Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

Unlikely she was prostituting.

Does not appear to have been sleeping rough.

Clothing suggests she was lower to middle class.

Crime scene tape flaps above the rocks. Police dogs have been brought in, grid searches have been completed and repeated. The heavy rain has made things harder, stirred up the ground, surfaced the muck of other mornings and washed away footprints and any other impressions he—the perpetrator—might have made on the only morning that matters. The most they have to work with right now, then, is my body. The impressions I have left behind, and those things he has pressed onto me.

There is evidence of a struggle.

My case file fills up with notes like this, a padding of words around the bare bones of the crime. Physical evidence packaged and labelled at the scene is examined. Samples come back from the lab, and databases are searched. The first forty-eight hours are critical, they say. But as time ticks down, there is no revelatory discovery, no match, no name. Led by Detective O’Byrne, a dozen men and women have turned me into their question, but the answer eludes each and every one of them.

‘She is not giving up her secrets easily,’ they say to each other. As if there are better ways for a dead girl to behave.

Detective O’Byrne is different. He doesn’t give up on me so easily. In these earliest days, he thinks about it like this: I am simply a song he can’t quite remember. A melody he used to know, but for now he can only hear a fragment, a note hanging in the air as it repeats, over and over. The name of the song is tantalisingly close, but he can’t quite get there. Can’t get to that place, far enough inside his own head, where other people, other men, sing out. I see him trying hard, see the times he places his thick fingers at both temples and pushes down, elbows against desk, eyes squeezed shut.

The note hangs between us. He knows that he knows.

Someone took a photograph of him like this once. Printed it out, labelled it ‘The Thinker’. It’s still pinned on a precinct wall, some cluttered wall, amongst dozens of other snapshots documenting people and places and murders long solved. No matter that the real Thinker has his hand at his mouth. The photographer recognised the intent, the turning in on oneself, the folding of thoughts over and over until they’ve been reduced to something small and true. The truth wants to be told; Detective O’Byrne knows this most of all. He will get to that place, soon enough, he is sure of it. He will find the man who did this because signatures, calling cards, are always left on the bodies of murdered girls. This is why he keeps coming back to the list of potential weapons. Thumbs his way down the possibilities. Displaced fragments. Round in shape. Something brought down with extreme force against the right temple. Fresh hemorrhage. This came first, she was still alive. Before hands went to neck, before the crushing, the strangulation that killed her. Was that initial strike an accident? A moment of white-hot rage? Both of these things, intertwined? Thumb on words, pressing against the possibilities. Then fingers back to temple. A tap, mimicking the blow of a—what?

Figure out the weapon and you figure out the man.

For Detective O’Byrne, failure is not an option. It’s nothing personal, he thinks. Just his job. He would obsess over any case this complex, has to make it his priority. That’s what he’s paid to do, and what he does well.

It’s nothing personal. He is not making it personal when he puts his head in his large hands and aches over the already indisputable details of this case. Those grim facts written out across a young woman’s body that he knows for sure to be true.

There is evidence of a struggle.

Something you should know. I did not want to die. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but when the time came, I fought really hard to stay in my body. I tried my best, but I just couldn’t hold on. I did not want to die. And now I am—

Well. Ruby and Detective O’Byrne are not only ones looking for answers. Turns out they don’t teach you how to be out of the world any more than they teach you how to be in it.

TWELVE

U OK?

Ruby has been staring at her phone screen for twenty minutes. It is the first message she has received from Ash in three days. Three days. It’s been three whole days since she found Jane’s body. Jane. That’s what the media call the girl—me—now. Jane Doe, an unidentified white female found murdered in Riverside Park. Blonde. Thought to be aged between 15 and 24 years old. 5'5 tall, 125 pounds. A scatter of freckles across her nose. No identifying marks, no tattoos, and no major dental work done. She looks like no one and everyone, and they have named her Jane.

The girl is now Jane.

Police say they are investigating every single tip phoned in. They hold press conferences, their faces like stone. Standing at podiums, they warn women to be careful, to avoid situations. News stories lead with Vicious Attack and Brutal Slaying; the growing consensus is that this was a random attack, which puts my murder on the tip of all the tongues up here where it happened, though the whole city is spooked. Who is she, people ask? And how could this have happened? Nobody young and pretty gets murdered in New York City these days. Correction: nobody young and pretty gets raped and murdered in New York City these days. Quotes from ‘police sources’ on the exact nature of the assault dominate the story in the tabloid papers. It makes Ruby feel sick to her stomach.

(Others delight in it. They crawl right