The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag Page B

color of hair. She couldn’t state the color of her eyes, because there was nothing left of them.
    Landry stared at the girl’s hand, at her fingernails, still flawlessly painted a vibrant red despite her time in the water. A couple of them were broken. Hopefully she had sunk them into her killer. Hopefully Gitan would discover something to suggest that—skin cells, a microscopic bit of blood, enough of something for a DNA profile.
    The body had been in the water for some time, but unless the fish had taken up giving manicures, maybe there was a chance that something lodged well under the nails could still be there.
    The analysis of that kind of evidence took time. Serology, toxicology, DNA profiles. Real life isn’t like television. Even with arush put on the potential evidence, it would take days, even weeks to get results back. And even if they got a DNA profile on the perp, it would be helpful immediately only if the guy had offended before and was in the national data bank.
    Gitan examined every inch of the girl’s body. Every mark, every cut, every bruise was measured and photographed. Landry was hoping for bite marks. No defense attorney could argue away bite marks. They were as good as fingerprints.
    “What do you think here? Bite marks?” he asked, pointing to several dark semicircular marks around the areola on the left breast. He had put his reading glasses on and bent down close to squint at them.
    “Could be,” Gitan said. “The shape is right, but I’m not seeing clear individual tooth marks. Maybe he bit her through something like sheets or a light blanket, to obscure the marks. Maybe he’s smart.”
    “Maybe he’s done this before,” Landry said.
    That was a very bad thought. They wouldn’t be talking about some random horny bastard who didn’t want to take no for an answer. The crime wouldn’t be about a situation that had gotten out of hand. It would be about something done methodically, which required organized thought and enough cool in the heat of the moment to take precautions against self-incrimination.
    Gitan moved on to the ligature marks around the girl’s throat.
    “What do you think?” Landry asked. “A rope? A wire?”
    “First,” Gitan said, “we have thumbprints on either side of the larynx. See here? So we know her killer choked her manually at some point in the attack. But then we have the ligature marks as well. Not a wire. There’s too much abrasion. It had to be something with texture. If it was a rope, it was quite thin. I’m not seeing any natural rope fibers, but she’s been in the water. Fiber evidence is a lot to hope for. Or the rope could have been synthetic. Nylon cord, maybe.”
    Looking through a lighted magnifying glass, she studied and studied the deep grooves cut into the girl’s neck. The skin had broken in places.
    “Huh,” she said, as she took a tweezer and very carefully plucked a piece of something out of the wound.
    “What is it?”
    “Dried coagulated blood. Look.”
    Landry looked at the scab through the magnifying glass. Stuck in it were several fibers so small they were all but invisible to the naked eye. Short, superfine, dark. Almost like short hairs.
    “The lab rats will have an answer when they can get it under a microscope,” Gitan said.
    “I’m surprised you found anything,” Landry said.
    “Sometimes we get lucky. Her killer didn’t dump her right away. The wounds had time to dry and harden.”
    When Gitan was satisfied she had examined every inch of the front of the body, Landry helped Cecil turn the girl over. Gitan moved Irina Markova’s hair out of her way to examine the marks on the back of her neck. There weren’t any.
    “Okay,” Gitan said. “Either there was something behind her and between her and the killer, or maybe the killer was on top of her, holding her down with the ligature.”
    “In my experience, the kind of guy who does this kind of thing wants to watch the victim’s face as he chokes her,”