Mortal Danger

Perkins told the detectives. “The owner doesn’t know her, and neither do the others here.”
    Officer Husby stepped forward. “I think I may know who she is, although I wish I didn’t. I took a missing persons report this morning from a woman who lives at Eighty-fourth and Twentieth, about three miles from here. She was worried sick because her daughter Sara Beth didn’t come home last night.”
    “How old is she?” Cameron asked.
    “Fifteen. And from what we can see, the girl in themen’s room is wearing clothes that match the clothes Sara Beth was had on last night almost exactly.”
    Cameron and Tando—the only homicide detectives working on a skeleton crew that holiday—reached tentatively through the opening in the restroom door and touched the dead girl’s arm. She was cold and had apparently been dead for many hours.
    As they eased the door open, they encountered what looked like a scene from a movie, not the usual ugliness of a homicide scene. Even in death, the girl was beautiful. She wore a silk print blouse, and a jean outfit. A little dried blood marked her face, but her expression was serene and unmarked by fear.
    Except for the blood staining her blouse, and the cluttered and inappropriate spot where she lay, she might only have been sleeping, sprawled out with the careless grace of the young. Her chestnut hair fanned out around her head and then was caught in the dried pool of blood beneath her body.
    Despite the macho image we see on TV, a good homicide detective never looks at a victim’s body without feeling a pang of regret for the loss of a human life. Still, some cases bother them more than others. This girl—was it Sara Beth?—shouldn’t be dead, murdered, tossed aside in a pile of flaking plaster. She was so young. She should be going back to school in the fall, maybe riding on a homecoming float or wearing her first corsage to a prom.
    But homicide detectives don’t make the rules and they can’t change the ending of a tragic story; they can only pick up the raveled strands of mystery that are left behind and try to weave some pattern out of them.
    The teenager in front of them appeared to have suffered deep stab wounds to the chest, but they couldn’t tell how many. One of her hands was cut as if she’d tried to defend herself.
    Cameron, who had a daughter of his own the same age, put in a call for Dr. John Eisele of the Medical Examiner’s Office and requested that a fingerprint technician be dispatched to the scene. He had to keep concentrating on his job, not on his emotions.
    The owner of the building said that the restroom doors hadn’t been locked. All the fixtures had been removed.
    “Someone broke the lock a while back, and there seemed no need to replace it right away,” he said. “Nothin’ worth taking.”
    The small frame building was located in a commercial area where there was little likelihood that anyone would have been around late on a Saturday night to hear screams for help, if, indeed, there had been any. The detectives’ chances of finding an eyewitness or an ear witness were slight, so they made every effort to glean what they could from the scene itself.
    Detective Lieutenant Bob Holter and Detectives Don Strunk and Paul Eblin, along with senior ID technician Marsha Jackson, joined the solemn-faced group at the tire store.
    Even though they knew it might be futile, patrol officers began a door-to-door canvass of businesses in the neighborhood while Marsha Jackson dusted the outside of the restroom door for latent prints, lifting several. They might be vital, or they could have been left by any of a dozen workmen on the site.
    Then they completely removed the door itself after lifting out the pins.
    The girl’s body was now revealed in its entirety. They took photographs and measurements, and bagged what might be useful physical evidence and marked it with their initials and the date.
    As much as forensic science has moved forward in the last hundred years, there is one axiom that never changes. It’s been handed down to those processing a crime scene from the famed French criminalist Dr. Emile Locard: “The criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene of his crime—something perhaps too infinitesimal to be perceived by the naked eye—and he always takes something of the crime scene away with him.”
    This rule of thumb surely held true in the grimy washroom of the remodeled gas station. They just had to identify what had been