Near Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the crime scene was on the agenda even if it meant soaking trousers.
    When they passed the Route 3A exit, Cyrus reached over and turned off the radio, prompting Avakian to swear at him. “Three miles,” he said in response. “There’s a large pond. Let’s not overshoot it.”
    “I can drive and listen to the radio, it’s not that advanced,” Avakian grumbled.
    “This crap makes you crazy,” he replied, referring to football.
    “Our running game sucks. We need more balance.”
    “No,
you
need more balance.”
    “Yeah, right,” Avakian countered. “My egghead partner’s telling me
I
need balance. I like red-blooded American sports, you like libraries. Tell me which one of us is normal and which one needs professional help.”
    He guided Avakian off the road onto the shoulder as soon as he glimpsed the edge of Pinnacle Pond through the misty trees.
    Finding the location where her body had been discovered was a piece of cake because a knot of yellow police tape remained on a nearby tree. Cyrus had a wide-angle photo showing the body in a roadside depression: he and Avakian thus were able to stand over the precise spot, close to the grassy verge, down a natural slope in a shallow piece of ground puddled with runoff.
    Cyrus pointed to the highway. “All he had to do was pull off the shoulder, park there, pull her body out of the car, drag it three feet and push it down the slope. He’s in and out in under a minute.”
    “They couldn’t get any tire tracks,” Avakian said. “The grass is too thick and it was dry last week.”
    “No witnesses either,” Cyrus added. “He was probably here late at night when the traffic’s thin.” They were getting drenched.
    “Okay, we’ve seen it,” Avakian said, making a move back to the car. Cyrus wasn’t following. He was trying to decide whether to jump down into the wet ditch. “They went over the place,” Avakian implored. “You think you’re goingto find the perp’s wallet down there? Let’s go, for Christ’s sake.”
    Back in the car while Avakian dried his scalp with his pocket handkerchief, Cyrus offered up his assessment. “He picked her up in Boston off her usual beat, probably
didn’t
have sex with her, strangled her, drilled her head for whatever reason, drove her up here, pulled off the highway at a random place when there weren’t any headlights in his rearview mirror, dumped her just far enough off the road so she wouldn’t be spotted immediately, took the next exit and turned tail back to Massachusetts.”
    “Why no sex?”
    “Because he made no attempt to conceal the body by burying it, covering it up, dragging it another twenty yards and throwing it into the pond. That tells me he’s confident we wouldn’t find his DNA on her body. Just like the other two.” He seemed to second-guess himself for being so opinionated and he abruptly adopted a less certain tone. “I could be wrong. He could’ve used a condom.”
    Avakian grunted and turned the radio back on. “You keep thinking, I’ll keep driving.” He turned the volume up. “No ego problems here.”
    The rain was coming down too hard for Avakian to deign to use the parking lot. He pulled up to the coveredentrance of the Holiday Inn in Concord, got out and showed his badge to the attendant. The young man didn’t give him any lip and ran off excitedly to tell his buddies that a couple of FBI agents were on the premises.
    The assistant deputy medical examiner who’d conducted the girl’s autopsy over the weekend was attending a conference, and he agreed to meet with the FBI agents on short notice only if he could see them at the hotel. All the medical examiners in southern New Hampshire, along with their support staffs, were holed up for the day at an off-site meeting to get in-serviced on new database software that was supposed to make their lives easier. Dr. Ivan Himmel nevertheless had grumbled over the phone in a stream-of-consciousness way that there was nothing