[warning: mentions of violence, dead people]
They brought the body in just this morning. Apparently someone left her out by the freeway. Good Samaritan scared to be involved in a murder investigation? Attention seeking killer? Hard to say. But you went to the place where they found her, and she certainly didn't die there. Somewhere further out in the desert, you expect, somewhere that even a pretty girl like this one must have been wouldn't have been found.
Bodies found out in the desert aren't at all like the bodies you studied in Tennessee, no, not at all. They go through the same stages of decomp, of course, but slower, and the buried ones preserve better in the arid dirt, like the mummies of old.
She's about three months dead, give or take. Someone went at her with a small knife, and just based on the weapon you know this was no crime of passion. He went at her with deliberation, care. It would have taken time. As you reach down to peel away the cloth that remains of her shirt, a tattoo is visible on your skin under your clear glove, trailing up from under the sleeve of the white coat you wear all the way over the knuckle.
Someone wanted her to hurt, to die slowly. There's evidence of contusions under her skin. Knocked out and dragged away, you think, because the cuts look like they were made prior to death, though you'll have to get in for a closer look to be sure.
So what is the picture? Well, in the end, you find sand in her lungs, so it wasn't the cuts that killed her. Bruised, sliced, and tortured, and then buried alive. It's an ugly thought, but people do it. It was part of the reason you got into this field, people like the killer who did this horror to the petite girl on the table before you.
You won't get toxicology back for a couple weeks, but if you had to guess, you'd assume he drugged her to keep her still for the torture and the burying, since there's no evidence of restraints. Perhaps she didn't feel much. It would be kinder, though, and our killer does not give off the impression of kindness.
The questions now are where she came from, who brought her in a tarp to the side of the highway after three months in the ground, and who killed her. And there is, also, the other thought - that there is method in this, practice, care. If she hadn't been brought to the highway, who knows when she would have been found, if ever? And that, of course, leads him to wonder. Because there must be other bodies. So where are they, the silent girls? Where are they sleeping?