Free City of Echoes by Robert Ellis

the LAPD. But when they reached the trail in the dry brush and he spotted a pair of first responders waving flashlights at them fifty yards down the way, he realized that the crime scene was too far away for the killer to have tripped an alarm or camera.
    Cabrera gave him a nudge as they approached. “There she is,” he whispered.
    Matt looked ahead and could see her form in the darkness. His stomach was churning and he wasn’t sure why. While serving overseas, he had seen more dead bodies than he could count. Many of the corpses had been found in similar terrain. Most of them had been armed men, but every once in a while he’d come upon a woman or a child who had been executed or wounded and left to die alone under a hot sun in the rocks and sand.
    But this time it was different.
    He could feel it. The work of a madman.
    Ignoring the others, he knelt down before the girl’s nude body and switched on his flashlight. Her wrists and ankles had been bound and staked to the ground, her face mutilated and placed on a sheet of mirrored glass—just like the others. But what struck Matt most about the way the body had been left were the variety of different scents in the air. Her blond hair was rich with the fragrance of shampoo. He could smell the soap on her clear skin. Freshly applied deodorant. When he examined her nails, both her toes and fingers appeared to have just been polished.
    A tremor quaked through his body from somewhere deep inside. It seemed so odd. So singular. So familiar.
    “What is it?” Grace said. “What do you see?”
    Matt stood up and turned, sensing that something was wrong by the sound of Grace’s voice. His supervisor appeared nervous and afraid and looked like he was struggling to keep cool and hide it.
    “The killer cleaned her up, Lieutenant.”
    “The copycat. How so, Jones?”
    “He gave her a bath, did her hair, and painted her nails before he staked her down in the dirt and cut up her face.”
    A moment passed. Long and dark and exceedingly still.
    Grace didn’t say anything, and Matt didn’t think he was looking at the girl’s body anymore. He was too caught up in whatever was on his mind. Matt backed out of the way, unlocked his phone, and found Howard Benson’s number in his contacts list. Benson worked in the Missing Persons Unit. Anyone involved in narcotics spent a lot of time working with Missing Persons, and he and Benson knew each other well. Benson picked up on the first ring.
    “Are you still in the office?” Matt said.
    “I’ve been trying to get out of here for the past two hours. How can I help?”
    Matt turned back to the body. “A young woman, eighteen to twenty, about five ten, blond hair, on the slender side but with a belly, maybe a student.”
    “That could be anybody, Matt. What color are her eyes?”
    Matt knelt down again and panned his flashlight across the victim’s face, straining to see through the blood. The mutilation was hideous, her skin puffy, her features so deformed that it looked like she was wearing a mask made of pulp. It was an image that he knew he’d walk with for the rest of his life.
    “I can’t see her eyes,” he said.
    “What about a tattoo? A small heart-shaped tattoo just below her left hip bone. There’s a birthmark beside it.”
    “You’ve got someone in mind?”
    “A girl went missing five days ago. Another student. She had blond hair and lived in a dorm in Westwood.”
    Matt pulled the phone away. Orlando and Plank were on the left side of the body, and he asked them about the tattoo and birthmark. Orlando slipped on a pair of gloves. The investigator from the coroner’s office wasn’t here yet, nor was anyone from SID, including the photographer. Touching or moving the body in any way would compromise the investigation and possibly take down a trial. But Orlando had other ideas. The soil beneath the corpse was loose and sandy. Matt watched as the detective scooped away the debris and Plank shined his flashlight on