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humor than a mortician. But! He was as bright as a supernova and had helped me clear almost all of my cases. As I strode toward him, I shouted, “I am so glad to see you.”
    â€œWhat do we have?” he asked, grabbing his tool kit from the van’s backseat. I briefed him as we headed to unit 1B, where Lieutenant Rodriguez, Joey Jackson, and Arturo Zucca, the lead criminalist, waited.
    â€œBut you don’t think it’s a suicide?” Brooks asked as Weasel Cop took pictures of his shoe soles. “Because of the bound hands?”
    â€œGut feeling,” I said, shaking my head. “Her hands, yeah, but there are a few places on the ground that look like someone may have cleaned a spill, and again … Trusting my gut here.”
    I led Brooks to the master bedroom, and the rest of my team followed. We watched silently as he approached Jane Doe.
    Flashlight in hand, Brooks shone light up and down the girl’s body, then stooped to start collecting fly larvae of every size. Once he had vialed enough specimens, he shone the beam of light on the victim’s hands. “Rigor’s set in … And look at her fingers. The tips are dark purple—the blood’s settled. She’s been dead for a while.” Using a scalpel, he cut through the girl’s tank top right above her waist. Then, he cut into her skin and stuck a long thermometer through the incision, deep enough to pierce her liver. After a few seconds, he checked the thermometer’s gauge. “Sixty-nine point six … She’s probably been dead for about twenty hours.”
    â€œShit,” Joey muttered. “A day , just about?”
    Brooks shone his light on the victim’s bound hands again.
    She wore yellow acrylic fingernails.
    â€œThe tips have been cut off,” I noted. “And one nail, the right middle, is totally gone.” My eyes skipped around the closet. “And that one nail is presumably missing.”
    â€œWere they cut before or after she died?” Lieutenant Rodriguez asked.
    Brooks said, “Don’t know.”
    My sister would clip off the tips of her acrylics, then soak her fingers in acetone before going to the nail shop—the shop charged if they had to take them off. Back then, I had cringed as I watched my sister doing this, as nail carcasses flew here and there, sometimes hitting me in the eye, most times landing in the space between Tori’s bent leg and thigh; Technicolored nasty things that held two weeks’ worth of dirt, dead skin, and, on my sister’s worse days, green fungus.
    Had this (Jane Doe being frugal and doing some of the work herself) been the case here? Or did we have a monster who had watched episodes of CSI and knew that her fingernails held vital clues to his identity?
    Brooks swabbed the girl’s arms and neck with cotton swabs, in the hopes that the murderer had left behind saliva or semen. As he slipped the sticks into glass vials, he said, “I’ll do a rape kit when we bring her in.” He slowly exhaled. “So now, let’s address this.” He shone his flashlight on the girl’s neck. “See how her facial skin tone is redder than the skin tone of her arms? Could be an indicator of strangulation. You see how the bruising around her neck is in a straight-ish line? If she had hung herself, that belt would have left a bruise shaped like an upside-down V.” He studied the bruise, then shook his head. “He didn’t have to choke her so damned hard.”
    â€œSee the scratches?” I whispered, pointing at her face.
    There was a scratch on her right cheek that ended near the top of her lip. There was another scratch above her left eyebrow.
    â€œDid she fight him?” Joey asked.
    â€œI sure as hell hope so,” Lieutenant Rodriguez said.
    â€œCould she have tied her hands herself?” I inquired.
    Brooks narrowed his eyes, then cocked his head. “It’s