Dr. Lanier removes the thermometer, reads it and says, “Body temp’s ninety-six.”
“She’s not been dead long at all,” Scarpetta says. “Yet the condition of the blood in the living room, hallway and even some in here suggests the attack occurred hours ago.”
“Probably the head injury is what got her, but it took a little while,” Dr. Lanier says, gently palpating the back of the head. “Fractures. You get the back of your head smashed against a masonry plaster wall, and you’re talking serious injuries.”
Scarpetta isn’t ready to comment on the cause of death, but she does agree that the victim suffered severe blunt-force trauma to her head. If the stab wounds cut or completely severed a major artery, such as the carotid, death would have occurred in minutes. This is unlikely—impossible, really—since it appears the woman survived for a while. Scarpetta sees no arterial spatter pattern. The woman may still have been barely alive when her boyfriend found her at 12:30 p.m. and was dead by the time the rescue squad arrived.
It is several minutes past 1:30 now.
The victim is dressed in pale blue satin pajamas, the bottoms intact, the top ripped open. Her belly, breasts, chest and neck are clustered with stab wounds that measure sixteen millimeters—or approximately three-quarters of an inch—with both ends blunt, one end slightly narrower than the other. Those injuries that are superficial indicate she wasn’t stabbed with an ordinary knife. Almost in the center of those shallow wounds is an area of tissue bridging that indicates the weapon had some type of gap at the tip, or perhaps was a tool that had two stabbing surfaces, each of them a slightly different thickness and length.
“Now that’s strange as hell,” Dr. Lanier says, his head bent close to the body as he moves a magnifying lens over wounds. “Not any normal knife I’ve ever seen. How about you?” He looks at Scarpetta.
“No.”
The wounds were made at various angles, some of them V- or Y-shaped due to twisting of the blade, which is common in stab injuries. Some wounds gape, others are button-hole-like slits, depending on whether the incisions are in line with the elastic fibers of the skin or cut across them.
Scarpetta’s gloved fingers gently separate the margins of a wound. Again, she puzzles over the area of uncut skin stretching almost across the middle. She looks closely through a lens, trying to imagine what sort of weapon was used. Gently gathering the pajama top together, she lines up holes in the satin with wounds, trying to get some idea where the clothing was when the woman was stabbed. Three buttons are missing from the torn pajama top. Scarpetta spots them on the floor. Two buttons dangle by threads.
When she arranges the pajama top neatly over the chest, the way it would be were the victim standing, of course the holes don’t line up with the stab wounds at all, and there are more holes in the satin than there are wounds. She counts thirty-eight holes and twenty-two wounds. Overkill, to say the least—overkill that is typical in lust murders, but also typical when the assailant and victim know each other.
“Anything?” Dr. Lanier asks her.
Scarpetta is still lining up holes and is getting somewhere. “It appears that her top was bunched up above her breasts when she was stabbed. See?” She moves up the top, which is so stained with blood, very little of the satin looks blue. “Some of the holes go through three layers of fabric. That’s why there are more holes than wounds.”
“So he shoved up her top before he stabbed her or while he was stabbing her? And then tore it open?”
“I’m not sure,” Dr. Scarpetta replies. It’s always so difficult to reconstruct, and a much more precise job will require uninterrupted hours under a good light in the morgue. “Let’s turn her just a bit and check her back.”
She and Dr. Lanier reach across the body and hold it by the left arm. They pull her over, but not all the way, and blood runs out of wounds. There are at least six stab wounds on her upper back and a long cut to the side of her neck.
“So she’s running and he’s stabbing. She’s in front of him, at least at some point.” It is Eric who deduces this as he and Nic return with several lamps and plug them in.
“Maybe,” is all Scarpetta has to say about it.
“One smear on a wall in the hallway looks like she may have been pushed up or knocked up against it. About midway in the hallway. Maybe he shoved her against it and stabbed her in the back, and then she got away and ran in here,” Nic proposes.
