by Anne Frasier
"This is nothing but a bunch of overwritten, sensationalized crap," Abraham told Max, who'd stopped by his office to assess his reaction to the article. He tossed the paper down on his desk. "You know what it looks like? It looks like an ad for a horror movie, that's what it looks like."
Max picked up the paper. "At least it's on page three, not page one."
Abraham walked to the window and stared down at the traffic in the street below. Had he done the right thing in bringing Ivy here? He normally didn't doubt himself, but when it came to the Madonna Murderer, he doubted himself about everything.
He was tired.
People were always asking him what he was going to do when he retired, telling him he'd be bored out of his mind. That wasn't going to happen.
But what if he couldn't shut off his mind? What if he went to Florida to fish, and all he saw were murdered babies, murdered mothers, floating just below the water's surface?
The guilt. Abraham couldn't get away from the guilt. Eighteen years ago, when the murders first started, he'd been an Area Five detective just like Max. He'd been pretty confident then, and he really thought he could catch the madman. But he didn't catch him, he never caught him, and twelve mothers and their babies had died.
That's why he'd worked so hard to help Claudia Reynolds. To help her get a new identity, a new life in a new country.
He was able to get her Canadian citizenship. For some reason just as inexplicable as everything else they did, serial killers rarely crossed borders. That didn't apply to everyone, of course. There was Christopher Wilder, who killed several people in Australia and then, when things got hot there, moved to the U.S. where he continued his spree before he was brought down by his own gun during an altercation with two officers.
Abraham kept track of Ivy over the years. He knew she'd spent time in a Canadian mental institute, but had come out of that darkness to get a master's degree in criminal psychology. She'd even published a book- length study on the mind of the serial killer.
But the Madonna Murderer was never found.
After the killings stopped, Abraham fell into a deep despair. He started drinking. Then he started taking pills. Then he combined the two until he almost died. His wife couldn't take it anymore and left him.
And now the killer had resurfaced.
Was there a God? That's what he wanted to know. Because sometimes it sure as hell didn't seem like it.
"What about the FBI?" Abraham asked. "Any news from them?"
"The Bureau is swamped, but they're pulling two people off other cases and sending them down," Max told him. "They should arrive this afternoon or evening."
Chapter 15
Max and Ivy stood side by side in Autopsy Suite Four of Cook County Morgue wearing face shields, yellow disposable aprons, and white disposable rubber gloves. There would be blood, there would be splatter, and in this age of AIDS, it was best to take every precaution.
A half hour earlier Max had swung by Ivy's apartment, possibly to gloat, possibly to see if she was still in town after last night's initiation into the ugly, horrifying world of senseless violence. When he'd buzzed her apartment, telling her to come on down if she wanted to get in on the autopsy, he had to wait less than five minutes.
He was reluctantly impressed.
It was common for rigor mortis to set in three hours after death. It began in the muscles of the face and eyelids, then spread slowly to the arms and legs, taking about twelve hours to affect the whole body. In most cases, if the victim hadn't been burned or poisoned, the process reversed itself after thirty-six hours, until the body was soft and supple once again.
Sometimes the medical examiner would wait until rigor mortis was gone and the body was flexible once more. But in such a serious homicide, it was best to move forward as quickly as possible.
The sheet-covered body of the female victim lay on a steel exam table that was concave and funneled to a drain. The floor was concrete, the walls white tile. Almost all equipment was made of stainless steel and would endure years of sterilization. A fume vent hung overhead, with the exam table itself equipped with down-draft ventilation.
Chief Medical Examiner Eileen Bernard clipped a tiny microphone to her liquid-impermeable gown with hands that were covered by the preferred thick surgical purple gloves that offered more protection than the lighter ones. Under her left glove she wore another of wire mesh.
Eileen Bernard had been Cook County Chief Medical Examiner for nine years. Before that, she'd been an assistant, and before that a professor of forensic pathology at the University of Minnesota. Max figured she'd cut open more dead bodies than almost any other person on the planet.
Stranger than that, she actually liked it and didn't try to pretend otherwise. Which took Max to a question that had lingered uncomfortably in the back of his mind for a number of years: Did Eileen Bernard have something in common with serial killers? Did she also have that obsessive need to cut people up, to see what they looked like on the inside? Only, she was doing it legally and getting paid a tidy sum in the process.
She turned on the tape recorder, operating it with the foot switch so her hands could remain free. "This is Dr. Eileen Bernard," she said into the microphone. That was followed by the case number, victim's name, age, weight, length.
Even though Max had already seen the body at the crime scene, he still felt a fresh jab of shock when Bernard uncovered it completely, exposing it to the glare of the blinding overhead spotlights.
The smell wasn't bad, certainly not like other autopsies he'd been to where the victim hadn't been found for days. But it was amazing how quickly the human body began to decompose—just minutes after death, so that even now that sweet-foul odor hung in the room, although the exhaust system fought to suck the stink away. Soon it would creep into his sinuses, cling to his hair. Back at Central, he'd shower and change, but the smell would still be there, no matter how much soap he used, or how hard he scrubbed.
