Echoes of Resilience

14

Officer Taylor had pulled up the medical examiner's report on Rose's body to review and see if anything there could connect Derek to her murder while waiting on the results on the rope. "Well she was brutally raped, which is where we got DNA, but she was also beaten, cut, and strangled and her neck was broken post mortem. Also there were deep ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, as if she was bound with rope."

"What was her cause of death?" Officer Jacobs asked while sitting next to her partner to get a look at the report over her shoulder.

"She bled out. The report lists over 200 cuts made on the body; she suspected the cuts were made with either a scalpel or a box knife. There was a box knife found not far from her body, but there were no fingerprints on it. We never found a scalpel, although that doesn't mean a scalpel wasn't used. Pull up the report from Meredith's hospital stay, I want to compare their injuries."

"Meredith also had cuts on her body, but none were as deep as the ones on Rose. Multiple healed fractures, damage to the trachea due to strangling, severe vaginal trauma, and a freshly broken nose. Their injuries are too similar for this not to be connected. We have Shepherd's DNA, let's run it against Rose's rape kit. He may not have been in the system when we found Rose but he certainly is now." Officer Jacobs said while grabbing her phone to make the call. "They're running the DNA and putting a rush on it."

"I just got a message back from the lab, the blood on the rope belongs to Rose. Whether Shepherd killed her or not he knows something, why else would he have a rope with her blood on it?" Officer Taylor sighs. "We know that last time Rose was seen was leaving the hospital after a surgery with Shepherd. She was reported missing by Richard Webber the next day when she never showed up for her next shift and no one could get in touch with her. The Doorman at her apartment reported that she never made it home the night before. Hospital security cameras showed her getting into her car, alone, and leaving the hospital. Did we ever check traffic cameras to try to piece together where she went?"

"We did, but we lost her about two miles from the hospital. After we found her body we talked to Shepherd, did we ask to talk to him or did he come to us?" Officer Jacobs flipped through her notes. "I mean he was never a suspect since he had another surgery immediately after the one Rose was in, we had no reason to really look at him let alone talk to him."

"He came to us, he said that he considered Rose a close friend and just wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help. We did ask him his whereabouts at the time and that's when he told us about the second surgery, which we easily confirmed, but we never questioned where he went after that. He seemed like a concerned friend at the time, but now it seems like he just wanted to know if we had any leads." Officer Taylor looks at the report again. "She was dumped shortly after she bled out, she had only been dead about three hours when we got the call. Now Addison told us that he never put a lock on the shed until after he came back from Boston so it's highly unlikely she was kept in the shed. Why would he keep Meredith on his property but Rose somewhere else? Not to mention the fact that Rose was killed after three days, but he had Meredith for over nine months."

"He wanted Meredith close by, it's possible that he caught Rose trying to escape and that's why he killed her. Had she escaped she could have gotten away before Shepherd went back to her, with Meredith on his land the chances of her getting away without Derek catching her would be more unlikely. Although with the lock there really wasn't a way for her to escape. The shed didn't have any windows, the only way out was the door."

"It definitely seems like the motives behind taking Rose and taking Meredith were different. Why don't we go ask the son of the bitch?" Officer Taylor asks while getting up followed by Jacobs, both making their way to go question Derek on his involvement in Rose's murder.