“Maybe,” Scarpetta says again, and she and Dr. Lanier gently lower the body to the floor. “This much I can tell you: Her pajama top was in disarray when some of these stab wounds to her chest and belly were inflicted.”
“The pushed-up top suggests a sexual motive,” Eric says.
“This is a sexual murder with tremendous rage,” Scarpetta replies. “Even if she wasn’t raped.”
“She might not have been.” Dr. Lanier bends close to the body, collecting trace evidence with forceps. “Fibers,” he comments. “Could be from the pajamas. Despite what people think, rape isn’t always involved. Some of these bastards can’t do it, can’t get it up. Or they’d rather masturbate.”
Scarpetta asks Nic, “She was your neighbor. You’re sure this is Rebecca and not the other woman in the photographs? The two women are very similar in appearance.”
“It’s Rebecca. The other woman is her sister.”
“Lives with her?” Dr. Lanier asks.
“No. Rebecca lived alone.”
“For now, that will be a pending identification until we can be sure with dental records or some other means,” Dr. Lanier remarks as Eric takes photographs, using a six-inch plastic ruler as a scale, arranging it next to whatever he shoots.
“I’ll get on it.” Nic stares without blinking at the dead woman’s battered, bloody face, the eyes dully staring out from swollen lids. “We weren’t friends at all, never socialized, but I saw her on the street, doing yardwork, walking her dog . . .”
“What dog?” Scarpetta looks sharply at her.
“She has a yellow lab, a puppy, maybe eight months old. I’m not sure, but he’s not fully grown and was a Christmas present. I think from her boyfriend.”
“Tell Detective Clark to make sure the police go out and look for her dog,” Dr. Lanier says. “And while you’re at it, tell him to make sure they send everybody they’ve got to keep this place secure. We’re going to be here a while.”
Dr. Lanier hands Scarpetta a packet of cotton-tipped swabs, a small bottle of sterile water and a sterile tube. She unscrews the caps of both the bottle and the tube. Dipping a swab in the sterile water, she swabs the breasts for saliva, the cotton tips turning red with blood. Swabs of her vagina, rectum, of every orifice can wait until the body’s at the morgue. She begins to collect trace evidence.
“I’m going outside,” Nic says.
“Someone needs to set up more lights in here,” Dr. Lanier’s voice rises.
“Best I can do is bring in lamps, whatever else is around the house,” Eric replies.
“That would help. Photograph them in situ before you move them, Eric, or some goddamn defense attorney will say the killer carried lamps into the bedroom . . .”
“A lot of hairs, dog hairs maybe, maybe from her dog . . .” Scarpetta is saying as she gently shakes forceps inside a transparent plastic evidence bag. “What? A yellow lab?”
Nic is gone.
“That’s what she said. A yellow lab puppy,” Dr. Lanier replies, the two of them alone with the body.
“The dog has to be found for a number of reasons, not the least is out of decency, to make sure the poor thing is all right,” Scarpetta says. “But also for hair comparison. I can’t be sure, but now I think I’m seeing quite a variety of animal hairs.”
“So am I. Sticking to blood, mostly here.” He points a bloodstained gloved finger at the woman’s naked upper body. “Not on her hands or in her hair, though, which is where you might expect to find animal hairs if the origin of them is the floor, the carpet, here inside her residence.”
&
nbsp; Scarpetta is silent. She secures another hair in the forceps and shakes it loose inside a bag that must have at least twenty hairs in it now, the origin of all of them the dried blood on the belly.
Out on the street, someone has started whistling loudly. Voices are calling, “Here, Basil! Come, Basil!”
The front door opens and shuts repeatedly, the sounds of feet moving in the living room, the dining room, cops talking, and then a woman’s voice, a woman crying and screaming.
“No! No! No! That can’t be!”
“Ma’am, just show us in one of these pictures.”
Scarpetta recognizes Detective Clark’s voice. He is loud and trying not to sound upset, but the more the woman screams, the louder he gets.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t go in there.”
“She’s my sister!”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Oh, God, oh, God.”
