the gorge rise in the back of her own throat and swallowed hard. Inappropriate reaction. She hoped Sam hadn’t noticed. Taylor was as detached as the rest of them, but something about this girl was breaking all her protocols. The individual murders hadn’t bothered her in the beginning. Well, not that much. Not like this.
“Taylor, did you notice? She’s got that same stuff on her temples.”
Taylor stepped closer, bent over the body. On either side of the girl’s face, two smears of a whitish substance glistened under Sam’s light. They looked like streaks of moonlight.
“Appears to be identical material. Any chance the labs are back on it?”
“We should have an answer by the time I finish her up. We didn’t get anything usable from the earlier samples, they were too degraded.” Sam started working her way systematically through the Jane Doe’s hair.
“You said it wasn’t biological.”
“Right. No DNA to obtain. There was plenty of it on this body, though, nice and fresh. I put it into the LCMS.”
“That’s your special little machine that spits out the chemical compositions, right?”
“Special little machine? How about liquid chromatography mass spectrometer? I’d like to spend more time, do some sophisticated testing to see its composition, but I need a comparison sample with the actual material that’s leaving the marks to be sure. In the meantime, we have enough to at least get an idea of what we’re working with.”
Sam continued her examination, and Taylor stood beside the body, lost in thought.
Two months ago, Taylor had been called on the murder of Elizabeth Shaw, a senior at Belmont University. Elizabeth had disappeared walking home to her apartment from class. The city buzzed, searches were initiated, but it was all too late. Her body was found in the tall grass in a gulch off of Interstate 24. Thrown out of a car door like litter, she’d lain in the gulch for at least two days. The postmortem damage to her body had been animal related. The biological evidence was copious; her arms and legs were hog-tied. They hadn’t determined where she was actually killed.
Elizabeth Shaw’s murder scene didn’t look precisely like the original work of Snow White, but during her autopsy, flakes of red Chanel lipstick were recovered from her mouth. They reexamined the knots on the ropes, found them to be much more complex than they originally appeared. And in a touch that alarmed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, a two-decades-old newspaper clipping about the first murder in the original Snow White case had been pulled from her vagina. All thoughts of this being a simple murder flew out the window, and the homicide team found themselves quietly reopening a twenty-year-old case.
In quick succession, two more girls were taken and murdered. Candace Brooks was killed three weeks later, left by the side of Interstate 65 this time. The press started attributing the killings to “The Highwayman”—the interstates being the one common denominator between the two crimes. Candace’s autopsy was eerily similar to Elizabeth Shaw’s, right down to the newspaper clipping—though this one detailed the twenty-year-old report about the Snow White’s second murder.
When victim number three, Glenna Wells, showed up on a boat ramp on Percy Priest Lake, the media beat the medical examiner to the scene. A sharp-eyed young reporter had managed a glimpse of the body, saw the glowing crimson lips, the presentation of the body, and ran back to her producer with video footage. The producer was an old-timer, recognized the tableau from his early days on the crime beat. The Highwayman was relabeled the “Reemergence of the Snow White Killer.” Taylor and the rest of Metro were lambasted for not warning the area that a serial killer long dormant was back in their midst, and the media frenzy began. Glenna’s body gave them a third newspaper clipping and no more clues. And now there was a
“Taylor, did you notice? She’s got that same stuff on her temples.”
Taylor stepped closer, bent over the body. On either side of the girl’s face, two smears of a whitish substance glistened under Sam’s light. They looked like streaks of moonlight.
“Appears to be identical material. Any chance the labs are back on it?”
“We should have an answer by the time I finish her up. We didn’t get anything usable from the earlier samples, they were too degraded.” Sam started working her way systematically through the Jane Doe’s hair.
“You said it wasn’t biological.”
“Right. No DNA to obtain. There was plenty of it on this body, though, nice and fresh. I put it into the LCMS.”
“That’s your special little machine that spits out the chemical compositions, right?”
“Special little machine? How about liquid chromatography mass spectrometer? I’d like to spend more time, do some sophisticated testing to see its composition, but I need a comparison sample with the actual material that’s leaving the marks to be sure. In the meantime, we have enough to at least get an idea of what we’re working with.”
Sam continued her examination, and Taylor stood beside the body, lost in thought.
Two months ago, Taylor had been called on the murder of Elizabeth Shaw, a senior at Belmont University. Elizabeth had disappeared walking home to her apartment from class. The city buzzed, searches were initiated, but it was all too late. Her body was found in the tall grass in a gulch off of Interstate 24. Thrown out of a car door like litter, she’d lain in the gulch for at least two days. The postmortem damage to her body had been animal related. The biological evidence was copious; her arms and legs were hog-tied. They hadn’t determined where she was actually killed.
Elizabeth Shaw’s murder scene didn’t look precisely like the original work of Snow White, but during her autopsy, flakes of red Chanel lipstick were recovered from her mouth. They reexamined the knots on the ropes, found them to be much more complex than they originally appeared. And in a touch that alarmed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, a two-decades-old newspaper clipping about the first murder in the original Snow White case had been pulled from her vagina. All thoughts of this being a simple murder flew out the window, and the homicide team found themselves quietly reopening a twenty-year-old case.
In quick succession, two more girls were taken and murdered. Candace Brooks was killed three weeks later, left by the side of Interstate 65 this time. The press started attributing the killings to “The Highwayman”—the interstates being the one common denominator between the two crimes. Candace’s autopsy was eerily similar to Elizabeth Shaw’s, right down to the newspaper clipping—though this one detailed the twenty-year-old report about the Snow White’s second murder.
When victim number three, Glenna Wells, showed up on a boat ramp on Percy Priest Lake, the media beat the medical examiner to the scene. A sharp-eyed young reporter had managed a glimpse of the body, saw the glowing crimson lips, the presentation of the body, and ran back to her producer with video footage. The producer was an old-timer, recognized the tableau from his early days on the crime beat. The Highwayman was relabeled the “Reemergence of the Snow White Killer.” Taylor and the rest of Metro were lambasted for not warning the area that a serial killer long dormant was back in their midst, and the media frenzy began. Glenna’s body gave them a third newspaper clipping and no more clues. And now there was a
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