Frankie and Jake's plane landed at roughly 2:30 PM Florida time. They were met at the gate by two of the local police department detectives and they, along with their carry-on bags, were whisked off to the precinct headquarters. After all the introductions and pleasantries were made, Frankie and Jake were taken out to the scene of discovery for their own look-see. Nothing out of the ordinary from the file. Everything that was still there was listed in the file and in detail as well. Frankie blew a wisp of bangs out of her eyes in frustration. She had hoped to find something, anything that would give them something to go on.
Once they both realized that nothing more could be found in the police reports, Jake suggested they split up and tackle two projects at once. "I'll go to Skinner's apartment if you'll go to the Morgue and look over the body with the coroner."
"You got it. Meet me back at the hotel for dinner then?" she winked as the one detective led her out to his car and Jake was led out to another one.
--
Jake looked in through the door of the apartment with a sigh. She wasn't exactly Martha Stewart and it looked like she hadn't cleaned house in a month of Sundays. He ran his hand though his hair and grabbed a box. "Better get to it."
He wandered through the entire place first, looking at photographs and her knickknacks. Nessa Skinner was a grown woman with the softer side of a little girl. She had stuffed animals on her bed and a few of the beanie bears littered the home. Her family pictures showed a bright and cheerful woman. Jake's next move was to her desk. He looked for her organizer, wallet, calendar, anything that would have given a schedule or contacts or some sort of clue as to who she would have trusted or who had last seen her.
"Hello..." Jake pulled a book from her desk. "Now what would a High School yearbook be doing on your desk Ms. Skinner?" It was odd, he knew, to find a yearbook from over 10 years ago sitting out on her desk conveniently. Casually he flipped through it for a few moments before he put it into the box along with her address book and day planner.
"I'll need to get a copy of her phone records, guest log in from the lobby downstairs."
"We've gotten statements already from her co-workers and her neighbors to see if they've heard anything. She's got some close friends that we've spoken to already."
"I want those statements too, Investigator Battles and I will go over those to see if there is anything we can put together."
"I'll call the station and have copies made for you."
--
Across town in the County Morgue, Frankie was dressed in a full frontal rubber apron and elbow-length heavy-duty rubber gloves. Her hair had been tied back and both she and the coroner were poking and prodding around with Nessa Skinner's body.
"I hate to ask you all the same questions the detectives have, but..."
"It's alright Miss..."
"Frankie. Call me Frankie."
"Alright. Frankie... We swabbed her vaginal and anal orifices for semen or any other form of foreign DNA, scraped her fingernails for tissue samples, removed fibers from her wrists and ankles, took castings of the stab wounds.."
"You did the full run down then. Anything unusual?"
"No. She's amazingly clean. The place she was found was antiseptic as far as her blood contamination."
"Which means she was killed elsewhere and moved to the motel room."
"You got it. It also means she was stabbed repeatedly, AFTER she was strangled. The petechiae and ligature marks tell us that she was alive when she started to asphyxiate. The lack of clotting and general blood tells us that she was stabbed after the heart had stopped."
Frankie made some sort of 'hm' noise as she leaned over the Frankenstein like body. It didn't even look like a real body... "Oral?"
"What?"
"Her mouth. Did you swab her mouth by any chance?"
"No, we didn't. We didn't see where any damage was done to her mouth."
"I see." Something caught her eye and she leaned in closer to the body's mouth.
"What is it Miss Battles?"
"It's Frankie... and I see something. Get me a swab please?"
The coroner handed her a long cotton swab moistened with some fluid. "What do you see?" When Frankie didn't answer him, but instead tilted the body's head back and forced the lips apart, he leaned in closer. "We're not used to getting Federal help on our murder investigations. Mind telling me why you and your partner are so intrigued by this case?"
"We think it's one of a serial killing." Frankie murmured as she swabbed the inside of the lower lip. As she stood upright, the coroner could see that there was a slight pinkish cast to the swab. "Run that for Miss Skinner's DNA and anything else. Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling our killer loved his ladies so much, he couldn't resist one last kiss before leaving them." She handed the swab to the coroner and snapped off her gloves as she left the room.
As Frankie pushed out of the doors and stripped off the rubber apron, she just let it fall to the floor as she bolted for the bathroom to heave up her breakfast.
************