Then the voices are quiet, and conversation recedes into a background murmur. A few flies begin to stray into the house, drawn by the scent of death, the high-pitched droning straining Scarpetta’s nerves.
“Tell them to stop opening the goddamn door!” She looks up from her kneeling position, sweat rolling down her face, her knees in terrible pain.
“Jesus. What’s going on out there?” Dr. Lanier is angry, too.
“Heeerrrre, Basil! Come on, boy!”
Whistling.
“Yo! Basil! Where are you?”
The front door opens and shuts again.
“That’s it!” Dr. Lanier gets to his feet.
He walks out of the bedroom, yanking off his bloody gloves. Scarpetta removes another animal hair, this one black, and places it inside an evidence bag. The hairs adhered to the body when the blood was wet. They are adhering to the belly, breasts and chest but not to the bottoms of the woman’s bare feet, which are also smeared with dried blood, not from injuries, but from where she stepped.
Scarpetta’s breath is hot and loud behind her surgical mask, sweat stinging her eyes as she waves off flies and goes over the woman’s face with a lens, looking for more hairs, every crack in dried blood magnified and more horrible, every split and cut in the skin more ragged and gaping. Flecks of paint adhere to blood, possibly transferred from the living room wall. The variety of animal hairs recovered from the body supplies Scarpetta with an important piece of information.
“We found the dog.” Nic is standing in the doorway.
Scarpetta is startled back to a different dimension, one that isn’t a hideous, dry red landscape behind a magnifying glass.
“Basil, her dog.”
“That’s not where most of these hairs are from. I’m finding dozens, different kinds, different colors. Dog hairs, possibly. Much coarser than cat hairs. But I’m not positive.”
Dr. Lanier walks back inside the room, brushing past Nic, snapping on fresh gloves.
“What I’m seeing here makes me think the hairs were transferred from the perpetrator—perhaps from his clothing—directly to her upper body. Maybe if he got on top of her.”
She pulls the pajama bottoms down an inch, just far enough to expose the indentations left by their elastic waistband. She sits back on her heels and stares, then takes off her mask.
“Why would someone get on top of her and not take her pajama bottoms off?” Dr. Lanier puzzles. “Why would someone transfer all these dog or doglike hairs to her naked upper body and nowhere else? And why the hell would anybody have all these dog hairs all the hell over them to begin with?”
“We found Basil,” Nic says again. “Hiding under a house across the street. Just cowering and shaking. He must have run off when the killer left, I guess. Who’s going to take care of him, of Basil?”
“I expect the boyfriend will,” Dr. Lanier replies. “If not, Eric loves dogs.”
He tears open two packets containing sterile, plasticized homicide sheets. While Scarpetta spreads one on the floor, Dr. Lanier and Eric grip the body under the arms and behind the knees, lifting it, centering it on the sheet. They spread the second sheet on top of her, rolling up the edges, wrapping her like a mummy so no trace evidence will be added or lost.
JAY LIFTS A HAND OFF the steering wheel to strike Bev, then changes his mind.
“You’re stupid. You know that?” he says coldly. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“It didn’t happen the way it was supposed to.”
The radio inside his Cherokee continues with the six o’clock news as he drives toward Jack’s Boat Landing.
“. . . Dr. Sam Lanier, coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, has not completed the autopsy yet, but sources close to the investigation have confirmed that the victim is thirty-six-year-old Rebecca Milton of Zachary. The cause of death isn’t official, but sources say she was stabbed to death. Police do not believe the murder is related to the women reported missing from Baton Rouge over the past year . . .”
“Fools.” Jay turns off the radio. “Just lucky for you if they aren’t assuming that.”
Four small dogs, mixed breeds, sleep in sunlight shining through a back window of the SUV. Five cases of beer are stacked on the backseat. Bev worked hard today after dropping Jay off at the University Lake in the heart of LSU. He didn’t say why he was going there or what he’d be doing all day, only to pick him up in the same spot where she dropped him off at half past five. Maybe he was looking for his escaped-convict brother. Maybe he was wandering around, enjoying being away from Bev and the fishing shack. He was probably trolling for pretty coeds. Bev imagines him having sex with one of them. Jealousy wakes up inside her. It smolders.
