Hour Game

by David Baldacci

  red hair was tied back in a bun, revealing perfectly formed ears and a long, slender neck. Her brow was furrowed, and her look was one of distraction as she sat behind her desk.

  “Kyle just turned thirty and doesn’t really want to be here.”

  “I guess it’s hard to pick up women in bars with the line ‘Want to check out some great corpses?’ ” said Michelle.

  “I think Kyle’s dream is to be in a world-famous rock band,” said Sylvia.

  “Right, along with twenty million other guys,” said King. “He needs to get over it. I did when I was seventeen.”

  Sylvia glanced at some papers on her desk, signed them, closed the file, stretched out her arms and yawned. “I’m sorry. I haven’t done three autopsies so close together for quite some time, and there’s been an outbreak of spring flu. That’s what I was doing next door.” She shook her head wearily. “It’s a little schizophrenic. One minute I’m looking at the throat of a fifty-year-old woman, the next moment I’m cutting up someone to see how they were murdered. Usually, there are months when I don’t even step foot inside the morgue. But not lately.”

  “It takes a very special person to do what you do, Sylvia,” said King.

  “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, just simply stating a fact, but thanks.”

  She turned to Williams, who was looking paler by the minute. When she spoke, her tone was not exactly one of warmth and honey. “I trust you’ve recovered from the first autopsy.”

  “I think my head has, not sure about my gut.”

  “I was really hoping to see you at the Canney and Pembroke posts. Having the lead investigator in attendance is usually quite helpful,” she added in an admonishing tone that made her point quite clear.

  Williams looked miserably at her. “I was planning to but then got called away.”

  “Of course.” Sylvia glanced at King and Michelle with a suddenly hardened expression. “Do you both have strong stomachs?”

  Michelle and King looked at each other. King answered for them. “Strong enough.”

  Sylvia turned to Williams. “Todd, do you have any objection to their seeing the bodies? Of course I also want you or at least one of your men to attend as well. It might appear strange to a jury that somebody from the police force hadn’t viewed the bodies at least post-autopsy.”

  Williams looked angry but then seemed to wage an inner debate with himself. Finally, he shrugged. “Hell, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE AUTOPSY ROOM WAS

  much like Sylvia’s office minus all warmth and feminine touches. Everything was stainless steel and neatly arranged. Two personal workstations with built-in desks were situated on one side of the room, and two stainless-steel examination tables with drainage holes, water tubs with hoses, a small dissection table, organ scale and trays of surgical instruments were situated on the other. The four had stopped at the locker room and donned scrubs, gloves and masks before entering. They looked like extras in a low-budget bioterrorism flick.

  Michelle whispered to King as Sylvia walked ahead to speak with Kyle.

  “I can see why you two dated. You both have the super mutant neatness gene. Don’t worry; I hear they’re working on a cure.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” King whispered back through his mask. “I’m never going over to the dark side.”

  “I’ll show you Jane Doe first,” said Sylvia, coming back to them.

  A large stainless-steel door opened, and as Kyle emerged pushing a gurney with a sheet covering the dead woman, threads of chilly air escaped from the refrigerated room.

  Michelle started shivering uncontrollably.

  “You okay?” King asked.

  “Of course I am,” she shot back through chattering teeth. “You?”

  “I was a premed student briefly before I went into law. And I worked at the morgue in Richmond over a summer. I’ve seen lots of bodies.”

  “Premed?”

  “I thought it would help me pick up girls. I know, I know, but I was young and stupid.”

  Kyle left. Before Sylvia pulled back the sheet, she looked at Williams, and her expression was now more kindly. “Chief, just do what I told you the first time, and you’ll be fine. You’ve already seen the worst of it. No more surprises, I promise.”

  He nodded, hitched up his pants and appeared to be holding his breath and praying for a natural disaster so he could get the hell out of there.

  She pulled back the sheet and they all looked down.

