Page 13

Despite Jessie’s best efforts, she’d fallen asleep in the car.

“Hunt,” Riddell barked, “we’re here.”

Her eyes snapped open to find that they were pulling into the yacht club parking lot. The sun was just starting to come up. She glanced at the clock on Riddell’s dashboard. It read 6:06 A.M. She was surprised he’d let her sleep the whole way here.

She sat up, trying to force her brain to uncloud. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. She didn’t feel that much more alert than when she’d been ripped from her nightmare earlier.

“What do we know?” she asked, not only because she wanted the information but because it would give her more time to clear her head while he talked.

"Not much more than before," he said as he parked. "They were bringing the boat back down here from where they found it. I assume they're back by now. It was another sailboat. The victim was male. That's all I was told. But I see the medical examiner and crime scene unit folks are here already, so hopefully we can get some answers."

Through sticky eyes, Jessie took note of the M.E. and CSU vans, also parked in the lot. Riddell got out of the driver’s seat, and she slowly did the same, praying that the detective would attribute her deliberate movement to the nap she’d just taken and not the medication that had her synapses misfiring.

“Shall we go check it out?” she asked.

He nodded, and she let him lead the way. Considering that she was having trouble blinking the muck and sleep out of her eyes, she couldn't clearly determine where they were going and kept her focus on the man in front of her. He was walking too fast for her taste, but unsure if he was rushing or she was too slow, she said nothing.

She took a deep breath of the salt air, hoping it would empty out the cobwebs. They were about to be studying a crime scene and a murder victim. She needed to be in better shape for that than she was right now. Unfortunately, she suspected she only had a couple of minutes to force the change in clarity. She wasn’t optimistic.

It didn't even take that long to get there. Less than sixty seconds later, Riddell suddenly stopped moving. She almost bumped into the back of him but managed to avoid a collision by stepping to the left at the last moment.

She grabbed a dock post to steady herself as she surveyed the scene. There were already multiple people on the boat, which was a little smaller than Peterson’s. She counted at least four CSU techs, as well as Dr. Tran, the M.E. from yesterday. For the first time, she noticed Oliver Stanton standing on the dock near Riddell.

"Who's the dead guy?" Riddell asked the yacht club's executive director, without a trace of empathy. Jessie would have mentally chided him for it, but if the victim was anything like Daran Peterson, she might have trouble finding much herself.

“His name is Taye Boyce,” Stanton replied, his voice shaky. “He’s one of our members, has been for a half dozen years. This is his cruising sailboat.”

“What can you tell us about him?” Jessie asked, doing her best to sound alert.

“I know that he worked in finance and that he does very well for himself,” Stanton said. “He’s single. I’m not sure of his exact age but I believe he’s in his early thirties, a little older than his friend, Mr. Peterson.

“They were friends?” Riddell asked sharply.

.

Stanton jumped at the forcefulness of the detective’s question.

“Yes, Mr. Boyce and Mr. Peterson were good friends.”

“That seems relevant,” Jessie said, aware that she was stating the obvious.

“You think?” Riddell replied acidly, apparently agreeing, before adding, “Are you ready to go onboard or do you want to cling to the dock for a while longer?”

Jessie felt the weight of her weapon on her hip and longed to relieve the pressure by pulling it out and shooting her temporary partner in the chest. She imagined his shocked face as he fell backward into the water, blood darkening the waves as they lapped against the dock.

“Sure,” she said, offering a saccharine smile as she forced down her desire to say much more. “I’ll join you in a second. I just want to reach out to my research team to have them start looking into Boyce.”

Riddell scowled but didn’t object as he turned and stepped onto the short gangway to access the boat. She pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to Jamil, asking for anything they could gather on Taye Boyce.

The second after she sent the text, it occurred to her that she could have sent it to Ryan instead. Still deskbound, he would have leapt at the opportunity to jumpstart the research into the victim. But she cut herself some slack as her brain still wasn’t in full gear yet.

She carefully made her way onboard. Normally she preferred to study the crime scene more generally before examining the victim, but in this case they appeared to be one in the same. Boyce was lying face down on the deck.

A giant pool of blood, now coagulating, surrounded him, with most of it collected near his upper half. Jessie guessed that for there to be so much blood, the injury was to his neck. It looked like the liquid had been dumped out of him.

There was broken glass mixed in amid the blood, mostly on his left side. To his right, a windbreaker rested limply on the deck, also soaked in blood. A few feet in front of him, a bottle of white wine sat in a chiller. The ice had all melted. That suggested that he’d put it in a while ago.

Jessie was about to silently compliment herself on thinking clearly for several consecutive seconds when her thoughts were interrupted by Dr. Tran.

“Shall we turn him over?” he asked. “I suspect that the cause of death will be easier to determine if we do.”

Jessie looked over at Riddell, who, to her consternation, nodded without even looking at her. She let it slide when she noticed that Tran was still waiting for her go-ahead.

“Please,” she said.

With the assistance of a CSU tech, the medical examiner rolled Boyce onto the plastic sheeting that had been laid out next to his body. Once they stepped aside, Jessie moved closer to take in the man.

His features were hard to discern because of the congealed blood covering his face, but his hair, matted with the viscous liquid, was blond. He wore a polo shirt and casual pants, along with expensive-looking sneakers. He seemed to be in pretty good shape.

But Boyce’s most notable attribute was the giant gash in his throat midway between his jaw and clavicle, right around where the jugular vein was located. Even for a brutal neck wound, this one was messy.

“Another stabbing, obviously,” Riddell muttered.

“Yes,” Dr. Tran agreed, “but this isn’t a normal knife wound. Look at the mangled skin at the edges of the puncture.”

Jessie had noticed that as well. She had a fleeting thought about what might have caused it, but the idea floated away before she could lock it down. She took a step back to try to unfuzz her mind and see if she could recapture it.

She turned her attention from Boyce’s body to the table with the wine bottle. She noticed that something was missing and scanned the deck near the table but found nothing. There was no cork, nor a corkscrew. She turned back to Tran.

“Could the killer have used a corkscrew as the murder weapon, like one used to open a wine bottle?”

The medical examiner glanced at the bottle on the table, then returned his attention to the body, leaning in closer.

“Don’t hold me to this,” he said. “I’ll need to get a better look back at the lab, but based on initial inspection, it certainly could be.”

“I think we can rule out him tripping and accidentally stabbing himself with a corkscrew,” Riddell said.

“Especially since it’s nowhere to be found,” Jessie agreed. “My guess is that whoever did this tossed it over the side after they were done.”

“That makes sense,” Riddell conceded, surprising her by not arguing the point.

“There’s only one glass out here,” she continued, “which he was apparently holding when he was stabbed. That would explain why it’s in pieces now. But if I had to bet, there was another glass at one point. If we have CSU check the galley, I think we’ll find a missing slot for another one, just like on Daran Peterson’s boat.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Of course, it was Riddell who eventually broke the silence.

“Two friends from the same club killed on their boats on consecutive nights,” he mused. “Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to call in the profiler from Homicide Special Section.”

“Why do you say that?” Jessie asked.

“Because this case has all the makings of a serial killer,” he replied. “You love those, right?”

Riddell was wrong about that. She didn’t love serial killer cases. But she was no stranger to them, which should help with these murders. That is, if she could ever get her head right.