The wake-up call from Otto Boutine blared in her ears, but for a moment Jessica could not recall where she was; she certainly didn't recall any sleep. It seemed that only minutes had elapsed. She woke in her clothes, sprawled on the bed. With the phone on its third, perhaps fourth ring, she made a mad dive for the thing, knocking it to the floor and catching the receiver before it dropped. Good reflexes were a blessing, something she had always possessed.
“ Jess, it's me, Otto.”
“ What time is”-she yawned-”it?”
“ Getting on toward ten, and you said you'd like to see the body in the morgue before we head back to Virginia.”
“ So I did.”
“ Stadtler isn't exactly waiting for you with bated breath.”
“ Fish-baited breath, maybe.”
“ That's why I like you so, Jess, but let's not piss anyone else off at us before we leave, okay?”
“ Is that an order?”
“ Consider it cheap advice. You comin'?”
“ Give me ten-no-twenty minutes, Chief. I've got to shower and dress.”
“ Meet you in the lobby.”
“ Grand.”
She quickly grabbed something to wear, realizing that she'd have to let her hair dry along the way, and that lately she hadn't given a thought to her appearance. She rushed from bed to bath, and later when she slipped from the shower, she heard a knock at the door.
“ Boutine, dammit, I'm not ready.”
The knock persisted and someone was saying something on the other side, but she couldn't make it out. She threw on a robe and opened the door. A waiter stood outside holding a breakfast tray.
“ Room service, compliments of 605.”
Boutine could be thoughtful, she said to herself. “Oh, please, on the table.” She rushed ahead of him to clear away the things she'd tossed over the table. Then she fumbled for a gratuity, but the waiter told her it was taken care of, and he promptly left.
She rushed down the toast and coffee and scrambled eggs as she continued to dress. She was a half hour getting to the lobby, where she found Boutine engrossed in the Milwaukee Journal.
“ Anything about the case?”
“ Too damned much. I swear I don't understand reporters. You politely ask 'em for cooperation and they nod and say yes, sir, anything you want, sir, and then they weasel information outta some schlock deputy P.R. officer, tack on a few innuendos, and they're practically blowing whatever careful case you might make against a suspect before you've even got the bastard in custody.”
“ They got the vampire angle?” She was upset now.
“ No, not yet.”
She sighed, pursed her lips and nodded. ' 'Thank God for that much.”
“ Faxed a copy of the one good print you found to Quantico.”
“ And I take it, it's not on file, right?”
“ Right, Sherlock.”
“ Stands to reason.”
His quizzical stare lingered over her. “I didn't have much hope that it would check out either, but what made you think so?” 'Nature of the crime places this guy as one of the general population. Likely to be white, middle to upper class, blends in like a sci-fi horror alien who's taken over a human body. Possible dual, if not quadruple, personality, leads stellar life by day, model neighbor, belongs to the Rotary, relatives and friends think of him as just a regular guy who stays pretty much to himself. Lives with his mother or alone, and if he is married, he's a mouse, completely dominated by her. Away from home a lot; goes hunting for human blood by night. But we'll be lucky to find a parking ticket with his name on it, much less a record.”
“ Maybe you ought to be in psychological profiling, Doctor.”
“ Maybe. Any event, this case may be unsolvable.”
“ No one said it was going to be easy.”
“ Thanks for breakfast,” she said. “Nice gesture.”
He shrugged. “We're on expense account.”
“ Just the same-”
“ Glad you enjoyed it.”
As they went for the door, she told him, “We've got to come up with a few more details that'll stay in-house.”
“ That's one reason we insisted on the autopsy.”
“ Poor woman's suffered some very unkind cuts, and now we're going to literally open her up to more. I can see why the locals hate us.”
“ Something else you ought to know,” he said, placing a gentle hand on her arm as he led her to the waiting car. “Having to do with her severed arm? At the crime scene?”
“ I know about that.”
“ What do you know about it?” He half smiled, incredulous, certain that he knew something she did not. The smile softened his granite features and she saw the boy who enjoyed puzzles and games surface in him. Word at Quantico had it that he was into sophisticated computer war games and simulations for relaxation, and that he was currently helping in the design of a software package that would simplify the work of police psychological profiling, and that this system might one day be textbook material in every criminalistics course in the country and quite possibly every police precinct in the land.
She said to his smile, “One of the cops picked up the arm from somewhere else in the room and laid it to rest beside the body.”
