“Struck me as unusual, so I sent a swab of the perfume to the lab. They kicked it back,” Claire said a moment later. “They can’t ID it. Don’t have the right equipment. Don’t have the time.”

“No time to solve the crime,” I groused.

“It’s always a three-legged sack race around here,” Claire said, pushing papers around on her desk.

“But I got back the labs on the sexual-assault kit. Hang on. It’s right here.”

Eyes glinting, she seized a brown envelope, pulled out the sheet of paper, and pinned it to her desk with a forefinger, saying, “The stain on her skirt was, in fact, semen, and it matched one of the two semen samples that showed up inside Caddy Girl.”

I followed Claire’s finger down the results of the toxicology screen. She stabbed the letters ETOH with her index finger. “This is what I wanted to show you. Her blood was positive for alcohol. Point one three.”

“So she was wasted,” I said.

“Uh-huh, but that’s not all. Look here. She was also positive for benzodiazepine. It’s unusual to have booze and Valium in your system, so I had tox run her bloods again, this time looking for zebras. They narrowed it down to Rohypnol.”

“Aw. No. The date-rape drug.”

“Yeah, she didn’t know where she was, who she was, what was happening, even if it was happening.”

The ugly pieces were there, but I still couldn’t make sense of the whole picture. Caddy Girl had been doped up, assaulted, and murdered with mind-boggling care and precision.

Claire turned to the wall of photos. “It’s no wonder she didn’t have vaginal bruising and defensive wounds, Lindsay. Caddy Girl couldn’t fight back if she wanted to. Poor child never had a chance.”

Chapter 25

I DROVE MY EXPLORER home in the dark, feeling female, not female cop. I had to see the world through Caddy Girl’s eyes if I wanted to understand what had happened to her. But it was horrific to imagine being that vulnerable to the will of violent men. Two of them, two animals.