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Part Three: A Night to Remember

June 27, 2006

"Oh, God," Jordan felt her stomach do back flips; her late dinner threatened to somersault its way out of her body. She hated middle-of-the-night calls anyway – who liked them? – but this was…

"Good Lord," Woody breathed behind her.

"Not really," Jordan said softly. "There's nothing good about this and I'm pretty sure God must have taken the night off." The sidewalk where the girl lay was in a quiet enough neighborhood.

The smell of fresh blood, it's metal tang that drenched the air and crouched on the tongue, pervaded the atmosphere. Jordan had seen her share of horrors and this one was definitely a doozy. She knelt and touched the pool of blood beneath the girl's left arm. The smear on Jordan's glove was tacky. Inhaling slowly, she leaned closer, checking the girl's open, staring eyes. No clouding of the corneas. With another deep breath, Jordan checked lividity. She turned and gazed up at Woody. "Lividity isn't fixed and she's still warm. She's been dead probably less than four hours." Jordan rose. "Who called it in?"

Woody jerked his head to direct her attention to a small man who stood huddled with one of the uniforms. "The guy works a night security shift downtown. He wasn't feeling well tonight, so he got someone to cover him and came home."

Her brows arched. "Bet he wishes he'd stayed at work."

Woody could only nod. "Man, she's young."

"Any idea who she is?" Jordan's voice was despondent. He was right. The girl was young – sixteen, maybe seventeen. The make-up coating her face was a misguided attempt to look older, but the satin prom dress she wore – now dyed red with blood – made her look all the more like a girl playing dress-up.

"No, she didn't have any i.d. on her and the guy who found her said she doesn't look familiar."

Jordan felt her eyes prickle with tears. "Maybe she was visiting a friend."

It was two days before they found out who she was.

XXXXX

Jordan was staring at the autopsy photos of the young Jane Doe. Cleaned of the blood, her wounds stitched up and her eyes closed, she looked like a worn-out child whose had a very bad day. Jordan hadn't been able to find anything for Woody to go on. No assault, no prints, no fibers, no scrapings from her nails. Nothing. They'd come up blank on prints for missing persons; dental x-rays hadn't panned out and no one had reported a girl matching her description over the weekend. It was going to be a long week.

As if to emphasize her despair, her phone rang, making her jump. "Cavanaugh."

"I think we may have i.d.'d Jane Doe." Good morning to you too, Detective Jordan thought, but kept it to herself. "You there?"

She cleared her throat. "Yeah. I'm here. What did you find out?"

"I'm bringing down Michelle Dreyfus. She came in this morning to report her seventeen-year-old daughter, Ashlynn, missing."

"How long has the girl been gone?"

"Well, that's the problem. Ashlynn said she was staying with a friend for the weekend."

Jordan began nodding. "And Ashlynn told the friend she was staying at home?"

"Close," he confirmed. "Ashlynn got a call on her cell phone while watching movies with the friend. Ashlynn got all excited and said she had to leave. She had just been offered a photo shoot."

Now Jordan's brow furrowed down. "On a Friday night? Just like that?"

Woody said, "Uh-huh. Torie, Ashlynn's friend, didn't buy it either and they argued. Ashlynn stormed out the front door, refusing a ride because her 'agent' was picking her up and saying she'd just go home afterwards."

The M.E. sighed. "So no one knew she was gone?"

"Nope. But guess where Torie lives."

"The street where we found Jane Doe?"

"Three streets over." He paused. "Is the – the body ready for viewing?"

"Yeah. You can bring Ms. Dreyfus over any time."

XXXXX

The woman accompanying Woody couldn't be much older than Jordan, though she was fighting looking even thirty. The fight was not going her way. It might if the woman didn't reek of cigarette smoke and a little something else, Jordan would have gambled. Her hair was a blond color that had come out of a bottle – a rather inexpensive one at that. Her face had the telltale signs of incipient alcoholism and she wore a man's button down shirt over her very short pink mini-skirt.

Lily accompanied Woody and the woman into the viewing area. She met Jordan's glance with one of her own. It said Don't judge. Jordan just gave an inward shudder; her own life could easily have gone this way, she supposed. As gently as she could, she greeted the woman and explained in general terms what Ms. Dreyfus would see.