“ How the hell did you know that? This guy comes to me early this morning, says he can't sleep, saying he's scared shitless you'll find his prints on her somewhere, and that he was one of the first on scene, and that he had-”
“ Picked up the arm and placed it with the body without thinking.”
“ And told no one, no one. So how could you know?”
“ Human nature and human folly,” she said, climbing into the car, leaving him to wonder and frown.
Inside, Boutine gave the driver directions, and then he turned to her. “Out with it.”
She thought of the need of rescuers at crash sites and other scenes of horror and mutilation, how often they wanted to put the pieces back together, line the bodies up in neat rows. But she said, “Well, the arm was severed by some kind of cutting tool, big tool by the look of things, but in any event, it would not have fallen into place as it was, at an exact angle from where it'd come off. Whoever placed it there did so with some attention to anatomy, fitting it as closely to the socket as possible, pointing straight away. At first, I thought maybe the killer had placed it there, reset it, so to speak. But I ruled that out quickly for two reasons.”
“ What reasons?” He was clearly fascinated.
“ First, the other missing piece, the breast, was halfway across the room, the other one dangling by a thread of skin. If the killer was obsessively interested in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, he would have been motivated to do so for all the pieces, not just the arm.”
“ Good point.” He understood obsessive behavior.
“ As for the second reason, I saw the displaced dust where the arm had been originally thrown. It hit one of the walls. left a faint sign of fluids and left a mark at the foot of this mark on the floor. I assumed then that it had been moved.”
From the inn it took them twenty minutes to get to the hospital. It was attached to a university teaching complex. Once inside, they were led down a long corridor and a flight of steps to the morgue belowground. It looked like a hundred thousand such places tucked away in hospitals across the country, a kind of earthly perdition for the remains, until which time as cause of death could be determined, a death certificate signed and the body turned over to the family.
Boutine stopped short of the morgue door, and his booming voice seemed out of place in the silence. “Make it quick. We have to be back in Virginia at sixteen hundred hours.”
“ Understood, but I thought you were joining us.”
“ No, thought I'd talk to some of the relatives, see what I might gather about the girl.”
“ Good luck.”
“ Same to you.” He took her hand to shake, but he held it a bit longer, saying, “You did excellent work last night, but you know that, don't you?”
“ Doesn't hurt to hear it from you. But it's a little premature. So far we don't have a thing.”
She pushed through the door where the local coroner and an assistant stood over the body; they'd begun to run some tests already.
“ Ahhhh, Dr. Coran… nice of you to join us,” said Dr. Stadtler, whose forehead was discolored by age spots, as were the backs of his hands.
She replied coolly, “I was up pretty late last night.” Stadtler's having left the scene hours before her still rankled them both.
He pursed his lips below his mask and nodded, his eyes studying her closely. “I do not know perhaps as much as the FBI, my dear Dr. Coran”-it grated her nerves to have someone refer to her as my dear doctor-”but I do know that under poor lighting conditions, we doctors miss a lot.”
He had obviously been relishing this moment, she thought. “And what did you find, Dr. Stadtler, that I overlooked? Or, rather, that you assume I overlooked.”
It was a bloodless autopsy, the first such that she had ever witnessed. She came closer to the corpse, its slashed eyes now familiar to her.
Stadtler continued in a voice that overflowed with smugness, a ribbon of contempt snaking through. “The girl's feet, below the ropes…” His pause was calculated. “Slashed.”
Despite the fact she was angry with herself for the oversight, she said, “Achilles tendons, I know.” The lie caught Stadtler and his assistant off guard. “But that's what autopsies are for, to be sure.” She'd paid absolutely no attention to the feet other than to note that they had been bound.
“ Yes, well,” Stadtler muttered like a chess player whose king has been cornered, “both tendons were severed.”
“ Making it impossible for her to stand, let alone run from her assailant.” She located a frock, a cap and a mask in a nearby supply cabinet. In an autopsy room only the minimal rules of sanitation applied. It was highly unlikely that the “patient,” as dead as she was, was contagious. As Jessica readied herself, she thought anew of the girl's ordeal. Even if she had had a chance of escape, with her heel tendons severed, she'd have had to drag herself away, pulling herself along like a two-armed lizard. She wondered if the killer had watched her drag herself about before he hauled her up to the rafters by the rope. Doubtful. There'd been no blood trail to substantiate this. Why then cut the tendons? Another precaution against the police, to confound the issue?
