Read Online The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag - Free Book Online

care what killed her,” he said. “All I want to know right now is who she is. If we can’t get an ID, where the hell do we go with the investigation? We can want to believe Doc Holiday killed her, but what do we know ? Jack nothing, that’s what.
    “Could be she had a rotten boyfriend,” he said. “Could be she had a rotten father. Could be she pissed off a dealer or a pimp. Could be everyone in this girl’s life hated her and had a reason to want her dead. Could be anything. We need a starting place. If we don’t know who she is, we can’t know why she’s a victim.”
    “No word on the prints?” Tippen asked.
    “Nada. She’s got about seven teeth left in her head, and Möller pulled a couple of loose ones out of her airway. We might be able to get a match if we can get dental records to compare to,” he said. “She had a bunch of body piercings. Five in each ear, a nose ring, a belly ring. A couple others. All the jewelry is missing.”
    “Doc Holiday took the jewelry from the others.”
    “But he didn’t pour acid on them,” Kovac said.
    “Maybe he’s trying something new, broadening his torture horizons.”
    “Maybe,” he conceded. “But the knife is wrong too. Too small. Seventeen stab wounds and none of them significant enough to kill her. What’s that about?”
    “What a great terror factor,” Tippen said. “He gets to look in their eyes every time he sinks the knife in, over and over and over. All the better if it doesn’t kill the victim.”
    Kovac wasn’t convinced. “These tigers don’t change that many stripes in one go. Maybe he changes the knife. Or maybe he adds the acid. But both?”
    Tippen raised his hands in frustration. “He’s ambitious. He’s bored. He’s got time on his hands. He saw it on Dexter. I don’t know. Do you want the bad guy not to be Doc Holiday?”
    “It doesn’t matter what I want,” Kovac said. “I want world peace. I want not to have acid reflux after eating pizza. Nobody gives a shit what I want. I want the truth. I want to know who this girl is and who killed her.”
    “And if we press the theory Doc Holiday killed her, then maybe we get our task force, and maybe we get to investigate our other two cases in something other than our spare time, of which we have none,” Tippen pointed out. “And maybe we get the media to show some renewed attention in those other cases, and maybe something shakes loose for one of them, if not for all of them.”
    Kovac sighed and rubbed a hand across his jaw. He needed a shave. “I’ve got no problem with that part of it. It’s the media part I hate.”
    “The media is the key. If we chum the water for them with our zombie girl, they’ll create the public pressure we need with the brass,” Tippen said. “We need these cases in the public eye. If people think there’s a monster running around the metro area, they’ll want action. Nothing captures the public imagination quite like a serial killer.”
    “You think we should yell ‘fire’ in a theater?”
    Tippen made a face. “No one is going to start a stampede. It’s not like Doc Holiday is breaking into homes and dragging young women from their beds,” he said. “The threat is a couple of steps removed from most people’s comfort zone. But the idea of a killer stalking innocent coeds and young mothers along the roadways still strikes a significant amount of fear. All we need is a good dose of vocal public outrage.”
    Kovac considered the argument and sighed. “I’m not against it.”
    The downside would be the glaring spotlight that kind of publicity would bring to the investigation itself. They had a victim with no face and no name. They had their work cut out for them. To run that investigation under a media microscope would not be a pleasant thing. He could already hear the questions: Why haven’t you caught him yet? What did you discover today? Why haven’t you identified the victim? Every moron who had ever watched an episode of CSI