“You shouldn’t have left me all day,” she says to him.
“What were you thinking? You were going to abduct her in the middle of the day and take her back to the boat in broad daylight?”
“At first. Then I knew you wouldn’t be happy.”
He says nothing, his face hard as he drives, careful not to speed or commit any other traffic infraction that could get him pulled over.
“She didn’t look like her. She had black hair. I don’t know if she went to college.”
Bev had been unable to resist the impulse. She had time on her hands, time enough to find that pretty lady she had fixed on at the Wal-Mart. Following her all night, she had learned that the lamb didn’t live in the house in the Garden District but had a small place in Zachary. Her neighborhood was dark, and Bev started getting nervous that her lamb might get suspicious. Bev had turned off on a side street before getting a good fix on the address.
This morning, she cruised, looking for the green Ford Explorer, figuring just because it wasn’t parked in the driveway didn’t mean it wasn’t in the garage. Obviously, she picked the wrong house. Once she was inside, she was committed.
What she never anticipated was that this particular lamb was going to fight like a wolf. The instant the black-haired woman answered the door, Bev reached inside her canvas bag and pulled out the gun and was shoved so hard it flew out of her hand. Bev rolled on the floor and slipped a buck tool out of the sheath on her belt. She managed to open what she thought was a blade, and the chase began. It seemed to go on and on for miles, with the woman running and yelling, and falling against a wall, which gave Bev the opportunity to grab her by her hair and slam her head against plaster, then kick her when she slid to the floor.
Damn if she didn’t get back up and punch Bev in the shoulder, hard. It seems Bev was yelling, too, but she can’t remember. There was a roaring in her head, like a freight train, and she stabbed and chased, blood flying in her face, on and on forever. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two. Bev pinned the woman to the bedroom floor and stabbed and stabbed, and now she isn’t sure if any of it really happened.
Until she keeps hearing it on the radio. Until she remembers the buck knife’s bloody bottle opener. She stabbed the woman with a bottle opener.
How could that have happened?
She looks at Jay, passing by pawnshops and car
dealers, and a Taco Bell that makes her want to stop.
Nachos with sour cream, cheese, chili and jalapeños.
Pizza places, auto shops and car dealers, and then the road narrows and is lined with mailboxes as they move along back to Jack’s, then the bayou.
“Maybe we could stop and get us some peanut brittle,” Bev says.
Jay won’t speak to her.
“Well, have it your way. You and your fucking Baton Rouge. Going back there because of your mangy brother. Well, wait ’til dark when it’s easier.”
“Shut up.”
“What if he’s not there?”
A stony silence.
“Well, if he is, he’s probably in that damn creepy cellar, hiding, maybe getting the money stashed down there. We could use some more money, baby. All that beer I’ve been buying . . .”
“I told you to shut up!”
The colder he gets, the prouder she is of the red bruises and deep scratches on her arms, legs, chest and other parts of her body where she must have been injured during what she refers to as a tussle.
“They’ll swab under her fingernails.” Jay finally speaks to her. “They’ll get your DNA.”
“They don’t have my DNA in any of their fancy databases,” Bev replies. “No one ever took my DNA before you and me got the hell out of Dodge. I was just a nice lady running a campsite near Williamsburg, remember that?”
“Nice my ass.”
Bev smiles. Her injuries are badges of courage and power. She didn’t know she had it in her to fight like that. Why, one of these days, she might just go after Jay. Her bravado deflates. She could never overcome Jay. He could kill her with one punch to her temple. He’s told her that. One punch and he’d fracture her skull, because women don’t have very thick skulls. “Even stupid ones” like Bev, he says.
“What did you do to her? You know what I mean,” he says. “You’re blood-soaked down the front of your clothes. You get on top of her like a man?”
“No.” It’s none of his business.
“Then how did your clothes get bloody from the neck to your crotch, huh? You climb on top of some girl who’s bleeding to death and jerk off?”
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