  The Y-incision running from chest to pubis made the body appear to have been unzipped. Jane Doe’s organs had been removed, weighed and analyzed, and then the block of organs, muscle and tissue had been unceremoniously bagged and dumped back in the body cavity. The incision that had opened the skull was not readily apparent from their viewing angle, though the face drooped, like a doll whose supporting stitches had given way.

  “The intermastoid incision is always an eye-opener,” commented King dryly.

  “I’m impressed, Sean,” said Sylvia, staring at him.

  Williams looked like he wanted to strangle King if he could only find the strength.

  The smell of the body was very intense in the small room. Michelle started to cover her mouth and nose even though they were masked. Sylvia quickly stopped her.

  “This room is very dirty, Michelle; germs everywhere, so don’t touch your face with your hands. And trying to stop the smell that way only makes it worse. With malodors like this your senses will go dead in about two minutes. Just keep breathing.” She glanced at Williams, who, to his credit, was taking large, rapid breaths and had one hand pushed against his belly as though trying to keep the contents in there right where they were. “At the crime scene your deputies kept running away to get fresh air and then coming back. The only thing they were doing was giving their sense of smell an opportunity to return.”

  “I know,” said Williams between wheezes. “Puked all over their damn uniforms. We blew our whole laundry budget for the month.” The police chief turned slightly green yet bravely stood his ground.

  Michelle felt herself taking quick, jerky breaths. As Sylvia had said, her sense of smell was beginning to vanish. She looked down at the body once more.

  “I don’t see any obvious wounds. Was it strangulation?” she asked.

  Sylvia shook her head. “I checked that first. I used a laser on the neck to look for ligature marks after none appeared evident under normal light. I thought there might be some hemorrhage into the muscles of the neck, but I didn’t find any. And the hyoid bone and the thyroid and cricoid cartilages weren’t fractured. They sometimes are in strangulation cases.” She looked down at Jane Doe. “We did the sexual assault workup. It came back negative. Whoever killed her didn’t rape or sexually violate her. Because of the usual order of an autopsy, I didn’t discover the cause of death until near the end; up to that point it was a puzzler.” She glanced sharply at Williams. “Todd, you’d already left by then.”

  Williams stared helplessly back at her. “Damn it, Doc, I’m trying here, okay? Cut me some slack.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense, Sylvia. How did she die?” exclaimed King. “And in stupid-people language if you can manage it.”

  Sylvia picked up a long metal rod and levered open Jane Doe’s mouth.

  “A twenty-two-caliber revolver was placed in her mouth and fired. The angle of the shot was about seventy-five degrees. The slug ended up lodged in her midbrain. I noticed some strange residue on her teeth. It wasn’t from the discharge of the gun; that would have been a dead giveaway. The killer must’ve swabbed the teeth and mouth with a cleaning fluid to eliminate the evidence. The wound inside her mouth was sealed from the hot gases emitted when the gun was fired, basically cauterizing it. However, the X rays showed the bullet. We always take X rays before making any incision, but we had problems getting the film processed, so I started the post. Once I opened her up, the wound track and slug revealed themselves. When we
got the X ray result, the bullet in the brain was there on the film.”

  “Isn’t a gun in the mouth a typical method of suicide?” said Michelle.

  “Not for women,” replied Sylvia. “It’s classic Mars versus Venus, testosterone versus estrogen. Men kill themselves with guns or by hanging. Women favor poison or drug overdoses, slitting their wrists or putting a plastic bag over their heads. Besides, there was no trace of gunpowder residue on her hands.”

  King mused, “The person would have to know that the cause of death would be revealed eventually even if he tried to hide it.”

  “Another interesting point,” said Sylvia. “The woman was not killed in the woods. She was killed elsewhere, inside some structure, and her body was later transported to the woods. Most likely in a car, and her body was wrapped in plastic.”

  “How can you be so sure?” King wanted to know.

