Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  “The body’s full of puncture wounds, which means whatever the weapon was, it came away covered in blood. Those drops are from the weapon. And since that’s a right shoe and the drops are on the right side—”

  “He’s right-handed,” Gatlin said. “Great. A million right-handed suspects. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Broussard looked back at the victim. “Speakin’ of gettin’ somewhere, you through with her?”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Gatlin said. He looked at Jamison. “Ray, get some shots of the umbrella and the purse. And one of her heels is stuck in that grate. Get that, too.”

  Broussard put his padded block on the sidewalk and knelt on it. He took a penlight from his shirt pocket and played it in the victim’s eyes. “What time you got?” he asked, looking up.

  Gatlin pushed up the sleeve of his raincoat and tilted his wrist into the cruiser’s headlights. “Three-forty.”

  “Consider her pronounced,” Broussard said, getting to his feet.

  Gatlin wrote the time in the small spiral pad where he had already sketched the scene and entered the measurements he’d taken.

  The sidewalk was slightly slanted toward the street and most of the blood had run in that direction. Staying on the side of the body nearest the building, Broussard moved down and knelt beside the legs.

  Seeing that Broussard would now be looking into the cruiser’s lights, Gatlin stepped into the street and stood in front of them. As he whistled at one of the uniforms, a large drop of water from the awning hit the back of his head and ran down his neck. “Cavenaugh, bring your light over here.”

  Broussard raised the victim’s leg that had been kept off the gore-soaked sidewalk by the opposite ankle, and bent it at the knee. He took the flashlight from Cavenaugh and examined the skin on the thigh and calf, making a sound that resembled a cat purring. After gently lowering her leg, he took a wooden applicator stick from the pocket protector in his shirt and drew it through the blood in which the body lay. He got to his feet and sent the beam of his flashlight up the brick and glass storefront. Then he handed the flashlight back to Cavenaugh and took out a little black book and a pen.

  While Broussard made notes, Gatlin went back to the sidewalk grate. “Ray, you through with this?” he asked, pointing at the purse.

  “Wait, lemme get one more, close-up.”

  Gatlin looked away from the camera flash, then pulled a pair of white gloves from the pocket of his raincoat and slipped them on. He picked up the purse and carried it to the cruiser, motioning for Cavenaugh’s partner to follow. In the light from the uniform’s flashlight, he turned the bag upside down on the hood. An assortment of objects clattered onto the car and stayed put, but a lipstick bounced once and hit the hood rolling. Evading Gatlin’s gloved palm, which banged down a fraction of a second behind it, the lipstick rolled to the front of the car and tumbled down the grill, the delicate sound making the circumstances seem even more grievous.

  As the uniform bent to pick up the lipstick, Gatlin grabbed his arm. By way of explanation, he wiggled his gloved fingers in front of the cop’s eyes, then retrieved it himself. In addition to the runaway lipstick, the bag contained a compact, a pink comb, an accordion file of credit cards, a tin of Tic Tac, two Trojans with reservoir tip, and a change purse with a fat roll of bills inside.

  “Wasn’t robbery,” Gatlin said, stating aloud what he’d already known when he first saw the unopened purse lying on the grate.

  “How much longer ’fore we can get movin’?”

  Gatlin looked across the hood of the cruiser into the questioning face of the ambulance driver.

  “You’ll get outta here when we’re through,” Gatlin explained with exaggerated patience.

  The driver raised both palms in a warding-off gesture and backed away. “Maybe next time you could, like, call us a little later.”

  Gatlin took a deep breath.

  “Just a thought,” the driver said, retreating a little more quickly.

  Gatlin picked up the accordion file and let it unravel. In it was a Minnesota driver’s license. “Paula Lyons,” he said reverently. “Better she stayed in Minnesota.” Tucked in one of the plastic sleeves was a check stub from a titty bar a few blocks away. He gathered everything up, put it back in the purse, and set the purse on the hood. “Bag that, will you?” he said to the uniform. “Then put it on the seat of my car. Bags are in the glove compartment. And use these.” He stripped off the gloves and handed them over.

