CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The searchlights bordering the small cove along the western edge of Jamaica Pond looked like something out of a sci-fi film from a distance—like several UFOs had come down to the body of water, waiting to kick off an invasion. There were a few police vehicles parked fifty or so feet away from the water and a few people scattered around the scene.

Avery parked behind a police cruiser and found Finley right away. He was standing over near the water, next to a small pier that extended out into the pond for a distance of about twenty feet. The pier looked very rickety, the sort of thing that had been well used several years ago and then neglected and abandoned.

Finley and three other officers were huddled around a body that had been laid down on a plastic tarp. It was a woman of about twenty or so—far too close to Rose’s age as far as Avery was concerned. Her hands were bound behind her back and there was something around her neck, a cloth of some kind.

“Any ID yet?” Avery asked.

“Not yet, but we’ll have it soon,” Finley said. “There was a debit card tucked into her back pocket. We’ve got the info being run right now. Should be any minute.”

Avery knelt down by the body for a closer look. The searchlights were some help, but Finley assisted in aiming a small flashlight at the body. Avery looked her over, doing everything she could to push images of Rose out of her mind.

The girl was quite pretty and surely weighed no more than one hundred and ten pounds. She had blonde hair that was a bit longer than shoulder-length and her blue eyes were wide open, staring up into the night sky. She was fully dressed, wearing a white long-sleeved top and a pair of tight-fitting jeans. Her hands had been bound with basic cord, a thick rope that had been expertly tied. The cloth around her neck was tied in the same type of knot, but it was loose-fitting. It had not been used to strangle her but looked dangerous nonetheless.

“This cloth on her neck,” Avery said. “I put my money on it being used as a blindfold. Her killer didn’t want her to know where they were going.”

“I don’t see any visible bruising,” Finley said. “No scratches or abrasions. No signs of a struggle from what I can see and—”

Another officer approached, walking quickly from the direction of the parked cruisers. “I got an ID from that debit card,” he said. “The victim is Abby Costello. Twenty-two years old, an employee at an accounting firm here in Boston.”

“Did you get an address?” Avery asked.

“Yes. We’ve got three officers headed over that way as we speak,” the cop said.

Finley looked down at Avery with a playfully suspicious look. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Her eyes,” Avery said. “They’re wide open. She was scared when she died, I think. Very scared.”

“Well, yeah. What’s so crazy about that?”

“Nothing at first glance. But if she was killed prior to being dumped, I don’t think there would be this expression of horror on her face. Besides…I see no indication of foul play before she was dumped into the water.”

“So you think the killer blindfolded her, brought her out to this random-ass pier, tied her hands behind her back, and tossed her in the water?”

“Yeah. I think the cause of death is going to be drowning. Her body wasn’t just dumped in an attempt to get rid of it.”

“Well, the ambulance is on its way,” Finley said. “The coroner should be able to verify that pretty quickly, I’d think.”

Avery stood up and walked out onto the pier. On its face, Abby Costello’s death bore no similarities to Alfred Lawnbrook’s. Still, the concept would not leave her alone. Maybe she still had spiders on the brain from that jarring nightmare…but she felt like there had to be some sort of connection.

Or maybe you’re trying to make one already messed up case much bigger than it is, she thought. Maybe you want that sort of trophy case in front of you after being gone for three months.

“Who discovered the body?” she asked.

“A guy out walking his dog,” Finley said. “Or so he said. When the first officers on the scene arrived, they said they smelled pot on his breath. The guy said he saw what looked like a lump of weird weeds floating out there. Hard to tell because it was so dark. As he got closer to the pier, he saw that it wasn’t weeds but blonde hair.”

“How long has the body been out of the water?” Avery asked.

“Forty minutes. She’d only been out for five or ten minutes before I called you.”

Avery looked around at the scene. She knew that there were sections of Jamaica Pond that often drew sizeable crowds, especially on the weekend. But this little cove was off the beaten path, the sort of place teens came to make out or smoke pot. The chance of finding a witness to what happened was slim to none.

