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Back The Silenced Women Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Part I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Part II
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-One
  28. Chapter Twenty-Two
  29. Chapter Twenty-Three
  30. Chapter Twenty-Four
  31. Chapter Twenty-Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Part III
  37. Chapter Thirty
  38. Chapter Thirty-One
  39. Chapter Thirty-Two
  40. Chapter Thirty-Three
  41. Chapter Thirty-Four
  42. Chapter Thirty-Five
  43. Chapter Thirty-Six
  44. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  46. Read on for a sneak peek at the next Violent Crime Investigations Team mystery!
  47. Chapter One
  48. Acknowledgments
  49. About the Author
  50. Back Cover

A new ME report indicated the bruising around the victim’s head wound probably came from the base of the skull under the left ear contacting a sharp surface, not from use of a weapon. Checking the regional ViCAP database, Coyle found no similar causes of death in homicides in the past three years.

The database also showed no similarly “staged homicides,” with a victim wrapped in a blanket, in seven western states for the past five years. Other staged homicides recorded in the database included males in two separate cases arranged with folded hands, a female with photos, and a female with flowers.

Coyle closed the database and saw his reflection in the empty screen. I’m a grind, he thought. Who else would be alone in a room in the middle of the night, using five-year-old computers to search crap government databases? The point was, he was good at it—the best in the department, for what that was worth. Other cops knew his reputation. “You Coyle?” they’d say before they pulled out their phones to show him a data search. It wasn’t just tech skills, it was doggedness. He always liked that word—blunt, unadorned. He remembered sitting on his bed as a child, day after day, with a Rubik’s Cube. In his time in VCI, his work had led to arrests and convictions for assault and armed robbery, even if he was never in a car chase or fired his weapon. He had no reason to be jealous of Frames and Eden, or to wish for other assignments.

He clicked on his screen and found an online regional record of stolen cars. The listing showed no 1950s-era Mercedes in the past twelve months.

Still, the car in the video was the best single piece of evidence, and Coyle needed to see if it could tell him anything else. He went back to the Mercedes website. The trunk and taillights were unchanged over the production run, but what about the rear bumper? For twenty minutes, he looked at photos of Ponton bumpers. Then he found it. From 1958 to 1960, the rear bumper’s vertical upright bars were positioned closer to the middle of the car.

Coyle switched his music to the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” and used a finger to lick the salt out of the trail mix bag. He reopened the surveillance photos. The right side of the bumper in the photo was dented, and the left side had a parking sticker. But the bumper bars were clearly closer to the middle. He now knew the car to be a 1958, 1959, or 1960 Mercedes. Looking back at the state DMV database, he found fifty-four registered owners.