The Heathers

My phone rang as I exited the large double doors of the county courthouse where I had been testifying to a grand jury. The cold wind hit me in the face, temporarily taking my breath away.

“Hello?” I gasped into my phone, trying to regain my breathing.

“We’ve got another one,” Jack’s voice came from the other side of the line.

“Another one what?” I asked. Jack had a predilection for acting out the tough-guy persona of every TV cop. He was trying to drop a one-liner on me like some detective in a bad drama.

“Another dead girl, Quinn.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so instead of trying to sound cooler than you are?” I was engaging in banter with Jack, but I could feel my hands begin to shake and not from the cold.

“She was pulled out of the water at Pier 6. I’m heading there now. I’ll meet you there.”

“Ok,” I said as I opened my car door. I sat in my seat for a second, attempting to get my thoughts together. It could just be a coincidence. This girl might have died by accident or suicide. There’s no way we have a possible serial killer on our hands. Right?

I drove out of downtown toward the river. As the buildings became shorter and more industrial, another thought hit me. Please, please, please, let me be wrong. As I pulled up to the crime scene, my car had barely come to a stop when I threw it in park and jumped out. I ducked under the tape and ran down towards the end of the pier. When I got close enough to see the girl's features, I heaved a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Jackie. I mean, a dead girl is a dead girl, but I couldn’t bear the thought of having let Jackie down like that.

The medical examiner was zipping up the body bag as I approached. Jack stood up to greet me.

“Can't say for sure, but it looks like our guy,” he said. Two bodies in just over a week. The ME hadn’t even gotten the chance to give us the final report on Evelyn and now we had another possible victim of the same guy.

“Can you tell us when she died?” I asked the medical examiner as we walked the girl’s body back toward the vehicles.

“Before 12:35.”

I looked at the short stocky woman in surprise.

“How did you get that exact time?” I asked, bewildered. Normally they are able to narrow the time of death down to a window of a few hours, but this was impressive.

She stopped the gurney and unzipped the bag. I grimaced. You’d think as a homicide detective, I’d be used to bodies, but honestly, I could never get used to it.

She pulled the girl's wrist out of the bag so I could see a small, delicate watch on her left wrist. I leaned over and saw the time read 12:35 and it had the date, today. This means she went in the water before 12:35 last night.

“Shoot,” I whispered.

“What? Isn’t it a good thing that we have a time of death?” Jack asked. I responded, in a snarky know-it-all tone that we didn’t technically have a time of death, only a time that she entered the water. She could have died at any time before that and the killer dumped her at 12:30 last night. I then had to explain my creepy-guy-at-the-bar theory to Jack.

“So, unless he is working with someone, which I think is unlikely in this case, it can’t be him, hence my ‘Shoot’.”

“So, you were at the bar that Evelyn worked at until 1 am? And he was there the whole time?” Jack asked for clarification. I nodded. We were back to square one.