  Then he walked back to Broussard. “How long you figure she’s been dead?”

  “Corneas are clear, no rigor yet, blood on the sidewalk thickening but not crusted… couple hours, tops.”

  “All the action take place here?”

  “No doubt about that. Livor is consistent with the position of the body and that blood up there is right.”

  They both looked at the blood speckling the white A and N on the word ANTIQUES painted across the storefront’s plate-glass window. “Too high for spatter,” Broussard said. “More likely cast off. Which means it wasn’t a knife.”

  “You don’t think a knife could have done that on the upswing?”

  “Doubt it.”

  Broussard took a small evidence envelope and a scalpel out of his bag and scraped some of the dried blood from the window into it. “Gonna have it typed to be sure?” Gatlin asked.

  “You wouldn’t be after my job, would you?”

  “Nah. Couldn’t afford the cut in pay.”

  “She have an ID?”

  “Driver’s license said she was Paula Lyons. Also found a check stub from Tasha’s, probably a dancer from the look of her.”

  “Any money?”

  “Couple hundred.”

  “Guess you can forget robbery.”

  Gatlin nodded. “Somebody with a grudge, jilted lover, maybe.”

  Though neither said anything about it, both men felt a deep sense of foreboding about the brutality of the attack and what that could mean.

  Gatlin looked back down the sidewalk toward the umbrella. “Whoever it was, she saw him coming and knew it was trouble. Dropped everything and tried to get away.” He turned back to Broussard. “Did he do her?”

  “When’d you ever know me to be able to answer a question like that on the scene?”

  Gatlin shrugged. “Thought you might’ve learned a new trick or two since I last saw you.”

  “Do I sense that our time has come?” the ambulance driver said sarcastically from over Gatlin’s shoulder.

  Gatlin deferred to Broussard. “Andy?”

  “In a minute.”

  Broussard got two large brown evidence bags and a couple of rubber bands from his forensic kit. Carefully, he slipped a bag on each of the victim’s hands and secured them with the rubber bands.

  “Now you can have her.”

  The two men in white tried not to walk in the blood while they lifted the dead girl and deposited her in a body bag on a folding gurney.

  Overhead, the sky rumbled.

  “How long before you can tell me the weapon?” Gatlin asked.

  If it had been a garden-variety murder, like those that occurred at the rate of about two a day with relentless regularity, Broussard would have caught a few more hours sleep and picked up the case around nine o’clock. But with this one, that was impossible. “Call me in an hour.”

  On his way back to his car, the sky rumbled again and Broussard’s stomach answered. He took a lemon ball from his pants pocket, separated it from some lint, and slipped it into his cheek. From all indications, it was going to be one lousy day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Aproned and gloved, Broussard stared into the murdered girl’s face, now brightly lit by the bank of fluorescent lights over the stainless-steel autopsy table. How young she looked, how terribly young. Ordinarily, there would have been a morgue assistant in the room to help turn the body, but it was too early for them to be in.

  He removed the bags he had put on the girl’s hands at the scene
. Then he took an applicator stick from a box on the shelves over the sink to his left and inserted it in the electric pencil sharpener beside the box. Carefully, he ran the sharp end of the stick along the underside of the girl’s fingernails, collecting the scrapings from each finger into a separate piece of white paper, which he folded into a triangle and sealed with a paper clip. He wrote the case number and finger designation on the outside of each packet and put them on the creaky old desk across the room.

  Picking up his Polaroid and several packs of film, he went back to the body and rapidly clicked off a dozen pictures, including four of the terrible wound on her neck, as well as two of each arm lying palm up, as she had been found, and two with them folded over her chest to show the surfaces not visible from the other view. As the camera delivered each picture, he flicked it with practiced ease onto the work area next to the sink, where the loathsome latent images grew bright and clear. Satisfied with the frontal pictorial record, he gently turned her over and took six shots of her back, then returned the camera to his desk.

