Missing in Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

He smiled. “It’s interesting.”
    “How soon can you tell me if the blood came out of a warm body, or came out of a damn bucket?”
    “We’ll look at that. Wouldn’t be as fun, but the bucket’d make more sense. Problem being, the spatter’s consistent with on-scene injuries.” Obviously intrigued, he chewed and smiled. “Looks like a damn slasher vid in there. Whoever walked in living got sliced and diced, stuck and gutted. Then, you gotta say it’s interesting, went poof!”
    “Interesting,” Eve repeated. “Is it clear to go in?”
    “All swept. Help yourself.”
    He went in with her where a couple of sweepers examined the sinks, the pipes.
    “We’re looking at everything,” he told Eve. “But you’d have to have a magic shrinking pill to get out of here through the plumbing. We’re gonna take the vents, the floors, walls, ceilings.”
    She tipped her face up, studied the ceiling herself. “The killer would have had to transport himself, the body, and a grown woman. Maybe more than one killer.”
    She shifted to study the spatter on the stalls, the walls. “The vic standing about there. Killer slices her throat first; that’s what I’d do. She can’t call out. We get that major spatter from the jugular wound, partially blocked by the killer’s body.”
    Eve turned, slapped her hand to her throat. “She grabs her throat, the blood pumps through her fingers, more spatter there, but she doesn’t go down, not yet. She falls toward the wall—we get the smears of blood—tries to turn around, more smears. He cuts her again, so we have the spatter on the next stall there, and lower on the wall here, so he probably stuck her, and she stumbled back this way.” Eve eased back. “Maybe tries to make it to the door, but he’s on her. Slice and dice, and down she goes. Bleeds out where she falls.”
    “We’ll run it, like I said, but that’s how I read it.”
    “He’d be covered in blood.”
    “If he washed up at any of the sinks,” Schuman put in, “he didn’t leave any trace, not in the bowls, not in the traps.”
    “Protective clothes? Gloves?” Peabody suggested.
    “Maybe. Probably. But if he can get a DB out of here, I guess he could walk out covered in blood. No trail,” Eve repeated. “No drag marks. Even if he just hauled it up and carried it out, there’d be a blood trail. He had to wrap it up. If we go with protective gear and a body bag or something along the line, he planned it out, came prepared, and he damn well had an exit plan. Carolee was a variable, but he didn’t have too much trouble there either. He dealt with it.”
    “But he didn’t kill her. He didn’t really hurt her,” Peabody pointed out.
    “Yeah.” That point was something Eve had puzzled over. “And he could have, easily enough. The door doesn’t lock. Safety regs outlaw locks on public restroom doors with multiple stalls. He makes do with a sign, even though this had to take several minutes. The kill, the cleanup, the transport. And Carolee was missing for over an hour, so wherever he went, wherever he took her, he needed time.”
    “A lot of places on this boat. Vents, infrastructure, storage. You got big-ass ducts for heating and cooling the inside cabin deals,” Schuman told her. “You got your sanitary tanks, your equipment storage, maintenance areas. We’re going through here, but it doesn’t show how the hell he got out of this room.”
    “So, let’s find out where he went and work backward. And we need to find out who the vic was, and why she got sliced on the Staten Island Ferry. It had to be specific, or Carolee Grogan’s blood would be all over this room, too.”
    For the moment, Eve thought, the best she could do was leave it to the sweepers.
    Four
    “Why didn’t he kill Carolee?” Peabody wondered when they were back on deck. “It would’ve been easier. Just cut her throat, and get back to business. It wasn’t as if he worried about covering up a crime. All the blood was a