The eyebrow shot up another few millimeters. “For two weeks?”
Archie drew the hiking path across the page of his notebook. It was maybe forty feet above, at its closest point. Then it curved and headed farther up the hillside, deeper into the woods. “People rationalize.”
“You thinking she was a prostitute?”
“Based on the shoes?” She was still wearing one—an amber Lu-cite pump. The other they had found nestled in moss underneath a fern a few yards away. “Maybe. Maybe she was a stylish thirteen-year-old. Hard to tell.” Archie looked at the grinning mouth, the teeth straight and white against all the surrounding blood and gristle. “She’s got nice teeth.”
“Yeah,” Robbins agreed softly. “She’s got nice teeth.”
Archie watched as his partner, Henry Sobol, came slowly, tentatively, down the hillside. He was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, despite the heat. Henry kept his eyes down, lips pursed in concentration, arms outstretched for balance. With his arms extended and his shaved head, he looked like a circus strongman. He walked sideways, trying to step in Archie’s footprints, but his feet were bigger than Archie’s and each step sent a spit of dirt and small rocks rattling down the embankment. Above them, on the hillside, Archie could see that everyone had stopped to watch, their faces anxious. A homeless man looking for a place to set up camp had found the body and called the police from a convenience store a few blocks outside the park. He had met the first officer to respond and taken him to the site, where the officer had promptly lost his footing in the loose dirt and slid down the hillside into the creek, polluting the crime scene and nearly breaking his leg. They would have to wait for the autopsy results to even know if they had a homicide.
Henry reached the bottom, winked at Archie, and then turned and waved merrily up above. The cops at the top of the hill all turned back to their work taping the crime scene off, and keeping the growing group of sportily dressed hikers and joggers at bay.
Henry smoothed his salt-and-pepper mustache thoughtfully with a thumb and forefinger and rocked forward to examine the body, allowing himself a reflexive grimace. Then business. “What killed her?” he asked.
Robbins placed a bag over one of her bloated, mottled hands and secured it with a twist-tie. He did it gingerly, as if she had nodded off and he didn’t want to wake her. The fingers curled, blistered and swollen, and the nail beds were black, but the hand was still recognizable, though probably not printable. The other, which lay half buried in the earth and moss, was crawling with beetles. “Search me,” Robbins said.
“She die here?” Henry asked.
“Hard to say until we know what killed her,” Robbins answered. He gazed up at Henry. “Do you wax your head or is it naturally that shiny?”
Archie smiled. Henry had called Robbins out at the police softball game that spring. It had been like this ever since.
“I was just asking,” Henry said to Robbins.
“Ask me after the autopsy,” Robbins muttered. He produced another bag and gave it a snap in the air, and then gently lifted her other hand so he could slide it into the bag. The beetles scattered, and Henry took a small step back.
Archie wrote something in his notebook. It had been thirteen years since they had stood over another dead girl in that park. That had set them on the trail of the Beauty Killer. They didn’t know back then it would become a career. Or that Archie would become one of her victims.
A voice from up the hillside hollered, “Hey.”
Henry looked up at the path, where Claire Masland was waving for them to come back up the hill. He put his hands on his hips. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said to Archie.
Claire motioned again. This time she put her whole arm into it.
“I’ll go first,” Archie said. He glanced back at Henry and added, “So when you fall you won’t take us both down.”
“Ha, ha,” said Henry.
What do you have?” Archie asked Claire when they reached the path. Claire was small and angular with a very short haircut. She was wearing a striped T-shirt and jeans. Her gold shield was clipped to her waistband, along with a phone, a gun in a leather holster, and a pair of red plastic sunglasses jauntily hooked through a belt loop. She tilted her head at a young uniformed cop who was covered in dirt.
“This is Officer Bennett,” she said. “The first responder.”
Bennett looked like a kid, tall with a baby face and a slight double chin that pressed fretfully against a skinny neck. He hunched his shoulders miserably. “I’m so sorry,” he said.