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.”
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
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.”