of her weight protruded from the wall under her armpits. Her heels were together, each foot angled away from the other to form a V.
A white veil of translucent lace had been carefully arranged to cover her face, like a bride.
The outthrust posture sent a collage of art-history remnants cascading through his mind—the Venus de Milo, a thousand renditions of the Crucifixion, the Louvre’s Winged Victory statue, her marble bosom jutting forward as if it belonged on the prow of an ancient ship plowing through a Mediterranean surf.
But this was no museum. It was a crime scene, and the mixture of cruelty and ostentation pouring from the garish exhibit filled him with a sudden wave of nausea.
Slowly, his analytical faculties began to reassert themselves.
She was naked except for thin cotton panties and the veil. Blond. White. Everything about the placement was symmetrical. Each hand was set in identical form, with thumb and forefinger touching, each shoulder, each hip had been carefully manipulated into perfect balance. All but her head.
Her head slumped gently to the left so that her long blond hair cascaded over her left shoulder before curling under her armpits. Through the veil he could see that her eyes were closed. No blemish, no sign of pain or suffering, no blood.
Only blessed peace and beauty. She could as easily be an angel painted by da Vinci or Michelangelo. The perfect bride.
Brian Jacobs, seventeen, had brought his girlfriend here after school for reasons unrevealed and found the Bride Collector’s fourth victim. Brad preferred to think of them as angels.
He peered closer and felt strange words of empathy well up inside of him.
I cry with you, Angel. I weep for you. For every strand of hair that will never again blow in the wind, for every smile that will never brighten someone else’s day, for every look of desire that will never quicken another man’s pulse. I am so sorry.
“She’s beautiful,” Nikki said behind him.
He felt a momentary stab of regret for having been pulled away from his connection with the woman on the wall. Nikki walked past him, eyes fixed on the woman, touching his arm gently with her fingers as she passed. Her breathing was steady, slightly thicker than usual. He knew the cause: the dark waters of the killer’s mind, which she now probed by staring at his handiwork.
Like an avalanche, the poignancy of his relationship with Nikki crashed through his mind… and then was gone, replaced by the image of her standing next to the woman. A blond angel hovering over a brunette. One with arms stretched wide in complete resignation, the other with arms folded. One nearly naked, the other dressed in a blue silk blouse with a black jacket and skirt.
She’s beautiful, he thought.
“What a shame.” Kim Peterson’s voice cut softly through the room, grasping what the other two were too proud to verbalize. The forensic pathologist stepped up next to Brad, withdrew a pair of white gloves from her bag then set it down. “What do we know?”
Brad would have preferred to spend more time alone with the victim, but the opportunity had passed. “No ID. Discovered an hour ago by two teenagers.”
They stared in a moment of silence.
“She’s beautiful,” Kim said.
“Yes.”
“This makes four.”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
The pathologist approached opposite Nikki, who remained quiet, lost in thought as she studied the body with searching eyes.
Kim sank to one heel and gently lifted the woman’s toes for a better view under the foot. “Care to tell us how you think it happened before I begin my preliminary examination?”
He wasn’t ready, of course, not yet, not without a complete analysis of evidence still to be gathered. But he’d been credited with an uncanny ability to accurately judge events from the thinnest of evidentiary threads. He’d cracked three major cases in the Four Corners region since leaving Miami and joining the Denver field office a year ago. At thirty-two years of age, he was on the fast track for high ground—much higher ground, according to his superiors.
But unlike them, his motivation had nothing to do with climbing an organizational ladder.
“Male, size eleven by the shoe prints. They were here for a while, maybe a day…”
“How so?” Nikki asked.
A distant murmur carried to him: an officer speaking to the curious driver of an approaching car outside, instructing him to head back to the main road. The roof over their heads ticked as it began to cool in the late afternoon.