Broken Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dress. What she saw caught her completely off guard.
“Oh, God.”
Jessica fell back on her heels, nearly toppling into the water. She grabbed at the earth, found purchase, sat down hard.
Having heard her cry out, Byrne and Calabro came running over.
“What is it?” Byrne asked.
Jessica wanted to tell them, but the words were logjammed in her throat. She had seen a lot in her time on the force—in fact, she really believed she could look at anything—and she was usually braced for the special horrors that came with working homicides. The sight of this dead young woman, her flesh already giving way to the elements, was bad enough. What Jessica saw when she lifted the victim’s dress was a geometric progression of the revulsion she felt.
Jessica took a moment, leaned forward, and once again picked up the dress’s hem. Byrne crouched down, angled his head. He immediately looked away. “Shit,” he said, standing up. “Shit.”
In addition to having been strangled and left on a frozen riverbank, the victim’s feet had been amputated. And it looked to have been done recently. It was a precise and surgical amputation, just above the ankles. The wounds had been crudely cauterized, but the black and blue trauma from the excisions ran halfway up the victim’s pale, frozen legs.
Jessica glanced at the icy water below, then a few yards downstream. There were no body parts visible. She looked at Mike Calabro. He put his hands in his pockets, walked slowly back to the entrance of the crime scene. He was not a detective. He didn’t have to stay. Jessica thought she had seen tears welling in his eyes.
“Let me see if I can redline the ME’s office and CSU,” Byrne said. He pulled out his cell, took a few steps away. Jessica knew that every second that went by before the Crime Scene Unit secured the scene, precious evidence might be slipping away.
Jessica looked closely at what was most likely the murder weapon. The belt around the victim’s neck was about three inches wide, and appeared to be made of tightly woven nylon, not unlike the material used to manufacture a seat belt. She took a close-up photograph of the knot.
The wind churned, bringing a bitter chill. Jessica braced herself, waited it out. Before stepping away, she forced herself to look closely at the woman’s legs one more time. The cuts looked clean, as if done with a very sharp saw. For the young woman’s sake, Jessica hoped that it had been done postmortem. She looked back at the victim’s face. They were now linked, she and the dead woman. Jessica had worked a number of cases in her time in homicide, and she was forever connected to each of them. There would not come a time in her life when she would forget the way death fashioned them, the way they silently asked for justice.
Just after nine o’clock Dr. Thomas Weyrich arrived with his photographer, who immediately began snapping away. A few minutes later, Weyrich pronounced the young woman dead. The detectives were cleared to begin their investigation. They met at the top of the slope.
“Christ,” Weyrich said. “Merry Christmas, eh?”
“Yeah,” Byrne said.
Weyrich lit a Marlboro, hit it hard. He was a seasoned veteran of the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Even for him this was not a daily occurrence.
“She was strangled?” Jessica asked.
“At the very least,” Weyrich replied. He would not remove the nylon belt until he got the body back to the city. “There’s evidence of petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes. I won’t know more until I get her on the table.”
“How long has she been out here?” Byrne asked.
“I’d say at least forty-eight hours or so.”
“And her feet? Pre- or post?”
“I won’t know until I can examine the wounds, but based on how little blood there is on scene, I believe she was dead when she got here, and the amputation took place elsewhere. If she had been alive, she would’ve had to have been tied down, and I’m not seeing ligature marks on