He used to put Vicks up his nose, but after four or five times, he began to associate the smell of menthol with death and now it was just as bad as the real thing. Anytime anybody came at him sucking on a cough drop, Max would recoil, the smell of a half-rotten body gusting into his face. And no way would he ever use it on Ethan when he was little. Instead, he would run a hot shower and wait for the bathroom to steam up. Then he would sit there on the closed toilet, holding Ethan until he stopped coughing and finally fell into a peaceful sleep.
Bernard pulled close the tray containing the tools of her trade—scalpels, forceps, chisels, and rubber mallets. She was systematic and always followed the same procedure she'd taught her students. Conform to routine and get everything the first time. As far as Max knew, there had never been the need for an exhumation on any of her cases—a testimony to her thoroughness.
She began by examining the body from head to toe, front to back, while her morgue assistant, a huge, sober-faced man, silently and solemnly stepped in when needed. Normally, a coroner used two assistants, but it was apparent this guy could handle it by himself.
After the initial overview, Bernard numbered the stab wounds with a black marker, her assistant helping to roll the body. "The wounds are confined to the chest and abdomen." She rechecked her count. "Twenty-two in all." She stood back while the assistant climbed up on a short ladder to take photographs from above.
She verbally cataloged every wound, its location, depth. "These were all done with the same instrument. A knife that was long and wide." She swung the flex- arm dissecting lamp with its magnifying glass closer. "See this?" With a purple, blood-smeared gloved finger, she pointed to ragged flesh. "Serrated."
"Same as the other victim," Max stated.
"Yes."
"But bigger than, say, a steak knife."
"Yes."
"A heavy bread knife?" Ivy asked.
Her voice rang out hollowly in the room, perhaps coming out louder than anticipated, as many voices did when the owner struggled for bravery.
Max shot her a quick glance, wondering if she'd had enough. Her eyes were focused on the victim. Instead of the fear and revulsion he'd expected to see, he saw what looked like sorrow.
"Sharper," Dr. Bernard said. "More like the kind of knife used by a butcher in order to cut through bone."
She went on examining the body, pointing out the red-and-purple ligature marks around the throat. The victim's mouth was still taped into a wide grin. She peeled the tape away, but rigor mortis kept the jaw from going slack. "Hard to tell, but I'll bet she was a beautiful woman." She forced the mouth open and peered inside, then inserted two gloved fingers. "Crushed windpipe."
"Asphyxiation?" Max asked.
"I don't think so," she said slowly, thoughtfully. "It looks to be postmortem. Just to make sure she was dead. As if twenty-two stab wounds wouldn't have done the job."
With the aid of her assistant, Dr. Bernard placed a rubber block beneath the victim's neck, stretching the neck and the tissue of the upper chest. Then she reached for a scalpel. Pausing below the collarbone, she glanced up.
Max Irving stood there, his face, behind the clear acrylic shield, unreadable as always. Next to him, the woman he'd introduced as Ivy Dunlap stared at the body, at the woman's face, her lips parted, her breath creating little puffs of condensation on her face shield.
Bernie hoped to hell she wasn't a fainter. Irving hadn't said anything past the introduction, no explanation as to why the woman was there. It was unusual to have a civilian at an autopsy, but not unheard of. She'd had a couple of reporters before, years ago when rules were a little less stringent. None of them had lasted past the first incision, let alone the cutting open of the skull with the bone saw in order to weigh the brain.
Opinions varied as to what was worse: the smell of hot bone, the sound of the high-pitched whine of metal against cranium, or the sight of a human skull being cracked open like a nutshell.
None of it bothered her. She couldn't remember a time when it had ever bothered her, not even when she was little and would find a dead animal on the Oklahoma highway that ran just a hundred yards from her home. She used to peel back the hide to see the muscles, the intestines, poking around with an inquisitive finger. The anatomy of anything fascinated her. All her life she'd tried to understand other people's revulsion toward anything dead, but couldn't. For her, looking inside a human body was no different than pulling a flower apart to see how it was put together.
Her parents had never understood her compulsion, and to this day her mother still asked why she didn't practice as a real doctor so that she could use her skills to save people, not cut them up when they were already dead. A hard thing for any parent to get, Bernie supposed.
Starting at one shoulder, just below the clavicle, she began the incision, following a line to the breastbone. The invasion was deep, penetrating skin, fatty tissue, and muscle in one motion. An identical incision was made on the other side. At the meeting place of the sternum, an incision was made down the entire torso, going around the navel and ending at the pubic bone. With shears, she then clipped through the rib cartilage until she was able to remove the rib cage and set it aside, exposing the thoracic organs.
She took samples of skin and tissue, dropping them into containers of formaldehyde. After she was finished collecting samples, she poured water over the remaining organs from a steel pitcher.
"Suction."
The assistant unwrapped a plastic wand, attached it to the hose on the suction machine, then turned the dial to medium. He prodded with the clear plastic tip, suctioning around the heart. Pink, blood-tinged fluid trailed up the tube to be deposited in a quart container.
"Heart intact. Lacerations to the liver and spleen."
Dr. Bernard poked around at various veins and arteries that lay collapsed and as flat as tapeworms. "She bled out completely. Did you notice how there was hardly any lividity? No blood left in her body to settle."
