The Likeness: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

live dead girl, oxymoron and all. “Sam,” I said. “What’ve we got?”
Sam shot me a quick, searching glance; when he realized I wasn’t about to swoon or scream or whatever he’d had in mind, he nodded. He was starting to look a little more like himself. “White female,” he said, “mid-twenties to early thirties, single stab wound to the chest. Cooper says she died sometime around midnight, give or take an hour. He can’t be more specific: shock, ambient temperature variations, whether there was physical activity around the time of death, all the rest of it.”
Unlike most people, I get on well with Cooper, but I was glad I’d missed him. The tiny cottage felt too full, full of clumping feet and people shifting and eyes on me. “Stabbed here?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “Hard to tell. We’ll wait and see what the Bureau says, but all that rain last night got rid of a lot—we won’t be finding footprints in the lane, a blood trail, nothing like that. For what it’s worth, though, I’d say this isn’t our primary crime scene. She was on her feet for at least a while after she got stabbed. See there? Blood’s dripped straight down the leg of her jeans.” Frank shifted the torch beam, obligingly. “And there’s mud on both knees and a rip in one, like she was running and she fell.”
“Looking for cover,” I said. The image surged up at me like something from every forgotten nightmare: the lane twisting into the dark and her running, feet slipping helplessly on pebbles and her breath wild in her ears. I could feel Frank carefully standing back, saying nothing; watching.
“Could be,” Sam said. “Maybe the killer was coming after her, or she thought he was. She could’ve left a trail straight from his front door, for all we’ll ever know; it’s long gone.”
I wanted to do something with my hands, rub them through my hair, over my mouth, something. I shoved them in my pockets to keep them still. “So she got into shelter and collapsed.”
“Not exactly. I’m thinking she died over there.” Sam pulled back the brambles and nodded at a corner of the outer room. “We’ve got what looks like a fair-sized pool of blood. No way to be sure exactly how much—we’ll see if the Bureau can help there—but if there’s still plenty left after a night like this, I’d say there was a load of it to start with. She was probably sitting up against that wall—most of the blood is on the front of her top and on the lap and seat of her jeans. If she’d been lying down, it’d have seeped down her sides. See this?”
He pointed to the girl’s top, and the penny dropped with a bang: not tie-dye. “She twisted up the top and pressed it against the wound, trying to stop the bleeding.”
Huddled deep in that corner; rush of rain, blood seeping warm between her fingers. “So how’d she get over here?” I asked.
“Our boy caught up with her in the end,” Frank said. “Or someone did, anyway.”
He leaned over, lifted one of the girl’s feet by the shoelace—it sent a fast twitch down the back of my neck, him touching her—and tilted his torch at the heel of her runner: scuffed and brown, grained deep with dirt. “She was dragged. After death, because there’s no pooling under the body: by the time she got over here, she wasn’t bleeding any more. The guy who found her swears he didn’t touch, and I believe him. He looked like he was about to puke his guts up; no way he got closer than he had to. Anyway, she was moved not too long after she died. Cooper says rigor hadn’t set in yet, and there’s no secondary lividity—and she didn’t spend much time out in that rain. She’s barely damp. If she’d been in the open all night, she’d be drenched.”
Slowly, as if my eyes were only just adjusting to the dim light, I realized that all the dark patches and stipples that I had taken for shadows and rainwater were actually blood. It was everywhere: streaked across the floor, soaking the