  Next, he filled a small test tube with distilled water from a carboy on a shelf to the right of the autopsy table and put the tube in a rubber rack. The remaining slots in the rack he filled with plastic screw-top tubes that each contained a long-handled cotton swab.

  When Broussard had received his forensic training thirty years earlier, he had noticed that his teachers often set test-tube racks, saws, and other paraphernalia on the bodies they were autopsying, as though in death, the victim had no more rights than a doorstop. It was a practice he carefully avoided even though it frequently added extra steps or a measurable inefficiency to his movements. Since the girl on the table was slightly built and there was room beside her for the rack he held, today this cost him nothing.

  After adding a stainless-steel bowl of warm tap water and a small sponge to the other objects he had assembled, he moistened one of the swabs in distilled water and applied it in a circular motion to an area of dried blood on the girl’s left shoulder. When the swab contained as much blood as it would hold, he slipped it back into its tube and screwed on the cap. He repeated this on three different areas of the body, writing with an indelible marker the case number and a sample number on each tube. Corresponding numbers along with a brief description of the sample went onto a form attached to a clipboard hanging on the wall. Now she could be cleaned up.

  Even though there was no one else to see her, he drew the curtain across the autopsy alcove before cutting off her clothing. Then he took several more photographs, documenting each step of his analysis.

  He dipped the sponge in the bowl of warm water, then stood for a moment as though uncertain about where to begin. It was the throat wound that had brought him directly to the morgue, because he thought he knew what had caused it. And if he was right, it was bad, very bad—so bad he was willing now to delay examining that wound until he had cleaned all the others.

  He began at her collarbone and worked his way down. As the blood came away, a series of ugly puncture marks with everted margins appeared. The wounds seemed to occur in sets of four, with an equidistant spacing between members of a set. As he worked, he noticed a second pattern, in which the distance between the two members on the right was distinctly less than between the others. The discovery of some arc-shaped abrasions under her rib cage confirmed his suspicions about the relationship between the two types of patterns. And what he had learned gave him no comfort.

  As he had suspected even before beginning the cleaning, the only wounds on her arms were defensive wounds on the outside surfaces, exposed when she threw up her hands for protection. The bloody smears on the inside surfaces were due to contact with her torso wounds. The blood on her legs was all from wounds higher up.

  Now her throat.

  He moved along the table, bent down, and tilted his nose slightly to the horizontal to bring the bifocal part of his glasses into position. The margin of the divot in her neck was surrounded by a thin film of blood that had dried in a smear. The wound itself went entirely through the sternocleidomastoid, the heavy muscle that runs from the collarbone to a ridge behind the ear. For such a wound, there was a minimal amount of blood in the resulting cavity. With a swab, he cleaned a small area in the bottom of the wound and verified his belief that the internal jugular vein was intact.

  Switching to the sponge, he began to carefully clean the margin of the wound a little at a time, working his way slowly around the circumference. In a very few seconds, he found what he’d feared. The sight stirred the old warning anew, louder this time….

  Never go…

  If he had heard it, he might have been able to push the thought to completion. Ignored, it withered and died.

  Hoping that it was not a futile effort, he returned to the long-handled swabs and took several samples from the depths of the wound and from uncleaned areas of the wound margin.

  With all the wounds cleansed, he went to the desk and got his ABFO #2 ruler. Placing the ruler so that it would be included in each picture, thereby providing a record of the dimensions of the object photographed, he took several close-up shots of the various wounds he’d found. As a last step before beginning work with a scalpel, he took swab samples of the contents of her mouth, vagina, and anus, even though he was sure that the serology lab would find no evidence of sperm or acid phosphatase, the cardinal signs of sexual assault.

  The stillness of the morgue was shattered by the ring of the telephone.

  “What can you tell me?” Gatlin said without identifying himself.

  “We should talk,” Broussard replied.

  “What’re we doing now?”

