Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 46

I CAME BACK TO THE SQUAD ROOM after lunch with Cindy, feeling several pairs of eyes tracking me as I passed the desks on my way to my office. I was thinking that a week had passed since Caddy Girl’s picture had been posted in the Chronicle, and now Jag Girl’s photo would be running beside it.

It was infuriating that we were still hoping for tips from the public.

Where were the leads?

Why was there so little evidence?

What the hell were we overlooking? How were we messing up?

I waved Jacobi and Conklin into my glass cube and closed the door, hung my jacket up. Conklin sprawled in the chair, his long legs spanning the length of my desk, while Jacobi parked, as usual, on the edge of my credenza.

I told Jacobi and Conklin that I’d put the photo of Jag Girl out to the press and asked if they had anything new.

“My partner’s got something for you, Boxer.” Jacobi isn’t prone to smiling, but I thought I saw a spark of pride light up his stony eyes.

“Yeah, we’ve got sorta good news,” said Conklin as he sat up straight in the chair.

“Any kind of news is good news on this case.”

“We got the DNA back on Caddy Girl’s rape kit.”

“Excellent. What do we know?”

“We got a cold hit, Lou,” Conklin said.

My rising hopes crashed.

A cold hit is a little bit of not much to go on. In this case, there was a matching DNA profile in the database — but the donor’s ID was unknown.

Conklin spread the computer printout on my desk, spun it so it faced me. Then he took me through it, slowly, patiently, the way I took my bosses through detail they were too thick to get.

“This sample came from the sexual assault kit of a white female who was killed in LA two years ago,” Conklin said. “She was in her early twenties — raped, strangled, and found in a field a few days after she was dumped there. No ID on the victim, and she was never identified. LAPD thinks she was a transient.”

“What was she wearing?” I asked him.

“No designer clothes. A polyester top pulled up to her neck. It’s no wonder we didn’t get a hit before,” Conklin said. “Completely different MO than the Car Girls. This victim wasn’t dressed up or posed in a car, but for sure, the same guy who had sex with this victim two years ago had sex with Caddy Girl.”

“Maybe the LA vic was our perp’s first kill,” Jacobi added. “And he’s been polishing up his act ever since.”

“Or maybe he’s got a partner now,” I said, trying on another theory. “Maybe this new cat has a lot more imagination.”