Coyle smiled. “I’ll bet Animal Services would let you adopt those two puppies you were playing with this morning.”

“Tell me about the victim,” Mahler said.

Coyle looked back at his screen. “Five ten. One thirty-two.”

“Which makes her a little taller than the girls two years ago,” Rivas said. Nicknamed Señor Database, he was renowned in the department for his memory, able to recall MOs, known associates, and crime-scene details from twenty years before.

“Some makeup—eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick.” Coyle read the words as if they were in a foreign language. “No tattoos or body piercings. Evidence of old scarring on her forearms and ankles.”

“She was a cutter,” Eden said. “What about her clothes?”

“Navy silk blouse,” Coyle read on his screen. “Blood on the back, probably her own. Sixteen-inch black skirt. Black underwear. No shoes.”

“It’s an aggressive look.”

Frames turned in his chair. “So what’re you saying there, Eden? She’s a pro?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. But that’s a short skirt. It’s a look.”

“You mean for the East Coast?”

“I mean for anywhere. With the makeup and clothes, it’s like she’s dressing up for something.”

Mahler watched the intensity with which Eden leaned toward the whiteboard. Maybe this is what you get when you hire a former FBI analyst.

“It was Monday night,” Rivas said. “Who dresses up on Monday?”

“Viejo.” Frames laughed. “Not all of us go home to watch Wheel of Fortune.”

“And one weird thing,” Coyle said. “Techs found something written in black ballpoint ink on the inside of her left calf. Difficult to read, but it looks like eight words: To take into the air my quiet breath. Whatever that means.”

Eden raised her hand. “Wait, I know it. It’s a quote. One of those things we had to memorize at boarding school. What’s-his-name, you know, Keats.” She worked the screen on her phone. “Yeah. ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ verse six.”

Frames whistled. “Narrow the search to English majors.”

“No, but the quote’s about death, losing your breath. If she was strangled, it might tell us something about that.”

“We don’t have cause of death,” Coyle said.

“We also don’t know if it was written by the victim herself, whoever killed her, or someone else,” Rivas said.

“Okay, okay.” Eden sighed. “But if the victim wrote the words, it could tell us something about how she was killed or who she was. Habitual skin-writing might be a symptom of depression or bipolar disorder.”