There was a policeman from Wekosha in the autopsy room who hadn't said a word. She recognized him from the murder scene the day before and she guessed it was he who had replaced the arm. She gave him a cursory smile before hiding behind her mask. He volunteered something. “Dr. Coran, I'm Captain Vaughn. Wekosha and the county sheriffs office are combining on this killing.”
“ Good idea.” She went first to the tendons to examine the scars there. Working from the feet up on an autopsy was how she had learned her craft at Bethesda from perhaps the best man in the business, Dr. Aaron Holecraft. Holecraft was semiretired now, but he wasn't above talking to a former student about a puzzling case. She knew she'd have to see him when she got back to Quantico about the Wekosha vampire case. She knew that Holecraft had seen some Tort 9s in his day.
The wounds had been cleaned thoroughly by Stadtler's assistant. “Did you get any pictures of the tendons before you cleaned them?” she asked the assistant.
Stadtler spoke up instead. “Why? Didn't you, my dear doctor?”
“ I'm not sure if the photographer last night got them, no.”
“ In any case, we'll be happy to provide them,” said Stadtler as if he had won a small victory.
The dull-faced, heavy-set Vaughn piped in. “We're checking every MDSO file we have.”
She rattled off the letters in her head as she worked and asked, “Mentally disturbed sex offenders?”
“ Yes, ma'am.”
“ Waste of time, Captain.”
“ What?”
“ This crime is not sex related, not in the usual sense, anyway.”
“ What? But she was strung up nude, and there was evidence of… of semen in her, wasn't there?”
“ All right, all right.” She realized she shouldn't have challenged him. “Go ahead with your search. Arrest everyone in your files who's ever flashed an eleven-year-old.”
“ But you think we'd be wasting our time?”
“ Yes, I think so.”
“ Just the same, we've got to work on every possibility.”
“ Understood. Now, can we have a little quiet in here?” Jessica said in a harsher tone than she meant. “This is an autopsy, and we are taping for transcripts later, I presume, my dear Dr. Stadtler?”
Stadtler frowned at this and said, “Of course,” as he flicked the recorder on.
The autopsy proceeded quickly now, and a few old track marks were found on the girl's arms, indicating drugs, but without blood, it would take very sophisticated equipment and tests to secure readings from the pancreas, the liver and other organs to show the necessary trace elements to say whether she was or was not drugged. Jessica took a sliver from each of the organs; these would go in formaldehyde-filled vials all the way to Quantico for expert eyes there. Stadtler took his own specimens, saying that he could get them examined in Milwaukee. Most of the girl's scars, other than the mutilation on the night of her death, told her biography, one of wounds and scars gathered over her lifetime. There were old, healed-over burns, stitch marks, an indication she once had had a C-section, likely giving birth or death in an unwanted pregnancy. She'd led a tortured life, and she had died a torturous death. So sad, Jessica thought.
While she couldn't yet know the identity of the monster who had killed Candy, she could see what the victim had eaten, breathed and injected. A lot of medical people became hardened like cops, having seen it all time and again, and they'd often say that the way a person died was a reflection of the way she lived. That some people lived in such a way as to attract violence; that most murder victims unintentionally courted death by placing themselves in high-risk situations. Doctors working on a dying gunshot victim frequently found remnants of other bullets in the body. Most successful suicides had scars from previous adventures. But what life-style exacted the kind of price this abused child and young woman had suffered?
Much of the autopsy was done in silence until the doctors agreed or disagreed on one thing and another. Stadtler thought the liver a bit jaundiced, while Jessica thought it had the look of pate, indicating alcoholism and the road to cirrhosis. They agreed on the condition of the kidneys, that one was underweight-scales don't lie-and due again to alcohol abuse, it had prematurely shriveled in size. Her ovaries, like the kidneys, had become wrinkled and smaller. Rough living showed through.
There were no indications whatever that she was struck in the head, the brain sustaining no injuries other than an excessive amount of fluids, including some pockets of blood which were prized by the doctors. Now a useful blood test could be accomplished, and poisons ruled out.
They were almost finished with the autopsy when Jessica's attention was caught by some bluish coloration about the throat and neck wound. She blinked. Maybe it was the blue fluorescent lighting. The natural blue of the wound itself when blood gushed up from the severed arteries? Still, she brought a large magnifying glass on a swing arm to bear on the wound.
“ What is it?” asked Stadtler, instantly curious. “Didn't you already do that?” He was asking about the depth and length measurement of the wound itself.
She replied with a question. “Have you checked the condition of the windpipe?”
