He pressed for the first floor. “I got a feeling this is going to be a long road trip.”
Santa Barbara was approximately 150 miles north of the county that had previously been the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s stomping grounds. Ordinarily C.J. loved driving up the coast, but the unexpected rain with its gloom made the trip dreary.
They’d flipped a coin, and Warrick had lost the toss. Taking the keys, he’d gotten behind the wheel of the midsize vehicle the Bureau had provided.
C.J. settled back in her seat and stared straight ahead. The rain was almost mesmerizingly hypnotic, causing everything farther than twenty feet away to appear surreal.
“You know, it’s funny, but I miss her.” She glanced at Warrick to see if he was laughing. He wasn’t. “When I’m on the job, I find myself missing her, and when I’m home, my mind keeps going back to the case.”
That was the complaint of more than one special agent. He could feel the car beginning to climb. Warrick swallowed to relieve the pressure in his ears. “Welcome to the world of parenthood.”
She laughed shortly, shifting in her seat. Rain made her restless. Or maybe it was this case. “How would you know?”
He shrugged. “I read a lot.” Moving with the curve in the road, Warrick spared her a glance. “You know, Rodriguez could just as easily have come with me.”
C.J. thought the man was a good agent, but he liked his weekends to himself. “Rodriguez is still in love. Leave him with his fiancée.”
Driving was getting a little trickier. Warrick slowed their speed down to a careful thirty-five miles an hour. “Well, Culpepper isn’t in love.” Not the way the man liked to complain about his wife, although Warrick suspected that there was a measure of affection in the grousing. “I know he would have been more than happy to make the trip to Santa Barbara.”
C.J. looked at him incredulously. “You telling me that you’d rather have Culpepper sitting here next to you than me?”
For an optimistic woman, she had a habit of twisting his words to give them a darker meaning. “No, I’m telling you that it would have been okay for you to sit this one out.”
C.J. wished he’d stop trying to make things easy on her. How could she feel like his equal if he kept insisting on spreading out his cloak for her so she could walk over the puddles without getting her shoes dirty?
“No,” she told him quietly, firmly, “it wouldn’t have.”
“C.J. you’re a new mother—”
Not that again. “Not so new,” she contradicted. “Sure, I’m a mother now, but I’m also a special agent with the FBI.” And that was very important to her. She’d had to buck not just her mother, but her father as well to get to where she was. And that didn’t begin to take in the male agents along the way who resented having a woman on equal footing with them. In many ways it was still a man’s world. “It’s who I am and I’m damn proud of it. I’ve just got to find the proper balance to this combination, that’s all. And you throwing up roadblocks all the time isn’t exactly helping.”
What was the use? thought Warrick. Mules had nothing on C.J. He slowed down more as a car, traveling in the opposite direction, its tires plowing through large puddles, sent an even heavier shower of water their way. For a second the windshield was obscured. Rain brought out the nutcases, he thought, all driving as if they had something to prove.
“I’m not throwing up roadblocks,” he told her. “And I thought I was helping.”
“Think again.”
They needed a break. His eyes on the road, Warrick switched on the radio. He wanted some music to take the place of their voices.
She frowned at his selection and changed the station.
He switched it back, then batted away her hand when she reached for the dial again. “I’m driving, I get to pick the music.”
“I’m driving on the way back.”
He didn’t bother looking her way. “Deal.”
Crossing her arms in front of her, C.J. settled back in her seat again and watched the rain fight an endless skirmish with the windshield wipers.
She could never get used to it, C.J. thought. The smell of the bleak, dismal area where the Medical Examiner did his gruesome work permeated her senses even as she tried to breathe through her mouth.
The victim’s body had been taken to the morgue. The local coroner had held off on the mandatory autopsy until the FBI special agents could get there. The moment they’d gone to the sheriff’s office, the man had brought them here.
C.J. tried to divorce herself from the fact that the body on the table had been a person with aspirations and dreams under a day ago. Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. She succeeded only marginally. Glancing at Warrick’s profile, she saw that it remained stoic. Didn’t he have any feelings?
Steeling herself, she approached the table.
“When was the time of death?” Warrick asked the heavyset man in the white lab coat.
The M.E., a Dr. Hal Edwards, glanced at the notes on his clipboard before answering.
“As near as I can place it, about fifteen hours ago.” He flipped the pages back in place, retiring the clipboard to a desk. “I hate to tell you this,” he looked from one to the other, “but you’ve probably figured it out already. Most of the clues have been washed away. It’s been raining steadily here for the past few hours.”
“Who found the body?” C.J. asked. She resisted the desire to brush back the victim’s hair. There were no signs that the woman had suffered. She supposed that was some consolation to the victim’s family, although not much.
“A jogger running for cover stumbled over her in the park. Called the police.”
“Man?” Warrick wanted to know. It was not unheard of to have a killer take a life then pretend to be the first one on the scene to try to avoid suspicion.
“Woman. They had to give her a sedative to calm her down.”
C.J. couldn’t take her eyes off the girl’s face. “God, she looks like a kid.”
“We’ve got a positive I. D.” the M.E. told her. “She was older than she looked.” This time he didn’t refer to his notes. The facts were still fresh. “Waitress in a local restaurant. No priors, decent girl. Engaged to be married. She looked like she fit the description of the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s victims, so we called you.” He recited the similarities. “Bruising around the neck, died of asphyxiation, pink nail polish.”
C.J. carefully circled the girl, moving away from the M.E. The marks around the girl’s neck were dark, ugly. She could almost feel the killer’s hands around her own throat, literally choking the life out of her. C.J. shivered, looking down at the girl’s hand. Something nagged at her. She picked it up to examine it.
The polish looked darker than the others had been. She looked closer.
Putting the lifeless hand down again, C.J.