The woman nodded her blond hair falling into her face. She shoved it back with impatience. As they revealed the Jane Doe's body to her, she gasped. "No! That's not…." She leaned closer to the glass. "Ashlynn's a redhead."

Jordan nodded slowly. "This girl – her hair was dyed."

"No, I mean, when Ashlynn left the house that day, she was a redhead!" The woman looked at Jordan. "Can I get closer? Ashlynn has this little scar –"

"On her left knee?" Jordan finished.

The woman nodded. "She ran into a fence when she was six and learning how to ride a two-wheeler." The fact that Jordan had known began to sink in. "Oh, my God. Oh, no! No!"

"Ms. Dreyfus, I'm sorry to ask, but do we need to know – is that your daughter?" Woody was as gentle as he could be.

The woman gave them all the look a drowning victim might to the lifeguards on the beach who can't get there in time. Why can't you save me? She looked even more closely and finally, tearfully, nodded. "Yeah. Yes. That's Ashlynn."

Before allowing Lily to lead the woman away, Woody insisted on asking a few probing questions. The answers were confusing. Yes, Ashlynn wanted to be a model. No, she hadn't said anything about having a modeling agent. No, no one in their family had the kind of dress they'd found Ashlynn wearing.

Just before Lily led her away, the mother turned to Jordan. "How did she die?"

Jordan swallowed. "She was – She was stabbed."

"Anything else?"

Wearily, Jordan answered, again trying to be general, to spare the woman the horrific details of a child not who'd not only been stabbed repeatedly, but had had her throat slit and her body cut open in a grotesque mockery of the coroner's Y incision.

"Was she – Did whoever did this -…?"

Jordan's heart wrenched. She shook her head. "Ashlynn wasn't raped, Ms. Dreyfus."

The woman's obvious gratitude at such a small mercy made Jordan turn away to hide the tears threatening to roll down her cheeks.

She heard Lily guide the woman out. Jordan raised a hand to her face and murmured, "Sometimes I really hate this job."

Woody crossed the space between them and put his arms around her. She turned in his embrace, resting her head on his chest. He stroked her hair. "I know," he said softly. "I hate it, too."

"What kind of world is it where a parent is glad her daughter wasn't raped? How sick are people that not raping a teenager is a relief because then she was 'only' stabbed and gutted?" She thumped her fist on his chest in frustration.

"We'll get him, Jo. We will. We'll get this one."

"Will we? Really, Woody? Because this is three young women now in three months and we haven't been able to find any of their killers." She looked up, her eyes burning with fury. As she came back to herself, she also realized where she was and stepped back. Woody's arms around her felt too good, too much like how it used to be, way too much like what she – damn her­ – still wanted them to. A year later and she still wanted the bastard. She let her anger at him and at the killing meld.

His fingers clenched. He hadn't wanted to let her go. She felt so entirely right where she'd been. He wanted to say something, to utter the words that weren't enough, but might at least be a start, and then he saw the look in her eyes. "It's been a run of bad luck. That's all."

Her breath stopped in her throat. "What if it's not a run of bad luck?"

"What?"

She was hurrying out of the room, running down the hall to her office. She dug out the files and began scanning them as Woody, having followed her at a more dignified pace, gaped at her. She looked up. "We don't have three separate killers, Detective. We have a serial killer."

"What? Jordan? Where do you get that? The m.o. on each crime is different. The victims all come from different backgrounds. I could go on."

"Woody, think about it." She held a finger to signify her first point. "No sexual assault. Three young women killed – brutally – but not one of them assaulted sexually." She held up two fingers. "They may have different backgrounds, but they all had one thing in common – fashion of some sort."

"How do you figure?"

"Eliza Bowen – the girl in the bunny suit – was an aspiring model; Kristy Douglas was getting a degree in fashion design – check with her parents – I bet she may have modeled or at least known some models; and now Ashlynn Dreyfus, who wanted to be a model and told her friend, Torie, she'd just been picked for a photo shoot."

Woody gave some consideration to her theory.

"And," Jordan held up three fingers. "They all had dark hair. Eliza's and Ashlynn's was dyed. And, like Eliza, Ashlynn's was an all over job. We didn't check if it was post mortem or not, but I'll have Nige do that."

"What about the different m.o.'s, Jordan?" Woody challenged.

Jordan let a small, satisfied smile play on her face. "Figure those out and we might be able to figure out who the killer is."

END Part Three