by Kathy Reichs
“You have a dog?”
“You want to hear this?”
“Story’s death was ruled accidental. Why are you bringing him up now?”
Slidell fixed me with a dramatic stare while reaching inside his jacket. Which was mustard and brown. With one deft move he pulled a Ziploc from the pocket of his shirt. Which was a shade of orange probably called melon.
Forcing my eyes not to roll, I leaned sideways to examine the contents of the baggie.
And felt my brows lift in surprise.
SUN GLINTED OFF the plastic dangling between slidell’s thumb and forefinger.
I waited for his explanation.
“Vic had a purse. Screeching pink, size of a burger, hooker strap.”
“I carry a shoulder bag.” Slidell’s sarcasm was, as usual, turning me surly. As was his jump to the conclusion that the hit-and-run victim was a prostitute.
“Hot pink? Shaped like a freakin’ cartoon cat?”
“You’re sure it was hers?”
“Thing was lying in the weeds, three yards from the body. Hadn’t been there long. We’re checking for prints. But, yeah, I’m sure it’s hers.”
“This was in the purse?” I indicated the object enclosed in the Ziploc.
“Along with one tube of come-fuck-me red lipstick.”
“Cash?”
“A ten and two ones. Forty-six cents. Loose. Like she just jammed it in.”
“Anything else?”
“Nada … except—” He waggled the baggie. The Amazing Slidell, Magician of Mecklenburg.
I took the bag and studied the plastic rectangle inside, certain I’d misread the tiny black letters on its surface.
I hadn’t.
“What the flip?”
“Thought it might interest you.”
The yellow-and-brown US Airways club card had an expiration date of February of the upcoming year. The account was in the name of John-Henry Story.
“She had John-Henry Story’s airline club pass?”
Slidell nodded.
“How?”
“Insightful question, doc. And here’s another. Story crisped six months back. Where’s his plastic been in the meantime?”
This wasn’t making sense.
“What we got here is Story dies, but his card lives on. Or goes into suspended animation,” Slidell said. “I checked. Last time he used the lounge was six weeks before the fire.”
“Where was he going?”
“I’m working on that.”
“Was anyone with him?”
“One guest.”
“The girl?”
“They don’t enter that information.”
Slidell drew another Ziploc from his pocket. “And this was also in her purse.”
I examined the slip of paper through the plastic. On it was scribbled: Las clases de Inglés. Saint Vincent de Paul Catholic Church.
I looked at Slidell. He looked at me and shrugged.
I moved to gather my belongings before exiting the Taurus, but, of course, I had no belongings. No shoes, no purse, no house or car keys, no phone, no cash, no cards.
Another time I could have called Katy for the spare key she keeps for my place.
Oh, God. Katy.
“Listen, thanks for swinging by for me. I—”
“—owe me one? Don’t worry about it now.”
Now? Great.
I hiked up my pants, eased from the Taurus, and hurried to the vestibule door. Stepping up onto the smooth concrete floor was as close to pleasure as I’d come all day. I paused a moment, taking relief from the cooling stone.
Waiting in my office were scrubs and sensible shoes. Soon I’d be reasonably presentable.
As with Slidell, my appearance wouldn’t shock so much as amuse those inside. I’d arrived looking, and smelling, worse.
Except for Mrs. Flowers. She would signal disapproval by the briefest narrowing of the eyes, by a flurry of rearrangement of her already meticulously ordered desk.
I nodded at Mrs. Flowers through the reception window. After buzzing me in, she motioned me over with a finger waggle.
Though Mrs. Flowers has a first name—Eunice—to my knowledge she’s never been addressed as anything other than Mrs. Flowers. The name so suits her I’ve wondered at times what she’d be called if she’d married a suitor named Smith or Gaspard. She is a peony of a woman, full-bodied, with pale pink skin that must have seen pampering since the stroller. The perfect complexion’s one flaw? Mrs. Flowers colors in the presence of the opposite gender.
