Free The 1st Victim by Tami Hoag Page A

forensic team swarmed around the body, taking photographs, shooting video, planting evidence markers in the snow.
    “What do you think?” Liska asked. “Was she a pedestrian that got clipped by a car?”
    “Why would anyone be walking out here?”
    They were on a truck route, nowhere near a residential or commercial area. There was nothing around here to walk to or from.
    “If her car broke down . . .”
    “But there is no car.”
    “It’s a dump job,” Liska concluded.
    They both heaved a sigh. They had no crime scene. No crime scene meant little evidence—little evidence and a victim with no name. No name, no family, no friends, no witnesses.
    They joined the forensics team in the ditch. Their Jane Doe looked to be five-feet-six or so, slender-to-medium build—hard to tell with the bulk of the red winter coat. Age? Hard to say with the damage to the face. The Medical Examiner would have to figure that out.
    Nothing resembling a murder weapon had been found in the immediate area.
    The trucker who had spotted the body and called it in was sitting in the cab of his vehicle some yards down the road. The truck’s engine grumbled to itself like a sleeping dragon. It was a beat-up old U-Haul–type box truck, twenty feet long or better, with Iowa plates. Liska and Kovac walked over to it, and Kovac knocked on the door and showed the driver his badge as the window opened, warm air and cigarette smoke escaping from the truck’s cab.
    “Kovac. Homicide. You are . . .?”
    “Frank Fitzgerald,” the driver said. “Call me Fitz. Everybody calls me Fitz.”
    He was an earnest-looking kind of guy, in his thirties, with a round, open face and wide brown eyes that lent him an expression of mild surprise. He was balding, had a pug nose and a couple of chins, and a dark beard and mustache cut so short the stubble looked more like metal filings than hair.
    “You called this in.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming down the road and I see what looks like a pile of clothes or something down the side here. At first I didn’t think nothing of it. But as I’m going by, I look, and I think: Geez, that looks like a body. But what the heck, you know? How can it be a real person? It must be a mannequin or something.”
    He glanced across the cab of his truck. Kovac glanced across, too. In the far side-view mirror he could see the forensics team tromping in the snow around the victim.
    “She must have got hit by a car or something, huh?” Fitz said. “That’s what she looked like. Like she got bashed by something big.”
    “You went down to the body?” Liska asked.
    “Yeah. What if she was still alive?”
    “But she wasn’t. Did you touch the body?”
    Fitzgerald popped his thick eyebrows up and grimaced. “No-o-o-o. It seemed pretty clear there wasn’t anything I could do for her.”
    “Were there any vehicles on the road ahead of you before you saw the body, Mr. Fitzgerald?” Kovac asked.
    “No. I had the road to myself. Who’s out on the road at the crack of dawn on New Year’s Day?”
    “You are,” Kovac pointed out. “What brings you to town, Mr. Fitzgerald?”
    “Big antiques show starting tomorrow. I wanted to get into town early, check into my hotel, and watch the bowl games. Have a nice relaxing day, you know? This is a hell of a way to start.”
    “We’ll need you to come downtown and make a formal statement,” Kovac said. “And—don’t take this the wrong way—but we’d like to have a look inside your truck.”
    “Whatever you need to do,” Fitz said. “I got nothing to hide. I buy and sell vintage junk. That’s what’s in the back. Vintage business signs, automotive collectibles, old toys—that kind of thing.
    “You don’t think somebody just dumped her here, do you?” he asked. “It had to be an accident, right? What kind of sick son of a bitch does that?”
    “The kind we like to put in prison,” Liska said.
    “Why did you stay?” Kovac asked. “You could have called