I nod, wondering if this is what Lena looked like a week after her life was taken. As she lay in a field or in a shallow grave somewhere. Before her skin peeled off and her clothes disintegrated, I wonder if she looked like this. Like Lacey. Pale and bloated from the hot, humid air.
“She talk to you about that?”
Detective Thomas nudges his head toward her arms, toward the tiny cuts in her skin. I nod.
“A little bit.”
“How about that?”
He glances at the larger scar on her wrist, that thick, fleshy purple lightning bolt I had spotted days before.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, we didn’t get to that.”
“Fucking shame,” he says quietly. “She was too young to feel pain like that.”
“Yeah,” I nod. “Yeah, she was.”
The room is quiet for a minute, all three of us taking a moment of silence to mourn not only the violence of this girl’s death, but of her life, too.
“Didn’t you check the alley before?” I ask. “I mean, back when she was first reported missing?”
Detective Thomas looks at me, and I see anger flash across his face. The fact that the body of this girl was found mere feet from the place she was last seen and it took almost a week to find her doesn’t look good, and he knows it.
“Yeah,” he says at last, sighing loudly. “Yeah, we did. Either she was somehow missed, or she was placed there later. Killed in another location and moved.”
“It’s a pretty small area,” I say. “Narrow. The dumpster takes up most of the space. If you checked back there, I can’t imagine you would have missed her. There aren’t many places to hide—”
“How do you know all this if you rarely go back there?”
“I can see it from my lobby.” I say. “My window points in that direction.”
He stares at me for a second, and I can tell he’s trying to make an assessment, determine if he’s just caught me in a lie.
“I obviously don’t have the best view,” I add, trying to smile.
He nods, either satisfied with my answer or filing it away to revisit at another time.
“That’s who found her,” he says at last. “The garbagemen. She was wedged behind the dumpster. When they lifted it up to empty it, they saw her body fall out.”
“Then she was definitely moved,” the coroner interrupts, tapping the backs of her arms. “That right there is livor mortis. The pooling indicates that she died on her back, not in a seated position. Or wedged anywhere.”
A wave of nausea rolls through my stomach, and I try to stop my eyes from scanning her body again, evaluating her wounds, but I can’t. She’s bruised, mostly, her pale skin looking marbled in places where I now know gravity forced the blood to settle. The coroner had mentioned ligature marks, and my eyes trace the length of her limbs, from her shoulders down to her fingertips.
“What else do you know?” I ask.
“She was drugged,” the coroner says. “We found heavy traces of Diazepam in her hair.”
“Diazepam. That’s Valium, right?” Detective Thomas asks. I nod. “Was Lacey on medication for anxiety? Depression?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I had prescribed her some. But she wasn’t taking anything yet.”
“The growth level suggests the drugs were ingested about one week ago,” the coroner adds. “So, at the time of her murder.”
Detective Thomas glances at the coroner after this new revelation, and I feel a sudden impatience reverberate through the room.
“How soon can you have the full autopsy?”
The man looks at the detective, then at me.
“The sooner I can get started, the sooner I can have it for you.”
I feel both men glance over at me, a nonverbal cue that I’ve been less than helpful. But my eyes are still glued to Lacey’s arm. To the tiny cuts littering her skin, to the ligature marks on her wrist and the jagged purple scar stretching across her veins.
“Well, no offense, Doctor Davis, but I really didn’t bring you here for small talk,” Detective Thomas says. “If there’s nothing else that you can remember, you’re free to go.”
I shake my head, my eyes boring into her wrist.
“No, I remembered something,” I say, tracing the path her razor must have taken to make such a crooked mark. It must have been messy. “Something about Lacey that day. Something that’s different.”
“Okay,” he says, shifting his weight. He eyes me carefully. “Let’s hear it.”