Free The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag

1
    Sam Kovac had been to more crime scenes than he cared to count. Homicides, suicides, assaults. He’d been a cop for a lot of years. He had worked homicide for most of those years. One might have imagined that after all those murders that the details would have blurred and run together, that the names and the faces of the victims would have faded from memory, but no.
    The same way baseball players remember every big game they’ve ever played, Kovac remembered his homicides. He remembered what he had been doing when he got the call-out. He remembered the weather. He remembered the scenes—they were indoors, outdoors, in houses, apartments, fleabag motels. With some cases he remembered the smells—dinner left cooking on the stove, a body left decomposing in a hot attic.
    Always he remembered that initial picture—the location, position, and condition of the body. These images were filed away in his brain like a macabre photo album. Some pictures were sharper than others, but none had faded entirely. So, as he stood in the cold that January morning, looking down at his victim, he knew this image would never leave him.
    The body lay at an odd angle in the ditch, arms and legs flung this way and that like a ragdoll’s. Her hair appeared to be a deep burgundy red, about shoulder length. It surrounded her head in a puddle. Her face was obscured by blood. Her features had been partially smashed in by something—a brick, a fist, a hammer. She was a study in red: red hair, red face, red coat. Bloodred on white. Like a broken rose discarded in the snow.
    A rose in winter.
    Strange thought. Kovac wasn’t given to poetry. He was just a regular Joe, an old-school copper. There were no surprises to him. He had no hidden talents. He was no secret novelist or secret millionaire or secret computer genius, as cops in mystery novels often are.
    He was just a guy working a job he believed in . . . in the freezing freaking cold. His mustache had grown icicles. The hairs in his nose had frosted over. His feet were starting to go numb.
    It was 7:22 A.M. , January 1. Most of the residents of Minneapolis and its environs were home in bed, sleeping off hangovers, waiting for the Rose Parade to start on television. Kovac knew he would still be working this crime scene while the New Year’s hams roasted in the ovens. Maybe he would make it home to see the last of the bowl games.
    “Happy fucking holidays,” he said as his partner arrived.
    Nikki Liska glanced down into the ditch. A petite pixie bundled up in a wool coat with a scarf wrapped around her neck and a furry Elmer Fudd–style cap pulled down over her head, she looked more like a little kid about to waddle off to school than a veteran homicide cop.
    Her heavy sigh became a cloud in the cold air. The temperature was supposed to reach a daytime high of twelve degrees. It hadn’t gotten there yet.
    “There’s no good time to be dead,” she pointed out.
    She thrust a Caribou Coffee cup at him with one gloved hand, keeping one cup for herself. “What do we know?”
    “Not much. A truck driver saw the body, stopped, and got out to see what was what. Thought it was a mannequin.” He took a sip of coffee, burning the tip of his tongue, and scowled. “I don’t know why people always think that. How many mannequins do you ever see on the side of the road?”
    “Dead bodies never look real to normal people.”
    “Mannequins don’t bleed, Elmer.”
    “Don’t make fun of my hat,” Liska said. “Sixty percent of your body heat escapes through the top of your head. ID?”
    “It’s forty percent, and less if you’ve got a good head of hair,” Kovac returned. The subject was an old joke between them. Kovac’s hair was like an old bear’s pelt: thick and brown, liberally threaded with silver. He’d had it cut by the same Norwegian barber for twenty years.
    “No ID,” he said. “No purse, no wallet, no nothing.”
    “Great. Our first Jane Doe of the New Year.”
    The