To Kill a Sorcerer by Greg Mongrain Page B

notebook.
    “You do have MSDS sheets on the manufacturer of your brand, don’t you?” Hamilton asked. “If you could give us those, we’d have something to work with in case we recover anything from a future scene.” Hamilton tried to hand over his card. Charlie reached out in the wrong direction. Hamilton finally put it in his palm.
    “I’ll have my assistant fax the information to you.”
    “And any other details,” I said, “on manufacturers, specifics on the scent, local retailers, anything else you might think useful.”
    “Sure,” Charlie said.
    “I appreciate this,” I told him.
    “No prob. By the way, detective,” he said, sniffing in Gonzales’s direction, “you might want to lay off the menudo for lunch.”
    Gonzales’s pen halted.
    “Maybe you should go now,” I said to Charlie. He probably heard the exasperation in my voice. I resisted the urge to kick him in the seat of his droopy shorts.
    “I am so gone,” he said.

Fourteen
    Wednesday, December 22, 3:21 p.m.
     
    “You’re fucking kidding, right?” Gonzales said after Charlie’s chauffeur led him back to the car. “If this is your idea of contributing to our investigation, you’re wasting our time.”
    “Look,” I said, “just include the incense he named in your reports. Clearly state your doubts about his lack of reliability. Who cares? We have the name of the brand of incense the killer is using. If it comes to nothing, it comes to nothing. But if it gives us a way to identify this guy, are you really going to complain that the source of that information is a stoner who’s blind as a bat?”
    “He’s not blind,” Kennedy said. “He went right for my boob, the dirty faker.”
    We couldn’t help it. There was a soft bulge under her starched uniform shirt, and we all looked at her boob.
    “Hey!” she warned.
    Gonzales gave me a look, turned to Hamilton. “Our rich fucking genius.” He walked back into the house.
    Before Hamilton and I could follow him, Deputy Medical Examiner Tasha Watanabe came out of the crowd and ducked under the crime scene barrier.
    Watanabe was tall and slender, with close-cropped jet hair and coal eyes.
    “Is this another one like two days ago?” she asked in a low voice as she signed the log.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, Sebastian. Have you got anything?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Nothing at all?”
    Hamilton and I exchanged a glance. He shook his head.
    “Is it—is she hanging from the ceiling again?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    Watanabe took a deep breath and led us into the house. She stopped when she saw the body.
    “Ah, God,” she said, staring at the hanging corpse, “not again.”
    After taking samples, the crime scene team had covered the area under and around the body with clear plastic so we could stand close to the victim without getting blood on our shoes.
    Hamilton stared up at the rope looped through the hook on the ceiling. “How do you think he got that up there?”
    “He used a chair or swung the loop until it caught,” I said.
    “With the victim doing what?” Gonzales asked. He was down on his haunches, peering at Jessica’s arms. “Hanging around while he tries to snag it? She’s got no ligature marks on her wrists, so he didn’t tie her up. What do you think, Tasha? Are those chest wounds post?”
    Watanabe had been studying the girl’s torso. “It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “Based on lividity, I think she was alive when he started cutting her open.”
    “Just like the last one,” Hamilton said.
    I hated to admit it, but Gonzales had a point. If the tox panel came back negative again, and there were no bruises or other marks to indicate the killer had stunned her or knocked her unconscious, his method for stringing these girls up without a struggle was a mystery.
    “He must be using something,” I said to Watanabe. “He’s immobilizing them somehow. It’s got to be drugs.”
    “Maybe he’s scaring them,” Watanabe said softly.
    “Enough for the girls