  “As you know, rigor mortis is a plain vanilla chemical process occurring upon death. It starts in the small muscles of the jaw and neck and bleeds downward to the larger muscle groups, the trunk and the extremities and is usually complete within six to twelve hours. I say usually because there are various exceptions to that rule. Body types and environmental conditions can impact the timing. An obese person may not experience rigor at death, and while cold inhibits rigor’s onset, heat accelerates it. The rigidity remains anywhere from thirty hours to three days and then disappears in the same order it appeared.”

  “Okay, what does that tell us?” asked Michelle.

  “A lot. Jane Doe was a young woman, well developed and nourished but not overweight. Rigor on her would have fallen within the normal parameters absent extraordinary environmental forces. The ambient temperatures the night before she was found had dipped into the high forties, which would have inhibited somewhat the rigor’s progression. Well, rigor on Jane Doe was fully resolved and her body flaccid when I examined her at the crime scene. That means she had been dead for three days at most by that time, or at the very least thirty hours. Given the resolution of rigor despite the chilly weather, I’d lean more toward her being dead three days when she was found.”

  “But you said rigor’s not precise. Maybe there was something else, another factor that skewed it,” suggested Michelle.

  “I had another check beyond the rigor. When I examined the body in the woods, it was already discolored, and swollen with gas from the bacteria engulfing the body. The skin also was blistering, and fluids were leaking from all orifices. That almost never commences until three days after death.” She paused. “And if she’d lain in those woods for even thirty hours much less three days, the insect infestation would have been dramatically different than what I saw. I expected to see heavy infestation of bluebottle and greenbottle flies, both outdoor varieties. Flies attack a dead body almost immediately and lay their eggs. Within one to two days the eggs hatch, and the cycle keeps going. Now, when I examined the mouth, nose and eyes, I did find fly-hatched larvae, but of what turned out to be houseflies. The outdoor fly larvae hadn’t yet hatched. Also, burial and carrion beetles should have been swarming the body by the time we found it. Nothing stops insects from doing their thing. And on top of that, after three days in those woods wild animals should have attacked the body and removed large parts of the extremities. All that was missing were fingers.”

  She turned the body on its side and pointed out reddish-purple patches on the front where the blood had settled postmortem. “I also had yet another way to check my theory of the body’s being moved. The position of the lividity really told me all I needed to know. As you can see, lividity gives the appearance of bruising with its darkish hues. However, here, you can also see that the discoloration is on the front of the torso and the thighs and lower legs. The white streaks you see on the abdomen, lower chest and parts of the legs are where the body was lying against something hard and the resulting pressure inhibited the process.”

  She shifted the body so they could see the back of it.

  “You can see that there is no such discoloration on the back or the backs of the legs. Conclusion: she was killed and then was laid facedown, and the blood-settling process commenced. Lividity usually first occurs around one hour after death and is complete within three to four hours. If the body is moved within another three to four hours, the original discoloration may partially disappear and new ones form as the blood shifts again. However, fresh lividity patterns are not produced by position changes twelve hours after death, because blood drainage becomes fixed at that time.”

  She gently laid the corpse back down. “My opinion is that she was killed indoors or perhaps in a car by the shot to the head. I believe her body remained indoors for at least twenty-four to forty-eight hours and then was taken to the place where it was discovered. She couldn’t have been in the woods longer than ten to twelve hours.”

  “And the transport by car? And the plastic?” asked King.

  “What was he going to do, carry her in his arms down the road?” said Sylvia. “And neither I nor the police found any fibers on her clothing, the sorts of trace you would expect to see from the carpeting in a car or a car’s trunk. And I didn’t find any on the body. Plastic doesn’t leave much if any residue.”

  Michelle said, “I found the body at around two-thirty in the afternoon. The boys would have seen it maybe minutes before that.”

  “Counting back,” said King, “that means the body would have been dumped there, using your twelve-hour outside number, no earlier than two-thirty in the morning.”

