Pulse

15

Central Florida, 2002

Sophia wanted everyone to see what she had done. That was why the sky was a cloudless blue, and the only breeze was soft and cool. The air was so clean and clear it seemed possible to see details half a mile away, like looking through a pair of powerful binoculars.

It didn’t require binoculars to see what Sergeant Ed Hall of the Florida State Police was looking at.

The sergeant stood staring down at a dead girl. She looked so frail beneath the wreckage of the barn. And there was something about her injuries, even beneath all that blood. There seemed to be dark rings around the flesh of her wrists, and the flesh was wrinkled. The same marks were around at least one of her ankles, too.

A length of rough-hewn beam lay across her midsection, and it appeared that it had come down and smashed her rib cage. Not much doubt as to what had killed her.

But what had she been doing in the barn almost nude? It was possible that the fierce winds of the hurricane or a trailing tornado had stripped the clothes from her.

Except for another oddity, at least to Hall’s way of thinking. She was wearing black thong underwear. A strange thing, for a kid her age. Unless she’d been older than she appeared now, dead.

The thing about the underwear that struck Hall as odd was that he’d just come from the eastern part of the state, following the wide swath of Hurricane Sophia, and he remembered the Ambersons being found dead in the wreckage of their house. One of the cops there had been saying it was hard to tell, what with the condition of the bodies, but it looked like Nathan Amberson might have been shot.

His wife, Flora, had been found nearby, her body also mutilated by fierce winds and debris. She’d been mostly buried in wreckage, and nude, like this poor as-yet-unidentified girl.

Hall had known the Ambersons slightly. Flora, though getting along in years, had been an attractive woman, and was rumored to have been sexually adventurous in her youth. Hall knew that some of the rumors were true. Husband Nathan, in fact, had once been talked out of shooting an unwanted suitor with a shotgun.

Hall stared down at the dead girl under the barn and rubbed his bristly jaw. A black thong on Flora Amberson, maybe.

On this girl, never.

But that wasn’t the only thing about the girl that didn’t set well with Hall. It was something about her eyes. Something that made it hard to look into them.

They reminded him of other dead eyes.