Free The Seventh Victim by Mary Burton Page A

she’d had and bought the camera. That precise day she’d started snapping pictures and almost immediately a sense of peace had eased the tension gripping her body. The world made a little more sense when she saw it through the lens of a camera.
    Her subject matter had been varied and scattered until she’d read an article in the Baltimore paper about a murder scene. A woman had been stabbed near the Inner Harbor. Pulled by forces she could not articulate, she’d gone to the murder scene and started snapping pictures. Later when she loaded the images onto her computer, she’d studied them so carefully, hoping to see just one element that would explain the violence that had claimed a woman’s life.
    No answers had surfaced that night, or the next. But the need to keep shooting remained. Her cameras got fancier, more sophisticated, but none gave her the feel she needed. And then she’d visited a Chicago auction house selling old photographic equipment. The trip had been more of a curiosity than a mission until she’d seen the hundred-and-fifty-year-old bellows camera. Instantly drawn to the camera, she’d bid high enough to win the camera and drain her savings.
    The digital camera had forgiven her amateur photographic skills, but the bellows camera had no patience for novices. She’d found a photographer in Pennsylvania who taught her how to prepare her glass negatives, shoot her images, and develop the smoky, moody pictures that so suited her subject matter.
    Lara scribbled down the address of the murder scene and grabbed her keys. “Ride in the car?”
    The dog perked up immediately and bounded out the front door to her black truck. He sat by the driver’s-side door barking and wagging his tail while she fired up the engine and the car’s air-conditioning. She loaded her camera equipment into the back of the truck along with a cooler of water in the backseat.
    She slid behind the wheel, shifted into drive, and headed toward the main road.
    Traveling to the murder scene took forty-five minutes and by the time she arrived the sun was high in the sky and the air hot.
    Lara pulled off the highway. A glance at the rolling landscape told her the light was not right. The sun was too high. But later, maybe at sunset.
    Still sitting behind the wheel, she snapped digital pictures of the road, her truck, and the area around it as she tried to get a feel for the area. In the distance she spotted a slight flap of yellow, which she guessed was crime scene tape left behind by the police.
    Shutting off the engine, she locked the car and with Lincoln headed toward the hint of yellow. Gravel crunched under her boots as Lincoln dashed ahead. She stopped ten feet short of the yellow tape. The tape looked fresh, as if the cops had returned to the area to renew their search. Made sense if they were looking for a connection between the two murders.
    Pulling off her sunglasses, she stared at the low-lying grass in the center of the tape; it still appeared to be matted down. She squatted and set her sunglasses on a rock.
    Was that the impression of a body? She started to snap pictures moving in a counterclockwise fashion around the site. Later, she’d load the images on her computer and then determine which angle would work best for the bellows camera and tripod.
    When she’d snapped over one hundred images she lowered the camera and without the lens’ protection stared at the ground. A woman had lain here, perhaps dead, perhaps dying, as someone had knelt over her and wrapped strong fingers around her neck.
    She closed her eyes as she’d done a hundred times before and tried to imagine her attacker. The cops had said that she’d had no defensive wounds, but there’d been skin under her nails. She’d fought.
    The Strangler had brought her to the wooded location off Route 10 and had laid her on the ground. What had happened next? Had he straddled her before he wrapped fingers around her neck? Had he been in a rush or had he enjoyed