Sour Grapes

it. On the driver’s door was the official seal of the medical examiner.
    “I’m never going to get Dr. Liu paid off at this rate,” Savannah said.
    “Paid off?” “ Yeah. I keep bribing her with her boxes of Godiva chocolates in exchange for all these favors.”
    Dirk glanced over at the litter with Barbie’s rigid body on it. The girl had been “setup” while bent double. “You don’t have to pay Dr. Liu to handle this one,” he said. “She has to look at all the ‘unnatural’ deaths, and this one definitely qualifies.”
    Minutes later, they were all gathered in a circle around the stretcher while Jennifer Liu made her initial field inspection of the body.
    There’s no obvious cause of death,” she said “but I don’t want to undress her until I get her into the autopsy suite.”
    “Then maybe she did jump, after all,” Dirk replied. “We were thinking that she was pushed, or maybe—”
    “No, I don’t think she jumped. ”Jennifer Liu reached down and with her fingertips gently brushed the girl’s hair back from her face. “Not unless she jumped while trying to escape from the person who had her.”
    Savannah looked into Jennifer’s dark eyes and saw that even the jaded doctor who had performed hundreds of autopsies was touched by this one. They all were affected emotionally when it was a kid.
    “What do you mean?” Savannah asked. “How do you know someone had her?”
    “Her hands were bound with tape,” Jennifer said, “and her mouth, too.”
    “How do you know?” Tammy stepped closer, then leaned over studying the victim’s lips and wrists.
    “See there, across her face... that red rectangle around her mouth?”
    They all nodded in unison.
    “There was a wide piece of tape over her mouth, and you can see where it ripped off some of the skin from her lips when it was pulled away.”
    Savannah winced. “That must have hurt.”
    “Actually, I don’t think it did. From the lack of bleeding, I suspect she was already dead when the tape was removed.”
    “And how about her hands?” Ryan asked. “Were her bindings removed postmortem, too?”
    “I don’t know for sure about that. I may be able to tell later.”
    “But you do believe there was tape around her wrists, as well as over her mouth?” Savannah asked.
    Jennifer nodded. “You can see bald areas there along the backs of her wrists where the hair was pulled out when they took it off.”
    Savannah squatted beside the litter and looked closely. The doctor was right; the fine, blond fuzz on the girl’s arm did end abruptly in a straight line just above both wrists. And the flesh there was also irritated, like that around her mouth.
    Dr. Liu delicately lifted the hem of the girl’s skirt and glanced beneath it. “Her underwear is still in place,” she said. “That’s a good sign... I guess.”
    Those in the circle exchanged a few relieved glances. The situation was tragic already. It was a small blessing if the killer had not added sexual insult to injury.
    “Okay, boys and girls,” Dr. Liu said, “you’re going to have to stand back now and let my assistants do their thing.”
    The Magnolia gang moved out of the way as the crime-scene technicians took over, placing small sacks over each of the girl’s hands, then loading her into a body bag.
    Savannah always got a bit of the chill when she saw one of those blue bags, the ones with locks on their zippers. Those were for situations that required extra security because the individuals had died under unusual circumstances. Every time she saw one of those bags being zipped closed and locked, Savannah whispered a quick prayer that she would never see anyone she loved being zipped into a body bag... especially a blue one.
    As the technicians were moving the corpse into the coroner’s station wagon, Savannah left the rest of the group and walked farther down the road away from the scene. In one area the dirt was softer, looser than the rest, and she could see tire marks in the soil that were more than a yard long.
    She knelt beside the most clearly defined section and studied it. The tread size was substantial, not as big as a truck’s, but wide for a car. She stood and motioned to Dirk. “Hey, buddy. Come check this out.”

    The technicians were pouring a plaster cast of the tire track, and Savannah and Dirk were observing the process, when Catherine Villa drove up in a green Jeep Cherokee. She stopped short at the yellow tape barrier, jumped out, and ran