Blusher or not, Mrs. Flowers has the skill and motivation to keep every document filed and accessible, every report typed, proofed, and delivered promptly, all while answering the phone and triaging members of the public who show up at her window. Given a staff of three pathologists, numerous death investigators, the occasional specialty consultant, and myself, it’s quite a feat.
“My word.” Mrs. Flowers’s upraised hand dropped to her yellow silk blouse.
“It’s a long story,” I said. Don’t ask, I meant.
One carefully plucked brow arched slightly, but she let it go.
“Dr. Larabee wishes to see you.” Southern as Tara. “He’s in the main autopsy room.”
“Thanks.”
Two small hallways, called biovestibules by those who designed them, connect the administrative and public sectors of the building with the autopsy area. I passed through one, pausing briefly to check the erasable board.
Four new cases. A single-vehicle accident near Optimist Park on North Davidson, elderly male driver DOA at Carolinas Medical Center. A sixteen-year-old female with a gunshot wound to the head, found beside a Dumpster on Shamrock Drive. The Peruvian mummified remains awaiting my assessment. And the teenage hit-and-run victim from Old Pineville Road.
Slidell’s Jane Doe.
I beelined for the ladies’ and did what I could with my hair and dirt-crusted face, then shifted to the locker room to change into scrubs. Last stop, my office for Band-Aids, antiseptic, and the spare Nikes I keep under the coat tree. Ten minutes after arriving, I was ready to roll.
When I pushed open the door of the large autopsy room, Tim Larabee was standing beside one of the two stainless steel tables. He wasn’t cutting or weighing, not dictating, not even looking down at the remains.
Shielding her from me? From Slidell? From the many who would probe and photograph and analyze and dissect her?
Odd thought. But true. The cold process had begun. And I would take part.
X-rays glowed from light boxes mounted along one wall. Cranials. A full-body series.
A pair of boots sat on one counter. Tan vinyl, with high heels and red and blue flowers running up the sides. Soles caked with mud. Cheap.
And small. Maybe size five. Tiny feet striding in very big-girl boots.
Clothing hung from a drying rack. A red blouse. A denim miniskirt. A white cotton bra. White cotton panties with pale blue dots.
Slidell stood by the rack, feet spread, hands clasped and V-ing down over his genitals. He wasn’t assessing the clothes or the body. He didn’t acknowledge my entrance.
I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.
Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good.
Nevertheless.
I looked at the bruised and distorted young face, and for a moment pictured the girl alive, slinging her pink kitty purse onto her shoulder. The strap slipping because the meager contents provided no ballast.
A dark stretch of road.
A hammering heart.
Headlights.
White cotton panties with pale blue dots. The kind Katy favored throughout middle school.
“Slidell give you a rundown?”
Larabee’s question snapped me back.
“Hit and run. Not yet identified.”
“Take a look.” Larabee crossed to the X-rays. His face looked drawn and gaunt, even for him, an obsessive long-distance runner with no body fat and hollows in his cheeks the depth of ocean trenches.
I joined him. He slipped a ballpoint out of the breast pocket of his scrubs and pointed at a defect located approximately mid-shaft in the left clavicle.
At the third and fourth ribs inferior to it.
Stepping to the next film, he ran the pen down the arm, over the humerus, the radius, the ulna. The hand.
“Yes,” I said to his unspoken question.
I followed as he moved on, to a posterior angle of the pelvis. He didn’t have to point.
“Yes,” I repeated.
To an anterior-posterior view of the skull. A lateral view.
A cold fist started closing on my gut.
Wordlessly, I returned to the body.
The girl lay on her back. Larabee hadn’t yet made his Y-incision, and, except for the bruises, abrasions, and distortion due to fractures, she might have been sleeping. The hair haloing her head was long and blond, one clump held high with a plastic barrette shaped like a cat. Pink. The kind little girls love.
