Avery arrived at the scene exactly twenty-seven minutes later. Watertown, Massachusetts, roughly twenty miles outside of Boston's city limits, was just one of the numerous towns that shared the Charles River with Boston. The Watertown Dam sat upstream of the Watertown Bridge. The area round the dam was mostly rural, as was the crime scene she was currently parking in front of. She estimated that the dam was still a good fifteen miles away, as the city of Watertown was another four miles up the road.
When she walked down to the river, Avery ducked under a long strip of crime scene tape. The crime scene was quite large, the yellow tape making a huge rectangle from two trees along the bank to two steel poles that the police had jammed into the solid ice on the river. Connelly was standing on the bank speaking with two other officers. Out on the ice, a team of three people were hunkered down on the ice, looking in.
She passed Connelly and gave him a wave. He glanced at his watch, gave an impressed look, and waved her on.
"Forensics can fill you in," he said.
That was fine with her. While she was growing to like Connelly more and more with each case, he was still best taken in small quantities. Avery made her way out onto the ice, wondering if those few times on a rink during her pre-teen years might serve her well. Apparently, though, those skills were long gone. She walked slowly, careful not to slip. She hated to feel vulnerable and not fully in control but the damned ice was just so slippery.
"It's okay," one of the Forensics members said, noticing her coming toward them. "Hatch fell on his ass three times getting out here."
"Shut up," said another member of the team, presumably Hatch.
Avery finally made it across to where the Forensics guys were huddled. They were hunched down, looking into a cleanly broken portion of ice. Beneath it, she saw the body of a nude woman. She looked to be in her early twenties. Pale and partially frozen skin aside, she looked quite striking. Gorgeous, actually.
Forensics had managed to hook the body beneath the arms with plastic poles. The end of each pole had a simple U-shaped bend to it, coated with what looked like some sort of cotton. To the right of the broken ice, a simple insulated blanket waited for the body.
"And she was found like this?" Avery asked.
"Yeah," said the man she assumed was named Hatch. "By kids, no less. The mom called the local PD and an hour and fifteen minutes later, here we are."
"You're Avery Black, right?" the third member asked.
"I am."
"You need to check things over before we take her out?"
"Yes, if you don't mind."
The three of them stepped back a bit. Hatch and the member who had called him out for busting his ass held on to the plastic poles. Avery inched closer; the toes of her shoes were less than six inches from the broken ice and open water.
The broken ice allowed her to see the woman from her brow all the way down to her knees. She looked almost like a wax figure. Avery knew the extreme temperatures might have something to do with that, but there was something else to her flawlessness. She was incredibly thin-maybe just a scrap over one hundred pounds. Her flushed face was turning a shade of blue but other than that, there were no blemishes-no scrapes, no cuts, no bruises or even pimples.
Avery also noticed that other than her soaked and partially frozen blonde hair, there was not a single hair on her body. Her legs were perfectly shaved, as was her pubic region. She looked like a life-sized doll.
With a final glance at the body, Avery stepped back. "I'm good," she told the Forensics team.
They came forward and with a count to three, pulled the body slowly from the water. When they pulled her out, they angled her so that she came out mostly on the insulated blanket. Avery noted that there was also a stretcher beneath the blanket.
With the body fully out of the water, she noticed two other things that struck her as odd. First, the woman was not wearing a single piece of jewelry. She knelt down and saw that her ears were pierced but there were no earrings. She then turned her attention to the second oddity: the woman's fingernails and toenails were neatly clipped-to the point of looking recently manicured.
It was odd, but this was what raised the most alarm bells in her mind. With the frigid flesh turning blue beneath those nails, there was something eerie about it. It's almost like she's been polished, she thought.
"We good here?" Hatch asked her.
She nodded.
As the three of them covered the body and then carefully trudged back toward the bank with the stretcher board, Avery remained by the section of broken ice. She peered down into the water, thinking. She reached into her pocket, looking for a small piece of trash, but all she could find was a hair tie that had snapped on her earlier in the day.
"Black?" Connelly called from the bank. "What are you doing?"
She peered back and saw him standing close to the ice but being very purposeful to not step on it.
"Working," she hollered back. "Why don't you skate on out here and help?"
He rolled his eyes at her and she turned back to the ice. She dropped the snapped hair tie into the water and watched it bob up and down for a moment. Then it slowly caught the sluggish current of the water beneath the ice. It was pushed away and under the ice to her left, further out toward Watertown.
So she was dropped in somewhere else, Avery thought, looking down the river in the direction of Boston. On the bank, Connelly and the officer he had been speaking to were heading up behind the Forensics team.
Avery remained on the ice, standing straight up now. She was getting very cold as she watched her breath vaporize on the air. But something about the cold temperature seemed to center her. It allowed her to think, to use the light creaking noises of the ice as a metronome of sorts as she put her thoughts together.
Nude and not a blemish or bruise on her. So assault is ruled out. No jewelry, so it could have been a robbery. But most cases of a body after being robbed would show some signs of struggle…and this woman was spotless. And what about those nails and the absolute lack of hair anywhere other than her head?
She slowly walked to the bank, looking down the frozen river to where it rounded a bend and kept on in the direction of Boston. It was weird to think of how beautiful the frozen Charles River looked from Boston University while less than twenty minutes away a body had been pulled from it.
She pulled up her coat collar around her neck as she walked back to the bank. She was just in time to see the back doors of the Forensics van close. Connelly was approaching her but he was looking beyond her and out to the frozen water.
"You get a good look at her?" Avery asked.
"Yeah. She looked like a damn toy or something. All pale and cold and…"
"And perfect," Avery said. "Did you notice there was no hair on her? No bruises or bumps, either."
"Or jewelry," Connelly added. With a heavy sigh, he asked: "Dare I ask for your initial thoughts?"
She was much more willing to be unfiltered with Connelly now. She had been ever since he and O'Malley had offered her a promotion to sergeant two months ago. In return, they seemed more willing to accept her theories from the get-go rather than questioning the hell out of everything that came out of her mouth.
"Her fingernails were perfectly trimmed," she said. "It's like she had just come out of a salon before she was dumped in the river. Then there's the lack of hair anywhere. One of those things is odd enough but together, it screams intentionality to me."
"You think someone cleaned her up before they killed her?"
"Seems like it. It's almost like the funeral parlor making the dead look as presentable as possible for the open casket. Whoever did this cleaned her. Shaved her and did her nails."
"Any idea why?"
Avery shrugged. "I can only speculate right now. But I can tell you one thing that you probably aren't going to like very much."
"Ah hell," he said, knowing what was coming.
"This guy took his time…not even in the killing, but in how the body would look when it was found. He was intentional. Patient. Based on similar cases, I can almost guarantee you she won't be the only one."
With another of his patented sighs, Connelly dug his phone out of his pocket. "I'll call a meeting at the A1," he said. "I'll let them know we have a potential serial killer."
