It was only a surface friendship and Rider had never seen Benton outside of the gym. They were both young black women trying to keep their bodies from betraying them as they went about busy professional lives and attempted to scale steep ladders in different worlds.
Nevertheless, the fact Kiz knew her gave us a good jump. We knew right away who we were dealing with-a responsible and confident young woman who cared about both her health and her career. It eliminated a variety of lifestyle angles we might have mistakenly pursued. The negative from the break was that it was the first time Rider had ever come across someone she knew as the victim of a homicide she’d been assigned to investigate. I noticed right away at the scene that it put a pause in her step. She usually was quite vocal when breaking down a crime scene and developing an investigative theory. At this scene she was silent until spoken to.
There were no witnesses to the murder. The vestibule was hidden from street view and offered the killer a perfect blind. He would have been able to move into the small space and attack without fear of being seen from outside. Still, there had been a risk to the crime. At any moment another resident of the building could have come home or left and come upon Benton and her killer. If the dog walker had taken his pet out an hour earlier he possibly could have ventured into the crime in progress. He could have saved her, or possibly have become a victim himself.
Anomalies. So much of the work entailed study of the anomalies. The crime had the appearance of an attack of opportunity. The killer had followed Benton and waited for the moment she was in the blind. Yet there were aspects of the scene-its privacy, for example-that suggested that he already knew about the vestibule and may have been waiting there, like a hunter watching a bait trap.
Anomalies. Angella Benton was no more than five feet five but she was a strong young woman. Rider had witnessed her workout regimen and knew first-hand of her strength and stamina. Yet there was no sign of a struggle. Fingernail scrapings produced no skin or blood belonging to anyone else. Had she known her killer? Why hadn’t she fought? The masturbation and the tearing open of the blouse suggested a crime of psychosexual motivation, a crime perpetrated alone. Yet the seeming lack of any fight for life suggested Benton had been completely and quickly overpowered. Had there been more than one killer?
In the first twenty-four hours our purpose had been to collect the evidence, make notifications and conduct first interviews of those immediately connected to the crime scene. It was in the second twenty-four that the sifting began and we began to work the anomalies, trying to crack them open like walnuts. And by the end of that second day we had concluded that it was a staged crime scene. That is, a scene designed by the perpetrator to convey false ideas about the crime. We concluded we had a killer who thought he was smarter than us, who was sending us down the psychosexual-predator road when the reality of the crime was something altogether different.
The thing that tilted us in this direction was the semen found on the body. In studying the crime scene photographs I noticed that drops of semen stretched across the victim’s body in a line suggesting a trajectory. However, the individual drops were round. It was common investigative knowledge in regard to blood spatter evidence that round drops are formed when blood drops directly down to a surface. Elliptical-shaped drops occur when blood is spattered in a trajectory or at an angle to the surface. We consulted the department’s blood spatter expert to see if the norms of blood evidence extended to other bodily fluids. We were told it did, and that for us cracked open an anomaly. We now theorized that the possibility was high that the killer or killers had planted the semen on the body. It had possibly been taken to the crime scene and then dripped onto the body as part of an intended misdirection.
We refocused the investigation. No longer did we view it as a case in which the victim wandered into the kill zone of a predator. Angella Benton was the kill zone. It had been something about her life and circumstances