  “I’ve got some things to show you.”

  “Not in the morgue, I hope.”

  “From pictures, if you’d rather.”

  “I’d rather. Your office in ten minutes?”

  “Right.”

  “And make sure the door to Forensics is open this time, will you? I don’t want to have to find a janitor to let me in like last time.”

  When Gatlin arrived, he found Broussard rocked back in his desk chair, fingers folded over his belly. He was watching the best coffee Gatlin had ever tasted issue in a hot stream from an old Mr. Coffee Broussard had bought because Joe DiMaggio said he should.

  Gatlin took off his thin raincoat and hung it on a hall tree that already contained three large white lab smocks. He was dressed in a lightweight blue suit, white shirt, and a wide blue tie with a Masonic emblem on it. The knot in his tie was too small to hide the button extender at his throat. Over at the coffee maker, the stream had become a dribble.

  Preferring a soft seat to a hard one, he avoided the wooden chairs in front of the desk and plopped onto Broussard’s pea green vinyl sofa, where the stack of medical journals on the cushion beside him toppled into his lap. By the time he got them straightened up, Broussard was standing over him with some coffee.

  “You read all this stuff or do you just keep it around to harass me?” he said, reaching for the cup.

  “Thought for a minute you weren’t gonna fall for it,” Broussard said, returning to the coffee maker. He filled his own cup—a huge container decorated with a raised ring of dancing crawfish—and went back behind his desk. He sat down and tapped his finger on the glass bowl of lemon balls next to the telephone. Gatlin waved him off.

  “Well, what have you learned since I last saw you?” Broussard asked, reaching into the glass bowl.

  Gatlin watched Broussard put a lemon ball in his mouth, raise his cup to his lips, and take a healthy sip. “Someday you’re gonna get one of those damn things stuck in your throat doing that,” Gatlin said. “What have I learned? I learned that nine out of ten people who answer the door at three in the morning have bad breath. And nobody is interested in conversation.”

  “No one saw anything?”

  “Do they ever? What about you?”

  “I know the murder weapon.”

  Broussard liked the way Gatlin jumped up so quickly, he
spilled some of his coffee.

  “So give,” Gatlin said.

  Broussard spread some pictures across the front of his desk and gave Gatlin a few seconds to look at them. Then he leaned forward and pointed at the first photograph with a blunt dissecting probe he’d taken from a glass beaker full of pens and pencils. “The initial blows produced these wounds—sets of four with the members of a set equally spaced. Then as the weapon became slippery with blood, it twisted in his hand.” He moved the probe to the second picture. “And she was struck several times with the side of it, causing these curve-shaped bruises.” He moved the probe again. “When he finally got the weapon turned right again, it produced these wounds, still in sets of four, but with decreased spacing between the two on the right.”

  Gatlin looked up, the muscles behind his jaw pulsing. “That sounds like a—”

  “Gardening claw,” Broussard said, not wanting Gatlin to say it first, “a cheap one.”

  “Because the tines collapsed when he hit her with the side of it,” Gatlin said.

  Though he probably didn’t even realize it himself, Broussard had mixed emotions about working with his old friend. Mostly he liked Gatlin’s quick mind, but a part of him enjoyed explaining things to a more dependent audience. Gatlin’s gaze had returned to the pictures. “The collapse of the tines could be useful,” Broussard said, scratching his short gray beard.

  Gatlin looked up. “Yeah, if we ever get our hands on it, that could help prove it was the actual weapon used.” Gatlin saw something else in Broussard’s eyes. “That is what you meant?”

  “Sort of.” Broussard hesitated, reluctant to say aloud what he had been thinking.

  Then Gatlin got it. “Ohhh shit. I hope you’re wrong about that. I really hope you’re wrong. I do not need another one like this in my life. What makes you think it might happen again?”

  Broussard added a picture to those already on the desk. “This is a close-up of the wound on her throat after I cleaned it.”

  Gatlin picked up the picture and studied it. “What are those… teeth marks?”