“Was the debit card the only thing on her?” Avery asked.

“Yeah,” Finley said. “No cash, no phone…which I found strange. A girl this pretty at this stage of life…they’re supposed to be glued to their phones, right?”

“The killer probably took it,” Avery said. “That or it’s somewhere at the bottom of the pond.”

She looked at Abby Costello again, trying to determine how long her body had been in the water. Her clothes were soaked and her hair was matted. Avery hunkered down next to the body again and saw that Abby’s fingers were covered in wrinkles that often came from sitting in a tub of water for too long—only Abby’s were very wrinkled. Her palms had also gone a hard shade of white.

“I’d estimate that she was in the water for at least two hours,” Avery said. “Maybe the coroner can tell us more. Given that span of time, I doubt it would do good to make a perimeter of the area. We’ll hope we can get some fingerprints from her body or the blindfold.”

In the distance, she could see the ambulance lights. She once again looked back out to the water, wondering what secrets it might be hiding.

***

Within another fifteen minutes, the officers who had been dispatched to Abby’s apartment called back. They’d broken the news to her roommate, another woman in her early twenties. She was distraught by the news and the only bit of information she could offer was that Abby had gone out on a date that evening. She didn’t know the guy’s name, as Abby tended to be very reserved and quiet about her love life.

When the police had searched Abby’s room, they’d discovered a box from an online retailer. The box had been open and inside was a brand new smartphone. The phone had been powered up but not yet set up or programmed. The package receipt inside gave an order date of two days ago. A quick call to the delivery service confirmed that the phone had arrived earlier in the day—maybe a few hours before Abby Costello had been tossed into Jamaica Pond.

It was this bit of information that Avery, Kellaway, and Finley were discussing in an A1 conference room twenty minutes after Abby’s body had been removed from the scene. It was 4:30 in the morning, the coffee was brewing, and Avery’s day was just getting started.

“This could maybe actually work out in our favor,” Avery said, pouring a cup of coffee.

“Having no phone at all?” Finley asked. “How’s that?”

“Because if she has a brand new phone, it means that her contract for her old one was probably up. That or it was just crapping out on her. How many times in the past when you have upgraded your phone did you simply just throw the old one in the trash?”

“Never,” Kellaway said. “I usually keep mine as a backup music player.”

“And when Rose was younger,” Avery said, “I’d keep my old ones for her to play games on. But either way…if Abby Costello had just received a new phone, the old one is probably still around somewhere and not at the bottom of the pond, as I had feared.”

“The cops at her apartment never found the old one, though,” Finley pointed out.

“So then we contact her service provider,” Avery said. “If they can’t get us the physical phone itself, they probably have records of phone calls and texts that we can use to find the killer.”

“There are those ecoATMs, too,” Kellaway said. “Those little things that look like miniature recycling bins where you can get rid of your old phone. It’s like a recycling initiative or something.”

“Great point,” Avery said. “We’ll need to assign someone to all of these tasks as soon as the local mobile and wireless stores open up.”

“So what do we do in the meantime?” Finley asked.

“You do whatever O’Malley and Connelly have you doing around here,” Avery said with a bit of pride in her voice. The smile he gave her warmed her heart. “As for Kellaway and I, we’ll start talking to the roommate and the family. And please, if you don’t mind, direct the calls from the coroner to me as they come in.”

“Aren’t you more worried about the spider case?” Finley asked.

“I am,” she said. “But I have a hunch…”

“That they’re connected?” Finley asked. “Really?”

“I’m going to assume they are until it can be proven otherwise.”

Finley shrugged and got up for his own cup of coffee. “Hey…if you want to overwork yourself within your first two days back, be my guest. Either way…it’s good to have you back.”

She said nothing to this, mainly because she wasn’t sure if she was really, truly back. It felt like it, but that could just be the excitement of it all. Whatever the feeling was, it was thrumming through her as she and Kellaway left the conference room, heading out into the early morning with two murders to solve.