The Detective & the Pipe Girl by Michael Craven Page A

John. I can’t let you look at the body. Cops are coming back down to look at it some more. Here’s the report and the pics.”
    Not the original. A copy he’d made for me, of course. He handed it to me.
    I said with a grin, “Not just a quick look at the body?”
    “Not unless you want to get caught and never get access to here again.”
    See what I’m saying? He said it with real bite. He was tired, irritated. Like I said, you have connections, but it’s still a challenge to use them.
    “Anything you saw that was out of the ordinary?”
    “Yeah, John. I mean, murder is out of the ordinary.”
    He gave me a blank, bug-eyed look, then calmed down a bit. “But not really. She was assassinated. Shot in the back of the head with a nine mill.”
    I thought: Jesus. Brutal.
    He went on. “Broken femur, three broken ribs, cracked mandible, broken ankle. All from the fall. None of which affected her death. She was dead when she fell. Had she not been, the damage from the fall would have been worse. It’s always worse when there is a conscious struggle.”
    I thought again: My god.
    He continued, “No drugs in the system. Nothing really to see in the pics other than the wounds. She has a couple tats, they all do these days. Oh, and . . . she had sex the night of the murder.”
    “Was it . . .”
    “Not rape. Sex. No sign of struggle on the body or anywhere else.”
    I looked at this strange, bug-eyed man. No expression as he told me the details of the autopsy for a beautiful young woman whose head had been blown off and whose body had been cracked into pieces.
    I said, “Why are the cops coming back?”
    “No reason. Happens all the time. You know that.”
    “Yeah, I know that. But sometimes there is a reason. You don’t think there’s a reason this time?”
    “Oh. If I had to guess I’d say it’s because they’re not that thorough in the first place and they try to be all cool and cop-y and not ask too many questions like they know what they’re talking about when it comes to corpses when they really don’t. And then they get back to their desks and realize they haven’t retained anything I said when they did decide to ask me questions, because they were too cool to write down my answers. So they tell me they want to come back for another look but usually they just want to come back and ask me the same questions again so they can get the same answers I already gave them. But that’s just a guess, John.”
    I smiled. Elliot was wound pretty damn tight. I found his rants amusing, and often true. When they weren’t directed at me, that is.
    I held up the packet he had given me, nodded, and left. Back to my office to look at photos and an autopsy report of a dead Suzanne Neal.
     
    Now at my desk, I opened up the folder. There she was, the beautiful girl I saw in a park overlooking the Pacific. But now pale, purple, and dead. And with an exploded head and face. I looked at the pictures. I read Elliot’s report. Shot in the head, died, technically, for a couple reasons. Brain dead, loss of blood. But really, in layman’s terms, because someone had put a gun in the back of her cranium and pulled the trigger.
    Violent. Horrible. Sickening.
    I looked at the pictures of her naked body. Not nearly as gruesome as the shots of her head. Just the lifeless flesh of a young girl, of a dead body. You couldn’t really even notice the broken bones. They weren’t compound fractures. I continued to scan her body. There were the tattoos. One small tat on each ankle. Left outside ankle, a rose, not terribly original. Right outside ankle, what looked to be a small rendering of a pyramid. I didn’t want to be cynical in this moment, but I thought the pyramid was probably one of those attempts people make with their tattoos to be spiritual. Her version of Asian lettering. Hey, nobody’s perfect. In fact, a slip like this, a bad decision, could even be endearing.
    Because we all make them.
    I looked over the report again,