Fatal Care Read Online Free PDF

made?”
    “Nine-o-five.”
    Joanna looked slowly around the crime scene, her gaze going from the hole in the fence to the empty shoe box to the candy wrapper next to it. “Have you ID’d the victim?”
    “Not yet.”
    Joanna went over to the gaping hole in the fence and peered down through it. The slope was steep, going down at least sixty feet. Just inside the fence, the ground and large pieces of scrap lumber were soaked with blood. In some areas the blood had coagulated and formed mounds of clots.
    She backed away from the fence, inspecting the ground around the shoe box and candy wrapper. No blood. But a yard farther away was a half-dollar-size piece of bloodied scalp still attached to bone.
    “This is how I put it together,” Jake said. “The guy wanders into a tough neighborhood where drug deals go down all the time. Some crackhead sees an easy score and whacks the guy. Then the picture gets fuzzy. Why does the perp kick a hole in the fence to dump the body? Why make all that noise?” Jake shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. The perp has got the money. He’s not going to stick around and attract attention. He’s going to run like hell.”
    “The hole was in the fence before he was shot,” Joanna said matter-of-factly.
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Just inside the fence is a pool of clotted blood,” Joanna told him, and then pointed at the shoe box. “And just beyond the box is a piece of the victim’s scalp and skull. He was shot about where I’m standing with the bullet taking part of his head straight back. Then he fell sideways through the hole in the fence and stayed there long enough to bleed a fair amount.”
    “How did he get to the bottom of the pit?”
    “Two possibilities. Either he tumbled down, or somebody gave him a push.”
    Jake smiled at her, thinking she was better at deduction than most of the cops he knew. “You’re getting pretty good at this.”
    “It comes with practice.” Joanna smiled back. Jake was a big man with broad shoulders and rugged good looks. His thick brown hair, now graying noticeably, was swept back, accentuating his high-set cheekbones. On his chin was a small jagged scar that women couldn’t help but look at and wonder how he got it.
    “Does your crystal ball tell you who made the hole in the fence and why?” Jake asked, getting back to business.
    “No, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t tell me if all this is connected to those dead fetuses, either.”
    “A damn cemetery of dead babies,” Jake said, shaking his head in disgust. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.”
    Joanna glanced around the crime scene once more, focusing in on the shoe box. “Do we know if the shoe box belonged to the victim?”
    Jake shrugged. “We can’t be sure. But it was found next to the candy wrapper, and its lid was off. We think the perp took whatever was in it. With a little luck, the box will have the victim’s fingerprints on it.”
    “And maybe the perp’s, too.”
    “Yeah,” Jake said pessimistically, “along with his address and home phone number.”
    Joanna slipped on a pair of latex gloves and picked up the shoe box. It was empty, with no store logo or other markings on it. She brought the box up to her nose and sniffed carefully. It had a faint, disagreeable odor that Joanna couldn’t identify. Yet there was something familiar about it. She lifted the box up to Jake. “Take a whiff and tell me what you think.”
    Jake smelled the box. He, too, detected the faint, unpleasant odor but couldn’t place it. “At first I thought it was methyl alcohol. But it’s not.”
    “No, it’s not that,” Joanna agreed. “Maybe we can extract it and identify it using a chromatograph.”
    “We’ve got a lot of maybes here,” Jake said unhappily. “Maybe this, maybe that. All we’ve really got is a guy with half his head blown off and a bunch of dead babies.”
    “Which may or may not be interconnected.”
    “Another maybe,” Jake growled,