"She bled to death?" Max asked.
"Yep."
"Could she have been saved?" the woman, Ivy, whispered, her voice trembling slightly.
She'd be going down soon, Bernie thought without disdain or criticism. It was simply something that happened. The nature of the beast, just as killing this woman had been an act the killer couldn't control.
"You mean could she have been saved if she'd been found in time?"
"Yes."
"Well, with the damaged liver and spleen, all the wounds, it's doubtful." What did she want to hear? Why did it matter? Bernie never questioned occurrences that had already happened. It was a pointless waste of time. She didn't read fiction. She no longer went to movies. Art and music did nothing for her. She existed in reality, a place she liked to be. She'd wasted a lot of time filtering movies, TV, through everyone else's eyes, trying to understand her fellow humans.
Fake. All of it fake. Especially the portrayal of death. Death was the total absence of spirit—something that no one could emulate, no matter how good the actor.
"Doubtful," she said, continuing to consider the question. "But maybe," she answered truthfully. "If he hadn't crushed her windpipe. He made sure she wouldn't be crawling anywhere, picking up the telephone, dialing 911." She reached for the bone saw that hung from a pulley above her head. "This next procedure was never a favorite of my students." Nine out of ten passed out the first time they witnessed the dissecting of the throat.
She would be nice and give Dunlap good warning. And she had to give her credit for making it to this point. A lot of people didn't. In fact, she could recall a certain detective who'd all but passed out on her not that many years ago. "All ashore who's going ashore."
Sometimes she didn't say anything. Sometimes she just started cutting. But she didn't feel like being mean today, so she issued the warning. And Dunlap was already looking a little washed out. Bernie looked at Max, raising one eyebrow. But then, maybe he wanted her to faint so he could catch her. Maybe that's what this was all about.
He looked back at her through his face shield, his stone features never changing.
Maybe not.
Ivy shook her head, saying, "I'm okay," even though she was afraid she wasn't okay.
She forced herself to watch as the dissection continued up the trachea, esophagus, and finally the removal of the tongue. It was the tongue that did it.
Ivy spun around and ran, pulling off her face shield and dropping it on a medical cart. Into a nearby trash container went the apron and gloves. Then she was pushing through a door marked EXIT in red, illuminated letters. Outside the building, she sucked in a deep breath, but instead of smelling fresh air, she smelled the sweet-rotten smell of death and formaldehyde. It filled her sinuses, her lungs, her throat. Bile rose, burning her esophagus, and dizziness collected behind her eyes.
She could feel the sunlight on her cold, clammy face. She took a few steps in the direction of Max Irving's faded blue car with the dented side panel, which was parked in the shade of a puny tree where birds were chirping, calling encouragements to her. She moved in the direction of that shade and those gaily singing birds, distantly wondering why they'd chosen to live in Chicago when they could live anywhere. If she were one of them, she'd go to St. Sebastian, where the sun didn't shine so harshly. A place that didn't smell like death.
She needed that shade. Not the shade of a cement building, a morgue, but that cool, tree-cast shade. Before she could reach it, dizziness washed over her again and cold sweat brought her to her knees, small bits of gravel poking through her khaki pants.
"Put your head down."
Mentally, she fought him because she didn't want to collapse in a heap in the middle of the parking lot. But physically she had no more strength than a rag doll as his hand pressed against the back of her scalp, forcing her forehead to her thighs.
Even in her near faint, she understood that another man, a man who had last physically forced his will upon her, was now preying upon other innocent women.
She cursed her own weakness.
She hadn't prayed in years, but she pulled together a semblance of prayer now while darkness danced behind her eyes and the hot, unforgiving surface of the parking lot bit into her knees, and a man for whom she felt no affinity pressed her to the ground.
Those earlier childhood prayers had been sent skyward at the pleading of her mother, and Ivy had cooperated for no other reason than to keep from going to hell. She'd quit praying when she discovered she was already there.
Give me strength, she begged, not of God but of herself. She was the only person who could get her through this, the only person she would trust. Which was a scary thought; she had so many weaknesses, so many doubts.
Coward, she taunted.
She straightened her neck, fighting the hand that was not only there to help her, but to hold her down, to keep her from doing what she'd come here to do.
She pushed him away and got to her feet, staggering to the shade tree, bracing one hip against the car's fender.
Irving followed, dropping to the ground, his back against the narrow trunk of the tree. With arms dangling over bent knees, he said, "I puked my guts out at my first autopsy."
She looked up at him, surprised at that admission.
Earlier, he'd taken off his jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt to just below the elbows.
Ivy rubbed her face and tried to swallow the acidic taste in her mouth. She wished she had some water. "I threw up when I had to dissect an earthworm," she told him, now that they were confessing things.
He laughed and scooped up a piece of gravel, then gave it a toss. "That's pathetic."
"I know."
She was already regretting her admission, that tiny peek she'd given him into her past, another life. She must remember not to talk about herself, not even about earthworms.
"So what are you doing here, Ivy Dunlap?" he asked, voicing a path of questioning her carelessly innocent words had begun. "What road brought you to this point?"