Focus.
I gloved and examined the ravaged flesh, ghostly pale and cold to the touch. I palpated the arm, the shoulder, the hand, the abdomen, felt the underlying damage evident on the X-rays in glowing black-and-white.
“Can we turn her over, please?” My voice broke the stillness.
Larabee stepped to my side. Together we tucked the slender arms tight to the body and rolled it by the shoulders and hips.
My eyes traveled the delicate spine and small buttocks. Took in the tread marks imprinted on the flesh of the painfully thin thighs.
The fist tightened.
“What’s this?” I ran one finger over a discoloration on the girl’s right shoulder. Maybe five inches long, the bruise appeared as a series of dashes.
“Hematoma,” Larabee said.
“It’s a patterned injury,” I said. “Any idea what made it?”
Larabee shook his head.
I looked at Slidell. He looked back but said nothing.
“May I see the CSU photos?” Stripping off and tossing, not so gently, my latex gloves.
Larabee collected a stack of five-by-sevens from the counter and handed them to me. Frame by frame I viewed the desolate spot where the girl had lived her last moments.
The photos told the same story.
It was no accident.
The girl had been murdered.
“MURDERED?” SLIDELL’S BARK ricocheted off the stainless steel and glass surrounding us.
“Legally that would imply intent,” Larabee said.
“Screw legal definitions.” I jammed a finger at the devastated body. “Some bastard killed this kid.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Slidell was shifting surprised eyes between Larabee and me.
I gestured Slidell to the X-ray showing the left arm bones. Larabee joined us and offered his pen. I took it and pointed to the humeral shaft, four inches below the shoulder joint.
“See this dark line?”
“A broken arm don’t mean the kid was capped.” Slidell was peering at the gray-and-white image, doubt crimping his already dubious expression.
“No, detective. It doesn’t.” I shifted to indicate the hand. “Note the medial and distal phalanges.”
“Don’t go all jargony on me, doc.”
“The finger bones.”
Slidell leaned in and studied the illuminated fragments at the tip of my pen.
“The middle phalanges should look like small tubes, the distal ones like tiny arrowheads. They underlie the fingertips.”
“Looks like wood shavings.”
“The bones have been crushed.”
Slidell made a noise in his throat I chose not to interpret.
I moved on to the cranial X-ray.
“There are no skull fractures. But note the mandible, especially the mental eminence.” I would leave discussion of soft-tissue injuries to Larabee.
Slidell pooched air through his lips.
“The chin,” I explained.
“How come it’s called mental when the brain’s up top?”
“Some people think with their mouths.”
Larabee smiled. Almost. My sarcasm was lost on Skinny.
“Fine.” Slidell’s skepticism was turning his tone gruff. “Her chin’s broken, her arm’s broken, and her fingers are smashed. How’s that add up to murder?”
“The tread marks on her thighs tell us this is a vehicular death. But it’s no regular hit and run. The victim wasn’t standing along the side of the road. Not hitchhiking. Not waiting on the shoulder for a ride from a friend. She was hit square in the back.”
Larabee nodded in confirmation of the conclusion he too had reached but had yet to voice.
Slidell continued staring at the film.
“Picture this,” I said. “She’s walking, maybe running. A car comes at her from behind. Maybe she tries to escape. Maybe not. Either way, the car plows into the backs of her legs.”
Slidell said nothing. Larabee kept nodding.
“She goes down hard, arms outstretched. Her chin impacts the pavement. She’s forced beneath the chassis. The left tires roll over her left hand, crushing her fingers.”
“You sure about this?”
I gestured an upturned palm at Larabee.
“Typically, a pedestrian hit by a vehicle is slammed onto the windshield or thrown sideways and outward, receiving injuries to the head, upper torso, or legs,” he said. “This victim has no cranial or thoracic trauma consistent with a windshield impact or rapid deceleration angled to the left or right.”
Slidell still looked unconvinced.
