Night Prey

her must be fairly strong,” Lucas said to Helstrom. “He had to either throw her in there or carry her up pretty high, without spilling guts all over the place.”
    Connell, white-faced, tottered back up the ramp.
    “What’d you just say?”
    Lucas repeated it, and Helstrom nodded. “Yeah. And from the description we got, she wasn’t a complete lightweight. She must’ve run around 135. If that’s Wannemaker.”
    “It is,” Sloan said. Sloan had walked around to the other side of the Dumpster, and was peering into it again. From Lucas’s perspective, eyes, nose, and ears over the edge of the Dumpster, he looked like Kilroy. “And I’ll tell you what: I’ve seen a videotape of the body they found up in Carlos Avery. If the same guy didn’t do this one, then they both took cuttin’ lessons at the same place.”
    “Exactly the same?” Lucas asked.
    “Identical,” Connell said.
    “Not quite,” Sloan said, backing away from the Dumpster. “The Carlos Avery didn’t have the squiggles above her ti . . . breasts.”
    “The squiggles?” Connell asked.
    “Yeah. Take a look.”
    She looked in again. After a moment, she said, “They look like a capital S and a capital J. ”
    “That’s what I thought,” Lucas said.
    “What does that mean?” Connell demanded.
    “I’m not a mind reader,” Lucas said, “Especially with the dead.” He turned his head to Helstrom. “No way to get anything off the edge of this thing, is there? Off the Dumpster?”
    “I doubt it. It’s rained a couple times since Friday, people been throwing stuff in there all weekend . . . Why?”
    “Better not take a chance.” Lucas went back to the Porsche, popped the trunk, took out a small emergency raincoat, a piece of plastic packed in a bag not much bigger than his hand. He stripped the coat out, carried it back to the Dumpster, and said, “Hang on to my legs so I don’t tip inside, will you, D.T.?”
    “Sure. . . .”
    Lucas draped the raincoat carefully over the edge of the Dumpster and boosted himself up until he could lay his stomach over the top. His upper body hung down inside, his face not more than a foot from the dead woman’s.
    “She’s got, uh . . .”
    “What?”
    “She’s got something in her hand . . . Can’t see it. Like maybe a cigarette.”
    “Don’t touch.”
    “I’m not.” He hung closer. “She’s got something on her chest. I think it’s tobacco . . . stuck on.”
    “Garbage got tossed on her.”
    Lucas dropped back onto the blacktop and started breathing again. “Some of it’s covered with blood. It’s like she crumbled a cigarette on herself.”
    “What’re you thinking?” Helstrom asked.
    “That the guy was smoking when he killed her,” Lucas said. “That she snatched it out of his mouth. I mean, she wouldn’t have been smoking, not if she was being attacked.”
    “Unless it wasn’t really an attack,” Sloan said. “Maybe it was consensual, they were relaxing afterwards, and he did her.”
    “Bullshit,” Connell said.
    Lucas nodded at her. “Too much violence,” he said. “You wouldn’t get that much violence after orgasm. That’s sexual excitement you’re looking at.”
    Helstrom looked from Lucas to Connell to Sloan. Connell seemed oddly satisfied by Lucas’s comment. “He was smoking when he did it?”
    “Get them to make the cigarette, if that’s what it is. I can see the paper,” Lucas told Helstrom. “Check the lot, see if there’s anything that matches.”
    “We’ve picked up everything in the parking lot that might mean anything—candy wrappers, cigarettes, bottle tops, all that.”
    “Maybe it’s marijuana,” Connell said hopefully. “That’d be a place to start.”
    “Potheads don’t do this shit, not when they’re smoking,” Lucas said. He looked at Helstrom. “When was the Dumpster last cleaned out?”
    “Friday. They dump it every Tuesday and Friday.”
    “She went missing Friday night,” Sloan said. “Probably killed, brought here at night. You can’t see into the Dumpster unless you stand on your tiptoes, so he probably just tossed her in and pulled a couple of garbage bags over her and let it go at that.”
    Helstrom nodded. “That’s what we think. People started complaining about the smell this morning, and a guy from the marina came over and poked around. Saw a knee and called us.”
    “She’s on top of that small white bag, like she landed on it. I’d see if there’s anything in it to identify who threw it