“ What for?”
She instantly ran her hand into the open chest cavity and up through the throat, massaging the layers of gristle that form the upper part of the windpipe, the cricoid cartilage, and she knew in an instant that the blue coloration around the throat was not due to the blue light or to the slash. She knew for a fact that the killer had also strangled his victim; but he had done so with so gentle a touch that it was not obvious, or likely provable.
Her confusion gave her away. The three men stared at her. “Just curious,” she lied.
“ Anyone can see she's not been strangled,” said Stadtler. “May we get on with it?”
“ I'm going to have to take a section here,” she said, indicating the throat.
“ What? What for? We were praying we'd save something of her for burial,” Stadtler said sarcastically.
“ Sorry, Doctor.”
“ Okay, I'm sorry. I was out of line on that,” he replied. “But what are you getting at here?”
“ I won't know until I get back to Quantico. I need electron microscopic photography on this.” With her scalpel she sliced a deep square of skin around the pale jugular section, her eyes intent on the area of the clean, deep cut that was necessary. She then realized yet another hidden message below the surface. “Oh, God,” she moaned.
“ What is it?” Stadtler was now crazy, and he all but pushed her aside. “What?”
“ Here, and here.” She pointed with her scalpel, which fit neatly into the cut on either side of the jugular, and each went deep, but there were two cuts and they did not connect. The long slash that connected each was superficial at the center. Something else had penetrated the jugular, and the scar from this wound was near invisible below the larger throat slash that hid it.
She explained this to Stadtler.
He was shaken. “I… I thought you examined this last night.”
“ Obviously not close enough.”
“ What… does it mean?”
“ It means that a second instrument was used at the jugular, and this large laceration is just a cosmetic masking of that fact.”
“ What other instrument?”
“ I don't know, and I won't know unless I take part of her throat back with me to Virginia.”
He stared long at her. “I suppose it's… necessary.”
“ Absolutely.”
He stepped away and then turned. “Gets worse every moment, doesn't it? Maybe I'm getting too old for this business. This world, perhaps.”
“ Given the dismemberment, it'll be a closed casket, of course.”
“ Yes, well, what's one more missing part?” said Stadtler. “No one will miss it.”
Jessica finished removing the square cake of flesh from the throat, and Stadtler's silent, able assistant held out a small jar filled with preserving fluids for the pulpy, layered section. “This information remains in this room, gentlemen,” she told them. “We've got to keep this to ourselves. Not a word.”
The estimate of time of death was made the more precise by a combination of items: livor mortis, the dark discoloration of death, and the degree of that coloration; algor mortis, the cold touch of death; and rigor mortis, the degree of stiffness or limberness told them much. Annie “Candy” Copeland had died between midnight and 2 A.M., the night before her discovery. According to Stadtler, the last man to see her alive was a swinish, small-town pimp who used her and put her on the street, a man named Scarborough, known locally as Scar. The man was under arrest for suspicion of murdering Annie Copeland.
Finished with Copeland's corpse at last, Jessica stepped away from the autopsy table, the hum of the A.C. drumming in her ears. She peeled away her rubber gloves and the mask, depositing both in the bins provided at the door. “Please have a copy of your report, along with the samples I've taken, ready to leave with me for Virginia. We'll be leaving the municipal airport sometime this afternoon. If there's a problem getting everything to me by fourteen-ah, two o'clock-please contact me, either at the inn or at the airport.
Stadtler nodded, and their eyes met, and in the silence between them, she came to realize that somewhere along the way, she'd gained his respect. He said, “Dr. Coran, I'll see to it personally.” She breathed deeply, licked her lips, and in a near feline expression of gratitude, she said, “Dr. Stadtler, it has been a very worthwhile experience working with you and your staff.” She was grateful that she was no longer his “dear Dr. Coran.”
She peeled away the green garments of her trade just outside the autopsy room in an anteroom where more bins stood, and where she could wash up. She splashed some water on her face and glanced into the mirror, taking her reflection in. She felt that she looked as if she'd been on a week's binge, and somewhere in the back of her head she heard the wafting music of a Jimmy Buffet tune strike up.
' 'Wasting away in Wekoshaville,'' she said to her reflection. Fieldwork was tough. Maybe she should've stayed in the lab.
She tamped her face with a clean, white linen, straightened her outfit, fixed her lipstick and then pushed through the door, going for the nearest exit. She needed the one thing Wekosha was good for-fresh air.?