I snatched up the crime-scene photos, chose two, and handed them to him. He studied both, then slowly exhaled through his nose.
“No skid marks.”
“Exactly. The driver never hit the brakes.”
“Sonofabitch.”
I turned to Larabee.
“You’re putting PMI at seven to ten hours?” I was asking about postmortem interval.
“To be safe. The body arrived here shortly after nine this morning. Air temp last night dropped to forty-eight. I observed lividity, but still got blanching. Rigor—”
“Whoa, whoa. Back it up, doc.” Slidell pulled a pen and small spiral from his pocket and began taking notes.
Larabee indicated the body. “Notice the purple mottling on her belly, the fronts of her thighs, the undersides of her arms, and the right half of her face?”
Slidell glanced up, resumed scribbling.
“That discoloration is called lividity. It’s due to the settling of blood in the body’s downside once the heart stops beating. When I pressed a thumb to her flesh, the vessels were pushed aside, leaving an area of pallor.”
Slidell twisted his mouth to one side.
“A white mark,” Larabee simplified. “After about ten hours the red blood cells and capillaries would have decomposed sufficiently so blanching wouldn’t have occurred.”
“And rigor’s when the stiff gets stiff.” Slidell pronounced it rigger.
Larabee nodded. “When the body arrived, rigor was complete in the small muscles, but not in the largest ones. Her jaws were locked, but I could still bend her knees and elbows.”
“So she died more than seven hours before she got here, but less than ten.” Slidell did the math in his head. It took a while. “Sometime between eleven and two.”
“It’s not a precise science,” Larabee said.
“What about stomach contents? Once you get her open?”
“Ninety-eight percent of her last meal would have left her stomach within six to eight hours of ingestion. With luck I might find some fragments, corn, maybe tomato skin, in a rugal fold in the gastric mucosa. I’ll let you know.”
“What about vit
reous?” I was asking about fluid drawn from the eye. “Can you test for potassium?”
“I took a sample, but it won’t really narrow the range.”
“How close was she to the light rail?” I asked Slidell.
“She was on the shoulder, on the side opposite the railway.”
“How often do trains pass during those hours?”
“Last one runs by there just after one A.M. The next isn’t until five A.M.”
“What about metallic spray?” I asked Larabee. “Or oil. Did you find any deposits on her skin or hair? On the clothing?”
He shook his head. “Unlikely airborne residue would travel that far, but I’ll double-check. What are you thinking?”
“The presence or absence of train residue might narrow the time frame.”
Larabee spread two sinewy hands, palms up. “Worth a try.”
I turned back to Slidell. “How was she found?”
“A call came in a little after seven A.M. Teacher on her way to work noticed what she thought was a mannequin, pulled over, thinking she could use a dummy for the school play. Tossed her cornflakes, then dialed 911.”
I picked up the scene photos and worked through a progression of shots moving from far to near.
The first several showed a stretch of empty road not different from what I’d pictured in my mind. On the right, the raised light-rail tracks threw long, postdawn shadows over the embankment, the shoulder, and the pavement below.
On the left, maybe eighty yards distant from the yellow crime-scene tape triangling the body, stood a small stucco building fronted by a gravel lot.
“What’s that?”
“A party supply store. Been empty for months.”
“And that?” I pointed to a one-story, windowless structure.
“Some sort of self-storage outfit.”
The next series zoomed in on the body and its immediate surroundings. Rountree Road coming in from the west. Old Pineville running north and south. On the latter lay one of the tan vinyl boots. My eyes traversed the pavement.
Paralleling the right shoulder was a swath of grass and foxtails that yielded to tangled underbrush as the ground sloped to a trench beside the supporting wall of the light-rail platform.
Back on the Rountree side, I noted an irregular smear of dirt and a spray of pebbles on the gravel shoulder, what looked to be a crumpled paper cup, and a beer can. Specks of white peeked from the tangled weeds. Litter?