Circle of Blood (Forensic Mystery)

dad.”
    “No,” she said, shaking herself. “I’ve got it.”
    Snowflakes were stuck to the red-gold hair, unmelted, since Mariah’s exterior had already cooled. With rote movements, Cameryn snapped picture after picture: of the decedent’s feet, her legs, the rip in her blue jeans, and pictures of the backpack, the gun. After Justin had placed the dental scale next to Mariah’s hand, Cameryn took close-ups of the right index finger curled in the revolver’s trigger, the palm gently cupping the wooden handle. Clearly, this was a suicide. What a tragic thing to do . It was then that Cameryn noticed Mariah’s fingernails. They were bitten down to the quick. Just like mine, she thought. I’ve felt overwhelmed, too. But you can’t take it back, because death is forever.
    Edging nearer, Justin said, “Be sure to get a close-up of her wound. Take a lot of those. That’ll be evidentiary.”
    “I know, Justin.”
    “Just trying to help.”
    Cameryn focused on the bullet hole. It was small, a bull’s-eye on Mariah’s right temple, ringed with black. Blood had snaked down the side of her face like a single finger of red. It would have been different, she knew, if Mariah had used a more powerful gun. She’d seen pictures of the damage a .44 left behind. Maintain, she told herself. The backpack hunched to one side as if it, too, were dead.
    “Now do you think it’s a girl?”
    “Yeah,” Cameryn said. Working in, she placed the scale against the side of the girl’s head. Mariah had obviously been agitated in the car before Cameryn had given chase. Is that what had done it? Had Cameryn’s running after this girl pushed her over the edge? Another thought chilled her: Mariah had been carrying a gun. If Cameryn had chased her down this blocked-off alleyway, things might have turned out differently.
    She moved the scale to the other side of the body and took another series of shots.
    “You think she’s a runaway?” Justin asked.
    “Maybe.”
    “I’ll interview everyone in town, see if I can get a lead on this vic. Somebody must have seen this kid.”
    As the camera clicked and flashed, thoughts tumbled through Cameryn, spinning like pinwheels, so quick she couldn’t follow their trajectory. Her mother, she was certain, had no tie to Mariah other than picking her up from a gas station’s bathroom—one of Hannah’s lost girls. And yet in her mind’s eye she could visualize the sheriff interrogating Hannah, could hear her father’s accusations , “Do you see, Cammie? Hannah’s crazy. I don’t want you to have anything to do with her anymore. Death follows that woman.” And Hannah, already fragile, might begin to crack. Cameryn had already sensed fissures running beneath. The accusations, the whispers—what if that kind of questioning sent her mother to her own desperate act of self-destruction? Why open a Pandora’s box ? Wait. Just wait.
    “You ever see this person before?”
    It took a moment for her to register that Sheriff Jacobs was now standing next to her. For a moment Cameryn imagined Mariah’s spirit hovering overhead, watching her tell the lie. “No,” she answered. It was only a partial untruth. She didn’t know Mariah’s last name or where she was from. She really didn’t know this girl at all.
    “I want to roll her,” Jacobs announced.
    “Okay, I think we’ve got enough.” Justin was squatting over the body, his hands dangling between his knees, lost in concentration. “I need to clear the gun.”
    “Do it,” said Jacobs.
    Gingerly, Justin took the .22 from Mariah’s grip. With gloved hands he emptied the bullets from the revolver and dropped them into a paper bag. The gun itself went into a separate paper bag. “Can you initial these?” he asked Cameryn.
    Cameryn wrote C.M. on the yellow tags.
    “Ready to flip the body,” said Jacobs. “I want to get a look at this kid. Deputy, on the count of three.”
    “One, two, three!” The two men gently pushed Mariah over, and Justin pulled the hair away from her eyes. If Cameryn had any doubts before, they disappeared when she saw the face. In death the features were even more doll-like, with her pale, wide-set eyes, the freckles looking not so much like honey now but like rust against the too-white skin. Mariah had already stiffened up, from the cold or rigor or both. Her right hand stayed in position, her fingers still cocked against the side of her head, while her left arm remained rigid at her side. Pale blue eyes