“I’m sooooo ready to hear your verdict,” I said.

Claire gave it up at last.

“It’s a homicide, definitely,” she told me. “Lividity was inconsistent with a sitting position, so she was moved. And I found faint bruising across the tops of her arms, chest, and on her rib cage.”

“So the manner and cause of death?”

“I’m gonna say she was burked,” Claire told me.

I was familiar with the term.

In the 1820s, a couple of sweethearts named Burke and Hare were in the cadaver procurement business. For a while, they dug up bodies for sale to Edinburgh’s medical schools—until they realized how easy it was to produce fresh corpses by grabbing live victims and sitting on their chests until they died.

Burking was still in good standing today. Postpartum mommies do it to their kids more often than you’d ever want to know. Slip the child between the mattress and box spring, sit on the bed.

If you can’t expand your chest, you can’t breathe.

And the victim’s body shows little or no sign of trauma.

I buckled up as Claire backed the car out and headed to Susie’s.

“It was a horror show for this girl, Lindsay,” Claire told me. “What I’m thinking is, while one perp sat on her chest, another freak slipped a plastic bag over her head and smothered her. Rolled up the edge of the bag good and tight. That’s where the ligature mark came from. Maybe he pressed his hand to her nose and mouth at the same time.”

“She had two killers?”

“If you ask me, Lindsay, that’s the only way it could have been done.”

Chapter 13

SAN FRANCISCO’S BUSINESS DISTRICT slipped by as Claire piloted the Pathfinder through evening rush-hour traffic. We were silent for a few minutes, the eeriness of that young woman’s death filling the space around us.

Images shifted in my mind as I tried to put it together one grisly piece at a time.

“Two killers,” I finally said to Claire. “Working as a team. Posing the victim inside a car after the fact. What’s the point of that? What’s the message?”

“It’s cold, for one thing,” Claire said.

“And sick, for another. The rape kit?”

“Is at the lab,” said Claire, “along with that pricey outfit Caddy Girl was wearing. By the way, the lab found a semen stain on the hem of her skirt.”

“Was she raped?”

“I didn’t see the kind of vaginal tearing or bruising you’d expect from a rape,” Claire mused. “We’ll have to wait to decide about that.”

Claire braked the car at the Muni rail crossing, and together we watched the train rattle by. Night was closing in over the city of San Francisco, and the commuters were all going home.

Questions were still flooding my little mind. Lots of them. About who Caddy Girl was. Who had killed her. How she and her killers might have crossed paths.

Had the killing been personal?

Or was Caddy Girl a victim of opportunity?