Field Of Graves. J.T. Ellison

us, and we don’t want to make a misstep.”

      “You think it’s the same guy?”

      “I don’t know. Until Sam finishes the post and we run all the evidence, there’s no way to know. But the posing, the staging, the sexual assault—we may be dealing with more than a simple predator.”

      “A serial,” he said, and she heard the teeniest bit of excitement in his voice.

      “Possibly. And that, my friend, is top secret information. I’ll be there shortly. Be good.”

      “You, too. Oh, hey. There’s a big front headed our way. We’re supposed to have bad weather for the next few days. Be careful.”

      Taylor clicked off the phone, tossed the cigarette under the wheel of a relatively new Mustang convertible. Lincoln wasn’t kidding. The sky was darkening, and she could smell the storm; the dry tang of rain getting stronger by the minute. She looked to the west, saw the first lightning strike. Maybe the storm would improve her mood; she always loved a good rain.

      Knowing she could put it off no longer, she headed back in to give Sam the bad news.

14

      Sam was stripping off her gloves and shield when Taylor walked back in. Her heart reached out to her friend. Taylor was exhausted—that much was readily apparent. Her hair was spilling down from her ponytail, her shoulders were slumped, and there was no bounce in her step. Her eyes were so gray Sam thought rain could pour out of them at any moment, and the smudges underneath were getting worse. She looked as if she had a cold starting on top of it all; she’d been sniffing for most of the afternoon. Sam went to her and surprised her with a quick hug. Taylor hugged her back, quick and hard.

      “You look like crap, Taylor. You need to get some sleep and some sinus medicine.”

      “Thanks, Mom.” She gave her a halfhearted smile. “I don’t have good news.”

      “Neither do I. You want to go first?”

      “You go on ahead.”

      “Well, this one’s cause of death was definitely from the stab wounds. There were two deep ones, got right into her heart. She didn’t suffer long. The other wounds are perimortem, and different. They’re vicious, ragged wounds with notches, two more in her chest and one right in the gut. Just missed her liver. From the clean stabs, it looks like he used a regular knife with a serrated blade; the flesh on one side of the wound is torn.”

      “And the others?”

      “Same knife, I think, but he turned it after it went in. Spun it around. A little extra to make it hurt worse. There’s no way to know for certain which were first, but there was a lot of bleeding. She was alive for the torture, unfortunately.”

      Taylor blew out a breath. “You’re saying ‘he’ a lot.”

      “She was raped, repeatedly, over a length of time. There was enough tissue left to show healed tears on both her vagina and anus. There were also fresh tears. Couldn’t get any semen—it was washed away by the river—but she was being roughed up for a while before she died. And...”

      “And?”

      “She may have been poisoned as well. She looks a lot like Shelby on the inside. Her liver has the same characteristics. I took all the samples and had them run over to Simon. I asked him to drop everything and analyze them.”

      “Sam, this isn’t good. Same guy, same point of origin? I’m praying we don’t have a serial on our hands.”

      “You had news to share, too. What was it?”

      “Lincoln got an ID. Her name is Jordan Blake. She’s a junior at Vanderbilt.”

      Sam was quiet for a moment, then whispered under her breath, “Damn.”

      “Yeah, damn is right. Do you have any idea when she was killed?”

      “She hadn’t been in the river for more than a week. Four or five days would be my guess. He could have tossed her in anywhere south along the Cumberland, and it took her this long to float upstream, or she was weighted and broke free. My bet is the latter. He threw her away like a piece of trash, Taylor. There wasn’t any of the reverence or—” She paused, bit her lip. “I don’t want to say gentleness of the other kill. But Shelby’s death didn’t seem as careless. This one—Jordan—she pissed him off.”

      “Was she killed before Shelby?”

      “I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, not with the water damage.”

      “What about the herbs?”

      “Like I said, I can’t be sure whether they were herbs, though the stuff I scraped off looked similar to what we got off Shelby. The thing is, if the composition is the same, he was with the body after she washed up on shore. Further proof he weighted her, then let her come to the surface to be found.”

      “Or...wherever he had her, he unweighted her, scattered the herbs on her back, and let her float in.”

      Sam thought about that for a minute. “Okay, that works for me, too. If he had spread them after she was on the bank, they wouldn’t have been wet, and these were definitely mucky. But recent, the water would wash them away quickly. He was right there, Taylor.”

      Sam watched Taylor fiddle nervously with a ring on her right ring finger. It was a thin silver band, very plain. She’d picked it up in Hawaii on a brief vacation and hadn’t bothered to take it off since. It held some symbolic meaning to her. One night, when they’d been very drunk, she told her it was a circle of life and a circle of death. Sam was aghast when Taylor said she didn’t want to take it off, that it was a constant reminder of her failings. Sam had to resist the impulse to reach over and wrench the ring right off Taylor’s finger and throw it in the trash. Taylor Jackson had no failings that Sam could see, other than caring too damn much about her job.

      “Taylor, there’s one other thing.”

      “More? What?”

      “She was pregnant. About six weeks along.”

      Taylor could do nothing but stare. The thoughts were flying, bouncing off each other like bumper cars. None were coming together.