  Williams had stood in the background all this time, but now he stepped forward. “Nice work, Sylvia. Wrightsburg is lucky to have you,” he said.

  She smiled thinly at his praise. “A postmortem doesn’t tell who committed the crime unless the killer left behind things like semen, saliva or urine that we can test. The post just tells us how and what.” Sylvia glanced at her notes and continued. “As I said, there was no evidence of rape, no injury to the rectum or vagina, and she’d never had a baby. I’d put her age at about mid-twenties and her health as physically sound. In life she was a well-built woman about five feet five inches tall. She’d had breast implants, and collagen injections in her lips. And she also had had her appendix removed. We’ll know more when the toxicology screens come back in a couple of weeks.” Sylvia pointed at Jane Doe’s slit-open stomach. “Todd, she was pierced on her belly button, perhaps for a belly ring, but there was none on the body. That might help you in identifying her.”

  “Thanks. I’ll check it out.”

  “The only helpful identifying mark I found was this.” She picked up a magnifying glass, lifted the sheet off the lower part of the body and held up one of the legs, positioning the glass at a spot toward the inside thigh very near the woman’s crotch. “It’s a little difficult to make out with the extensive discoloration of the body, but it’s a tattoo of a cat.”

  Michelle looked at the tattoo of the feline and the proximity of it to the woman’s genitals and stood straight up. “I really don’t want to think about that connection.”

  “Damn,” said Williams, reddening.

  “I know, not very ladylike, is it?” said Sylvia.

  She looked up as Kyle entered the room.

  “There’s another police guy out front, wants to talk to the chief here, Doc.”

  “Police guy?” Her tone was a little strident. “Try police officer.”

  “Right, this police officer wants to see the chief.”

  “Can you ask him to come back here?”

  A malicious smile passed across the young man’s features. “That’s the first thing I did, Doc. The police officer declined, without explanation. Come to think, though, he looked a little green when I suggested it.”

  “I’ll go out front,” said Williams, and he hurried off with Kyle right behind.

  Five minutes later Williams returned with a nervous-looking uniformed patrolman in his wake who was introduced by Williams as Officer Dan Clancy. Williams looked strick
en. “We might have an ID on the girl from the picture we circulated,” he said, his voice trembling slightly as they all stared at him. “Looks like she worked briefly at the Aphrodisiac.”

  “The Aphrodisiac?” exclaimed King.

  Williams nodded. “As an exotic dancer. Her ‘stage’ name was Tawny Blaze. Not real imaginative, I know. Her real name was Rhonda Tyler.” He glanced at the paper in his hand. “Tyler worked there for a while but left when her contract was up.”

  “Will the person who recognized the picture come down and attempt to make a positive ID?” asked Sylvia. “Although with the state the body’s in, I’m not sure that’s possible. But if—”

  Williams cut in. “That won’t be necessary, Sylvia.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “We were told she has a distinguishing mark.” Williams looked embarrassed.

  It hit Michelle in an instant. “A tattoo of a cat next to her…?”

  Williams’s mouth gaped even as he nodded.

  “Who was the person who provided the information?” asked King.

  “The manager of the Aphrodisiac. Lulu Oxley.”

  Now King’s mouth gaped. “Lulu Oxley! Junior Deaver’s Lulu Oxley?”

  “How many Lulu Oxleys do you know, Sean?” asked Williams.

  “I know her too,” said Sylvia. “Well, we used to have the same gynecologist.”

  Williams said, “That’s not all. We got a message from the Wrightsburg Gazette. They received a letter.”

  “What sort of letter?” asked Michelle nervously.

  “A coded one,” replied a very pale Todd Williams. “With the mark of the Zodiac on the envelope.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  KING ACCOMPANIED

  Williams to the police station to look at the note while Michelle stayed behind with Sylvia and Deputy Clancy to go over the autopsies already performed on Canney and Pembroke.