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)
Kat looked behind her, to the street below. “There’s a bus that travels that street, and it would have had a direct view to this spot. I’ll find out what time the last run is and get in touch with the driver. My guess, though, is that he killed her somewhere else and then posed her here.”
Posed her.
“Why, though? Why sit her up in a chair?” Sienna murmured, leaning her body around the chair and checking behind it. Nothing other than some loose gravel. “Why not just dump her?”
“I don’t know,” Kat answered. “But it obviously wasn’t to keep her comfortable if she was already dead.”
“And why here?” Sienna asked, nodding down the incline. “It’s weird.” She looked across the street at the dark building. “What about a worker or someone there? Maybe they saw something?”
“I looked up the company, Armstrong and Sons. They make tools. But it’s closed on Saturdays.”
She looked back to the woman, a small shiver snaking up her spine. The cards in the woman’s hands had been bagged, but she went over them in her head. Seemed it was a losing hand. The woman sitting cold and silent in front of her had been dealt more than one.
CHAPTER THREE
“Good morning,” Sienna said, handing Kat the cup of gourmet coffee she’d picked up on her way in and kicking the door to the meeting room closed. Though it barely felt like morning, considering she’d only managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep after leaving the eerie crime scene and falling into bed just as the sun began to rise.
Kat practically grabbed the offered cup. “I knew immediately I was going to like you and that we’d be best friends forever and ever,” she said, and Sienna laughed, setting her own coffee and the small, white paper bag containing cream, sugar, and stirrers on the table before hanging her purse on the side of her chair. She offered the bag to Kat, and they both removed the miniature cups of creamer and packets of sugar and began mixing them into their coffee as Kat nodded to the board at the front of the room. She had hung a photograph of the cards—front and back—but nothing else. “Ingrid will be here shortly. I’ll get all the crime scene photos up in a minute,” Kat said, tapping the folder in front of her. “And then I was going to start scouring the casino websites to see if I could at least narrow down the ones where staff wears a short black skirt and white shirt.”
Sienna was worried those were the two basics for the majority of them. “We’ll split the list,” she said. If they could figure out where this woman had worked, they’d be able to figure out her name.
“Great.”
She had to hope the ME had found something more to add to what they did have, which wasn’t nearly enough but also wasn’t nothing. Sergeant Ingrid Dahlen had met them at the crime scene earlier that morning and gone over what Kat and Sienna had already taken in about the victim and the props. Despite the time, the older woman had shown up looking wide awake and completely put together, as if she never slept and might have been sitting at her desk doing the paperwork she’d told Sienna she hated when the call had come in. She hadn’t had any guesses about the cards, either, and didn’t know what to make of them. But she’d volunteered to meet with the medical examiner first thing that morning and then let them know what he’d found. Sienna was eager to get started hunting down the person who’d committed this crime, but she was grateful not to stand in a chilled room with an open cadaver while the medical examiner pointed out all the ways she’d been brutalized. It was a necessary part of the job but one she’d rather read the report on. And if that made her a less hardened detective than others in her profession who were able to detachedly look at a dead body that had been alive and vital mere hours before, then so be it.
The door opened, and Sienna looked back, expecting to see the sergeant, but instead, a man in his early to midthirties with a short beard and wearing a janitor’s uniform came in, wheeling a large garbage can. He looked up, obviously surprised to see them, bringing the hand not holding the garbage can up and removing one of his earbuds. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know anyone was using this room.” He gestured to the trash can near the front of the room and then to another one near the coffee station. “Mind if I just empty those real quick, and I’ll be out of your way?”
“Hey, Ollie, it’s fine,” Kat said, and Sienna couldn’t help noticing the man seemed surprised Kat had used his name. Ollie put his earbud back in, wheeling his trash can forward, as Kat looked back at the folder of papers she had on the table. “Oh,” she said, addressing Sienna, “the bus driver who drove that route yesterday will be in at eleven this morning. The last stop across from the crime scene is at eight p.m., so considering the time of death, it’s likely there wasn’t anything to see when he made the stop.”