LITMIR.BIZ

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this planet who didn’t believe in auras, it was his partner. Her Cuban mother had seen to that, spending a small fortune on espiritistas and santeros who promised cures…for the right price.

      She nodded toward the body. “What do you see?”

      “Ligature marks on the wrists.”

      “The ankles, too.” She took a minute. “She hasn’t spent too much time in the water.”

      He nodded. “Maybe she was dumped. She’s not a floater.”

      A submerged body, a floater, decomposed at an accelerated rate. Within a day, or even hours depending on the temperature, anaerobic bacteria trapped in the intestines produced gases that distended the stomach cavity and bloated the body beyond recognition. Other than a little mud, the victim before him looked pristine.

      “Not a drowning?” Erika ventured.

      “Or a crime of passion.” He indicated the ligature marks. “Whoever killed her took his time.”

      “Poor baby.” She seemed to be talking to the girl as if she could hear her. “We’re going to find the piece of shit that did this to you.”

      Watching Erika there beside the girl, Seven got a flash of a different, even more disturbing image. His nephew, Nick, lying there in the mud.

      Jesus, the girl was only a few years older than Nick.

      He looked away, obliterating the image and getting back to business. “So who are we waiting for?” he asked, deducing that someone of authority had made the call to put them on the case. He glanced around at the milling law enforcement. “Or are we just supposed to stand around? Maybe twiddle our thumbs?”

      She turned to look at him. “What? You want to go fishing? Maybe take a jog around the loop?”

      “I was thinking more like roust a couple of budding ornithologists.” He nodded toward the wooden footbridge with its viewing platform. He could just make out the bird watchers and their telephoto lenses trained on the crime scene. “Maybe even before our victim shows up on the front page of the paper.”

      “They’re birders,” Erika said, turning to look in their direction.

      “Ornithologists, birders, same difference.”

      “Actually, ornithology is the scientific study of birds.” She nodded toward the guys wearing camouflage and standing next to binoculars so big they required tripods. “The birders?” She lowered her voice suggestively. “They just like to watch.”

      This time, he gave her the satisfaction of seeing him smile.

      The word game had started last month after a night spent watching a rerun of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A couple of beers and several artery-clogging bowls of buttered popcorn later, they both claimed the superior vocabulary. Seven was pretty sure Erika kept score…and that she was ahead.

      Having done her duty and sicced a uniform on the birders, Erika knelt next to the body. “Come look at this.”

      Erika took out a pen from her jacket and carefully separated the strands of hair covering the girl’s neck.

      “See that?” she asked.

      There was a red mark on the neck, like a prick of some kind. The skin around it appeared discolored.

      He crouched down alongside the girl and frowned. “What the hell is that? An injection site?”

      “She has another one here,” Erika said pushing aside the cordgrass with her pen to indicate the top of the girl’s hand.

      “Doesn’t look like track marks. Could it be some sort of bug bite, or a crab or a fish having had a go at the body?”

      Erika shook her head. “Too uniform.”

      His cell went off. Without taking his gaze off the strange mark, he reached for the phone on his hip. But it rang only once, stopping before he could answer.

      “How’s Beth doing?” Erika asked, not even trying to disguise her distaste.

      He ignored her and focused on the body and the curious marks. Erika assumed the call was from Beth, his sister-in-law, par for the course the last two years. That’s when Seven’s older brother, Ricky—the happily married man and Nick’s father, the perfect son to Seven’s prodigal—had pleaded guilty to second degree murder. Ricky, a plastic surgeon, had killed a male nurse, the man who’d been his lover.

      Beth, Ricky’s wife, hadn’t exactly taken her husband’s betrayal in stride. She’d fallen into the bottle. It had been up to Seven and his family to keep the pieces together for Nick.

      But now Beth was in AA. She was studying for her broker’s license. Sure, she’d lost the waterfront home and the fifty-five-foot yacht, the condo in Big Bear. She and Nick lived in a small house that Seven owned with his father…and she seemed happier than ever.

      Only, Erika wasn’t the forgiving type. She hadn’t bought into Beth’s new lease on life, or the fact that she’d given up on her game of musical chairs with the Bushard brothers. According to Erika, Beth was only waiting for the ink to dry on her divorce papers before she made her move on him.

      Out of the corner of his eye, Seven caught sight of a familiar movement. A strange prickling heated the back of his neck. Standing, he could feel his heart pumping hard as his body acknowledged the threat long before his brain could put the pieces together.

      “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

      Someone of authority had just arrived, all right.

      The woman marching toward them was blond and tall with the lanky build of an Olympic high jumper. Her long-legged stride forced the tech beside her to give a little skip just to keep up. She wore black slacks and a blazer with a simple white blouse, and accessorized with the requisite dark aviator glasses. But the thing that stood out—what made him instantly recognize her—was that damn BlackBerry in her hand.

      She was headed straight for Seven and Erika, instructing the crime-scene tech jogging alongside, while no doubt browsing the Web on her BlackBerry. Special Agent Carin Barnes liked to multitask.

      “Getting back to those twenty questions,” he said to Erika. “Why exactly did two Westminster detectives get called in here?”

      Erika stood, training her gaze on the blonde. “I think you skipped the part about it being bigger than a bread box.”

      “A hell of a lot taller, anyway,” he said.

      Bright and early, Erika had given him a call. A DB—a dead body—in the wetlands. Female. Very young. He’d gone into automatic; his partner was calling him to the scene of a crime. Why ask questions?

      He frowned. The fucking FBI.

      “Since when do you have an in with the feds?” he asked Erika.

      She lowered her sunglasses for his benefit. “Honey, I have an in just about everywhere.”

      She popped the glasses back on the bridge of her nose and stepped toward the approaching agent. Since he’d last seen Special Agent Carin Barnes, she’d clipped her hair boy-short. It was a valiant attempt at looking the part of tough federal agent but there was too much of willowy blonde there to achieve the proper effect.

      The women shook hands. Seven and Carin Barnes were of a height, just under six feet. Standing next to Erika, the two made a curious picture: A Viking warrioress looming over a Pictish princess. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he knew those two wouldn’t waste time on pleasantries.

      “Special Agent Barnes,” he said, bracing himself as the FBI agent came to a stop before him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

      “I assume that’s your attempt at levity,” Barnes said, pocketing the BlackBerry, “which we both know is wasted on me. This isn’t the killer’s only victim. Megan Tobin of Henderson, Nevada. We found her last month, dumped just like this.

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