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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

Eden went back to Woodhouse’s handwritten note. The mark looked like two cursive letters—“cv” or “cn.” If it was “cm,” it might mean centimeter. Eden scanned the typewritten text beside the note. The cord burns on Michelle Foss’s neck measured one centimeter wide. She opened the file on Susan Hart and found the same note: cord width, one centimeter. According to the medical examiner, the marks on MaryEllen Reese’s neck were wider and uneven, suggesting an irregular material. The reports on Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith contained no measurements. Eden searched all the desk drawers until she found a metric ruler. On the close-ups of Hunter and Smith, she measured the widths of the neck bruises. Smith’s were 1.25 centimeters, but Hunter’s were exactly one centimeter. Eden added a column to her spreadsheet:

She picked up her mug. The tea was cold. One page further in the Foss file, a handwritten note said, “three and a half.” Eden read the text beside it, describing the bruise patterning around Michelle Foss’s neck, which suggested the way the cord had been wrapped. The close-up photo of the young woman’s neck showed dark lines wound three and a half times. Eden raised her hands and moved them as if she were looping a cord. She looked around the room. Bent over their laptops, Coyle and Frames had not noticed her. She moved her hands again, winding them three and a half times. It was a difficult, awkward movement. Why three and a half? Why not three or two? Someone had done it purposefully. What did it mean?

Eden looked at the four other victim photos. On MaryEllen Reese’s neck, the marks were crisscrossed, as if the cord had been wrapped front to back. The marks on Amanda Smith’s neck had a different spiral shape, as if the wrapping had begun on the side. Susan Hart’s and Beth Hunter’s bruises were a mirror image of Michelle Foss’s—three and a half times around.

She paged through the rest of the reports on Michelle Foss without finding any more handwritten notes. She stacked the folders and reopened her laptop. On her spreadsheet, she added notes on the cord width and bruise pattern and used yellow highlighting to mark the consistencies.

Staring at the spreadsheet, she wondered if the similarities were a coincidence. How many possible widths of cord are there? How many ways of wrapping a cord?