Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Sienna estimated the woman to be in her mid- to late fifties. Her dyed brown hair with two inches of gray roots was gathered in a ponytail that had mostly come loose, likely during the fight for her life. The one she’d tragically lost. Sienna noted her rough-textured, overly wrinkled, and sagging skin and thought there might have been a fair bit of “hard living” that had gone on. Her gaze moved to the woman’s mottled neck. “It looks like a ligature was used,” she said, noting the particulars of the marks.
“Yes.” Kat gestured to a spot near the left side. “You can see here where whatever the killer used cut through the skin.” It had barely begun to bleed. She’d been alive when it had happened, but not for long. Sienna hoped it had been a quick death, but either way, her suffering was over now. Still, sadness tugged. Whether quick or not, the woman had to have been terrified at the end. “Art—he’s the medical examiner—will confirm.”
One of the criminalists, a young woman with straight black hair and a large overbite that gave her a bit of a bunny-ish look, pulled the cards carefully from the victim’s hands, peeled the tape away, and held them toward Sienna and Kat.
“It looks like her hands were bound to the back of the chair at one point,” the young woman said, gesturing with her chin in that direction. “There’s glue residue there and bruising on her wrists.”
Yes, Sienna could see that now, pink-and-red mottling where she would have been restrained. “So why the hell did he untie her and put playing cards in her hands?”
The criminalist, obviously knowing Sienna didn’t expect an answer, merely looked down at the cards, fanning them out slightly. “It looks like there’s six or seven here.”
“Can you turn them over?” Sienna asked. Had this victim won a game and enraged her opponent? The uniform said she worked in a casino, but she wouldn’t have been playing at her place of employment. That sort of thing wasn’t allowed while you were working a shift, and there were probably even rules for when you were not. No, if she’d been doing that, she would have been picked up on surveillance, questioned, and likely fired, the cards confiscated. Nothing slipped past casino security. Had she gotten off work and been playing cards with friends? But if so, why hadn’t she bothered to change clothes? “These cards are a message,” she murmured.
“Left by the killer,” Kat said.
“Yes,” Sienna agreed. “But why?”
The criminalist turned them over, fanning them out a little more. Yes, there were seven of them. An eight of spades, nine of hearts, jack of hearts, five of diamonds, jack of spades, ace of clubs, and two of diamonds. If there was some sort of message in the cards, Sienna didn’t see it. Then again, she’d never been very good with cards. Anything other than basic shuffling and she was all thumbs.
If the cards were some sort of message or calling card, it wasn’t one that was immediately obvious. At least not to her. “Do they mean anything to you?” she asked Kat.
Kat studied them for a moment and then shook her head. “No, but I’m no card shark. Except when it comes to Uno. That’s my specialty.”
The side of Sienna’s lip quirked, but she didn’t laugh. It never felt right to her to laugh in the presence of a murder victim’s lifeless corpse. Other cops didn’t always feel that way—in fact many of them went out of their way to crack jokes—but she knew it was a coping mechanism, and she didn’t judge them for it.
“Bag them for us, Malinda,” Kat instructed. “And by the way, this is Sienna Walker, my new partner,” she said to the three criminalists, gesturing to them one by one. “Malinda Lu, Abbott Daley, and Gina Marr.”
Sienna murmured a greeting. “Do you have an estimate on the time of death?” she asked Malinda, who was still the closest criminalist.
“She’s only been dead for a few hours,” Malinda said. She was very soft spoken and had a slight accent that Sienna couldn’t place. “Rigor has barely set in. I’d guess four hours? Not more than six.”
Sienna furrowed her brow, addressing Kat. “Who found her?”
“A homeless man who sleeps here sometimes. He was pretty wasted and got belligerent with the responding officers, so they took him to jail. I’ll get another statement later this morning and see if he remembers anything else, but it sounded like he came up here, saw her, dropped his nightcap, and hauled ass to the convenience store a couple blocks away. This was all about an hour ago. They called us. There’s no reason at this point to consider him a suspect. He could barely walk, much less haul a chair and a body up an incline while carrying a bottle of liquor.” She gestured to a spot off to the side where a broken bottle lay, the concrete surrounding it wet with whatever rotgut had spilled.