Vero and I stiffened. She elbowed me in the ribs.
“I know!” I hissed.
“But I’m awarding thirty points to Officer Donovan and Officer Ruiz for locating the deceased,” Nick continued. “They will now be responsible for clearing and securing the area while the rest of you wait for the ME. That role will be played by Peter Kim, our forensic tech volunteer.” Pete trudged through the brush, carrying a plastic tote in one hand and his flashlight in the other, his lab coat peeking out from under his puffy parka. Vero and I lingered beside the grave while Pete met with the other teams outside the crime scene.
“Nice job,” Nick said, handing me a roll of yellow tape. His hand brushed my back as he went to join the rest of the class.
Bracken crackled under our feet as Vero and I got to work, stretching yellow tape around the bases of the trees. “The dummy is hacked to pieces,” I whispered. “And someone named the victim Carl. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“It has to be,” she whispered back. “There’s only a handful of people in this world who know how Carl Westover died, and not a single one of those people would be stupid enough to tell anyone that he was chopped into bits and stuffed into a freezer. We should stay cool,” she insisted as she tore the last of the tape from the roll. “None of the detectives seem concerned. And tons of people are named Carl, right? You saw how the instructors reacted. I bet one of them was just trying to screw with Nick. They probably watched too many episodes of The Walking Dead. That whole show is just eleven seasons of Andrew Lincoln dodging dismembered body parts while he shouts, ‘Carl!’” Vero bellowed the name in a raspy voice, doing her best impression of Rick Grimes while she staggered and made zombie faces.
I shushed her as a few heads turned our way, most of them giggling.
The teams began fanning out, dividing the crime scene into a grid and searching for evidence. Nick joined the other instructors with a begrudging smile as they razzed him about his desecrated dummy, each of them pointing the finger at someone else. Maybe Vero was right. No one seemed terribly disturbed by the discovery except Vero and me.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I did not drag my sleeping ass out of bed at oh dark thirty to watch some other team win the prize. I’m going to grab us a piece of this action before all the good clues are taken. Are you coming or not?”
“I’ll be right there,” I assured her.
As Vero picked her way back to the crime scene, I retreated farther from the search parties, ducking under the yellow tape toward the razor-wire fence. I kept my back to the other teams, concealing my phone as I dialed Steven’s number again. Again, it rang to voice mail.
“Steven, it’s Finlay,” I said in a low voice, checking over my shoulder to make sure I was alone. “You know that … parcel I asked you to hold on to for me? The special one I asked you to keep at the farm for a while? I just need to know if it’s still there. That you didn’t move it or … open it for anybody. Call me when you get this.” I disconnected, feeling anxious and off-balance, unable to shake the feeling that the dismembered dummy was no coincidence as I started back toward the group. Ahead, shouts of I found something or Should I bag this, Detective? were answered by encouraging comments from the instructors while my sister called out the point values.
I paused, my phone light shining on a crumpled piece of paper in my path. I bent to pick it up. The paper was dry, which meant it couldn’t have been out here long. The sleet and freezing rain we’d had the night before would have turned it into frozen paste by now. I smoothed it out and held it under my light. The sales receipt was dated earlier that day from a hardware store not far from here. Three items had been purchased with cash: a pair of work gloves, a hacksaw, and a permanent marker.
I hurried through the brush, ducking back under the yellow tape to find Vero. “Hey, I think I found something,” I said, holding the receipt out to her.
Her eyes widened as she took it. “Where was it?”
“Past the yellow tape, about a hundred feet that way,” I said, pointing loosely to where I’d found it.
“Too far,” she said, handing it back to me. “That’s outside the crime scene. The instructors said they only dropped clues within fifty feet of the grave. Probably so we’re not out here searching all night. Why? What is it?” she asked when I refused to take it.
“Look at the items they bought.”
Vero frowned at the receipt. “If this was part of the exercise, why’d they leave the clue so far from the crime scene?”
“Unless it wasn’t part of the exercise at all.”
“Let’s wrap it up, everybody,” Nick called out. “Bag and tag the last of your evidence and sign it into the chain of custody with an instructor.”
I took the receipt from Vero and stuffed it in my pocket.
“But we still haven’t found the murder weapon,” Mrs. Haggerty’s grandson pointed out.
“Sometimes we don’t,” Nick said frankly. “Head back to your dorms and grab some shut-eye. Tomorrow, a few volunteers from the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office will be coming to assist us with a mock trial.” The announcement was met with excited chatter as teams began filing back through the woods toward the dorm.
Vero arched up on her toes, searching the crowd. “I’m going to catch up to Pete and see if he’s had any luck with our bullet. I’ll meet you inside.”
I lagged behind the rest of the herd, hoping to avoid Riley and Max, my thoughts still stuck on the dummy we’d found. Between Harris Mickler’s toxicology report and the dummy named Carl, it was starting to feel like the ghosts of my past were coming back to haunt me.
A cane clicked down, blocking my path, and I clutched my chest, sucking in a gasp.
“You really shouldn’t walk alone in the woods at night. You never know who might be out here.” Nick reached for my hand, helping me over a fallen branch.
“Like the axe murderer who hacked up your CPR dummy?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, exactly like that. When I find out which one of those assholes did it, I’m sending them a bill.” The path ahead of us was reasonably clear, but he held my hand anyway, both of us ambling slowly to the rhythm of his cane. “And now I’m going to be up all night correcting tomorrow’s handouts, because the autopsy report I prepared for our mock trial says our victim was strangled. And her name definitely wasn’t Carl.”
I forced out a laugh, determined to push thoughts of Carl Westover from my mind. Nick and the other cops weren’t taking the dummy seriously. I was probably overthinking this. “If it’s any consolation, it was a pretty fun class. You know, minus the whole being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night thing. You could have warned me about that, by the way.”
“That wouldn’t have been fair to the other teams. Besides, I told Charlie.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, remembering Charlie’s warning about getting to bed early. “That hardly counts.”
“Precisely.” He paused beside a tree, resting his weight against the trunk as he pulled me into the space between his legs. He smelled like coffee and his leather jacket, and faintly of the spicy cologne that he wore. The three together were a deadly combination, and my breathing became shallow as he reached for the zipper on my coat. “You know,” he said in a seductively low voice as he dragged it down. He reached inside my breast pocket, somehow managing not to touch me as he withdrew my cell phone from it. “You’re not supposed to have this in class. I should probably confiscate it, but I’ll let you off with a warning.” He grinned as I snatched it away from him. His expression grew serious as I checked to make sure the screen was locked before tucking it away. “Everything okay? I saw you leave to make a phone call. It’s not the kids, is it?”