didn’t need to confirm it, but he did. Right there. He couldn’t wait until he went home. He logged onto a computer-the Shack had several hookups-and went to MyJournal.com. Click, click, click.

There.

The navel ring, one of the “A for Anonymous” pictures, right there next to the journal entry where she described what it was like to give a guy a blow job.

Half the college girls had navel rings, but Angie’s was unique. A gold hoop with three hanging charms-a seashell, a leaf, and a rose.

The same as the picture.

But if that wasn’t enough to convince him that he knew his fantasy girl, she also sported the same rose tattoo on her breast, revealed by her bikini.

Angie was the slut.

He went home, read Angie’s online diary again. His fantasies, which had been only that, untouchable, were now in clear focus.

She was meant to be his. It was as if some god had thrown all the pieces to the puzzle in his lap and he’d finally put it together.

Angie was a whore, a slut. Cut from the same cloth as the whore who’d lied about his father. On the surface, Angie was nice, sweet, polite. Almost demure. But in private she revealed her true self, talking about her sexual relations with nearly a dozen men over the last six months.

Fucking hypocrite whore.

And she walked right into his trap. It was obviously meant to be, everything. His plan worked, from setup to execution.

She had walked right up to him, smiled. “I came as soon as I could.”

He’d driven to his place. She hadn’t even thought to question it. The lie he’d told her was so believable she didn’t doubt his sincerity for a minute.

It wasn’t until they were inside that he saw a brief look of panic. He gave her a Coke.

Twenty minutes later she was unconscious. When she woke up, she was tied to his bed, her mouth glued shut, naked. His penis grew hard from the vision of Angie so vulnerable, shivering and trying to scream.

He shook his head, clearing the memories. He was going to be late for class. He locked up his treasures and rushed out.

He’d let himself fully remember Angie and his methodical breaking of her spirit later. Tonight. When he could enjoy it.

FIVE

WILL AND CARINA were fifteen minutes late for Angie Vance’s autopsy, and Chen had gone ahead and prepped the body.

“What did we miss?” Carina pulled on a smock and latex gloves, though she had no intention of touching the body.

“The next of kin left thirty minutes ago, so you haven’t missed much. I just started.”

“That was fast,” Carina said to Will. “She must have come down right after we left her.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Will asked her.

Carina hated facing death, but she would want to know with every certainty. She’d need to see the truth with her own eyes.

Chen motioned for them to approach the table. “Something interesting I noticed as soon as I started the visual examination. Someone washed her body before she died.” Chen stood at Angie’s feet, a laser pen in hand.

“Why?”

“That’s your job, not mine. There was soap residue under her arms and in her hair. I sent samples to the lab. But the body was cleaned, no doubt in my mind. From the moisture in her skin I’d say she was wrapped in the bags shortly after the bath.”

“Why would he clean the body?” Carina asked, almost to herself. “To get rid of evidence?”

“Very likely,” Will said, though Carina’s question had been more rhetorical.

“Creepy,” she said. “And planned. He held her captive, raped her, kept her under his control for forty-eight hours, then he releases her to wash her before killing? Why not kill her, then wash her body? It would be easier. She wouldn’t be able to fight back.”

“She may have been too weak to fight,” Will offered, “or drugged.”

Chen said, “We’ve sent blood samples to the lab and will collect tissue and stomach contents during the exam.” He pointed the laser pen at her ankles and then her wrists. “She was restrained with rope, you can see the rope burns on her limbs. I was able to find a couple fibers embedded in her skin that hadn’t been washed away. Probably nylon or a cotton fiber, not hemp.”

Carina had been avoiding Angie’s face, but now that Chen had turned his attention to her mouth, she had to look.

The bandanna had been removed, though threads of it still clung to her lips, which were grotesque, purple and red pulp. Her neck was bruised as well, though it didn’t look like hand or finger marks, which would be one sign of possible strangulation. Her open eyes showed burst blood vessels. Not all suffocation deaths showed reticular hemorrhaging, which was why many nursing home or infant murders were deemed natural causes attributed to old age or sudden infant death syndrome. But Angie’s death was not peaceful. She had fought for every breath, the evidence of her failure still in her eyes.

“The glue was an industrial-strength superglue of some sort. I’ve never seen this before in my career. Because the skin is a porous surface, glue would be absorbed in the skin and wouldn’t hold its strength for an extended period of time. Because the skin is constantly losing cells, eventually the glue would flake off. But the addition of the bandanna gave the glue something to adhere to.”

He directed their attention to the victim’s overall appearance. “She hadn’t been fed or given fluid in at least forty-eight hours. She has obvious signs of dehydration.” The signs weren’t obvious to Carina, but she took Chen’s word for it. “I’m certain when we get inside I can confirm that. But there’re two things that are odd.”

Odd? This could get weirder?

Chen directed the laser to her stomach. “Bruising takes several minutes to hours to form depending on the trauma. Bruising is a constantly changing process, the color and size and depth of the injury growing, then shrinking and fading. Her stomach and upper chest appear to have the beginning signs of bruising. Very faint.”

“Faint?” Will said. “I can’t see anything.”

Carina focused on the areas Chen indicated. She’d never have noticed anything unusual until he pointed out the very slight discoloration. “What can cause that?” she asked.

“Any number of things. And it happened around the time of death. Bruising stops after the heart stops beating. Something heavy was placed on her, perhaps to facilitate her death or to keep her body from convulsing.”

A horrific thought came to Carina. “Could the killer have laid on top of her?”

“Yes,” Chen said, a rare sigh coming from deep in his chest. “It’s cases like this that make me think about early retirement,” he said quietly, looking at Angie’s face.

“What’s the second odd thing?”

He pointed the laser at her navel. “She recently had a navel ring ripped out. It had begun to heal, so I’d guess it was removed twenty-four to forty-eight hours before her death.”

He turned his attention from the tear in the navel to the two detectives on the other side of the table. “Ready?”

No, Carina thought, but nodded along with Will. They silently observed Chen’s meticulous internal examination, his assistant following orders expeditiously.

By the end of the autopsy, they had learned and confirmed several important facts:

Angela Vance had been raped multiple times. There was extensive tearing and deep tissue damage in both orifices, indicating that a sharp, foreign object had penetrated. There was no biological evidence. The killer could have used a condom. If he didn’t, that evidence had probably been destroyed or contaminated when he cleaned the body.