Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

Whittaker was in the middle of the sexual assault evaluation. He’d examined the body surface for hairs, fibers, and secretions or other trace evidence, and had swabbed and made smears on glass slides of the girl’s mouth and genitals; they’d test the swabs for chemicals found in ejaculate, and the slides for the presence of sperm cells. Forehead beading with sweat, Whittaker was now inspecting her pelvis.

  Jenner moved deliberately into Whittaker’s field of view.

  “Dr. Whittaker, I understand the Delore family has informed the office that I’ll be attending the autopsy on their behalf.”

  Whittaker nodded, continuing his exam.

  “Steve, I’d like to examine her face, if I may.”

  Whittaker straightened.

  “Dr. Jenner, let me make one thing perfectly clear. You are here because we’ve agreed to extend this courtesy to the victim’s family. You are not here to do the autopsy. You are not here to supervise my performance of the autopsy. You are here to observe my performance of a thorough medicole-40

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  gal examination. When I’ve finished—and only when I’ve finished—you’ll get an opportunity to examine her yourself.

  In the meantime, if you in any way approach, touch, or interfere with the body, I’ll have you removed from the building and banned from this facility for the rest of my tenure here.

  I have nothing further to say to you: this girl’s unfortunate death requires my complete attention.”

  Jenner stepped back, stung. The onlookers, variously titil-lated or embarrassed, avoided meeting Jenner’s eye. Antwon Terry, oblivious because he’d been on hold, sauntered over to bump elbows with Jenner, a traditional greeting in the morgue, where bloody gloves and gowns made handshakes difficult.

  Noticing Tommy Bailey standing next to Jenner, Whittaker snapped, “Bailey, come over here, put away the swabs and slides, and seal the kit for me, right now, please. And don’t disappear—I don’t want to have to scour the halls looking for a tech.”

  Jenner sighed. His return to forensic pathology was off to a beautiful start.

  Andie Delore’s legs were deeply tanned. She’d worn a scoop-neck single-piece bathing suit in Cancun; now, as her body lay on the table, propped by a metal block under her shoulder blades, her wounds seemed to float above the radiant white skin of her torso. Curving lash marks, dried to a dark liver red, crisscrossed her belly, chest, and thighs, but under the bright lights over the autopsy table, Jenner could see there were no penetrating injuries. Her face was discolored, blotchy and purple from her position, but had no wounds.

  Her neck, lolling backward from the drape of her trunk over the block, was also free of bruises and scrapes.

  Whittaker announced that he was going to open the body, and the onlookers put on their masks. He was fast, slick even. He quickly examined the body cavities and removed Precious Blood

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  the organs, passing them to Tommy Bailey to weigh. There were no surprises. There was some bruising in the scalp, but not enough to explain death, particularly since examination inside the head revealed no brain injury.

  The neck dissection revealed no bruising in the muscles, no crushing of the windpipe or Adam’s apple. There were some small hemorrhages in the tongue, which the girl could have caused herself, biting involuntarily as she was gagged.

  “And that, Detective, is that,” said Whittaker, stepping back from the table and turning to face Roggetti. He pulled off one bloodied rubber glove, stretched it back, then shot it forward into the trash. Then he tore off the other glove and tossed it, mask and face shield quickly following.

  Roggetti said, “So why did she die, Doc?”

  “Probably positional asphyxiation. I’m going to pend the cause of death until I know if she had drugs in her system, but I’ll certify her death today as a homicide. Call me if anything else turns up that I need to know about.”

  He turned and walked out of the autopsy room without another word to anyone.

  Roggetti turned to Jenner.

  “Doc?”

  “Detective?”

  “I’m pretty sure I got that, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. Would you mind going over it again with me? And maybe could we step outside while the orderly sews her up?”

  Jenner turned to Tommy and asked him to leave her up on the table after he’d closed her torso. He and Roggetti walked into the corridor.

  “So she was, like, strangled, right?”

  “Well, not exactly. The tiny red dots all over her face and eyes are petechiae, little popped blood vessels. In strangulation, the hands trap the blood in the neck and head, and the blood vessels burst because too much blood gets trapped in the face. But that can also happen if you’re upside down and the face becomes really congested.”

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  Jenner explained that most strangling victims have at least some external markings on their necks, even if they’re subtle, and hers was clean. How long could she have continued to breathe, nailed upside down to the wall? Even if she’d been suspended upright, she could have asphyxiated—crucifixion victims died from suffocation as their breathing muscles became exhausted and failed.

  “But I think what pushed her over the edge was that he duct-taped her mouth to keep her quiet—I saw some residue on her face at the scene. Once he shut her up, he immobi-lized her somehow and hung her on the wall, upside down and with her mouth sealed off. She would have gradually asphyxiated, even if her nostrils weren’t covered.”

  Roggetti, shaking his head, muttered, “Jesus . . .”

  Jenner nodded. “I’d like to think it was quick, but she was young and fit. I don’t know if she was still alive when he started to whip her. But at the scene I did notice some adhesive marks on her arms—I think he might have sedated her with patches of a transdermal painkiller like Fentanyl.”

  Roggetti’s cell phone rang. He raised his palm to Jenner as he looked at it, then said, “Doc, I gotta take this. I’ll see you later, okay?” He headed off toward the loading bay exit.

  Jenner was about to open the autopsy room door when a gravelly voice called out, “Well, look what the cat dragged in!”

  He turned to see an elegant blonde, fiftyish, in a white cotton shirt and stone gray khakis tucked into scuffed black army boots, a pair of chic black-framed glasses dangling from a cord around her neck.

  “Well, if it isn’t famous forensic anthropologist Annie Carr! Living proof that all the good women are either married or gay . . .”

  “And the best women are both.” She hugged him hard and kissed him softly. “Edward Jenner. How the hell are you, Precious Blood

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  handsome? I thought I’d never see you here again.” She ruffled his hair, beaming.

  He smiled back. “Makes two of us. I’m kind of okay. Happy to see you, not so happy to be here. You? How’s Sara?”

  “We’re good. We just got a golden retriever—a baby can’t be far off.” She looked over his shoulder into the autopsy room. “Are you here about that girl from the East Village? I heard about it—really nasty.”

  “Yes on the girl, yes on nasty. What are you doing at work on a Sunday?”

  “I’m teaching in Quantico this week, and I wanted to go over my specimens. I should scoot—say good-bye before you leave, okay? I’ll be in the Anthro room. Kiss kiss.” She loved flirting with Jenner. At first, he used to get an adorable stricken look: he wasn’t sure what he could say in return, and what was over the line. It had taken him a while to learn that if Annie liked you, there pretty much was no line.

  Alone in the autopsy room, Jenner set to work. Tommy had hurried off to smoke in the loading bay; the four-to-midnight shift would put her away. The only sounds were a dripping faucet at the other end of the room, and the hiss of the steam pipe.

  He looked at her face again. She’d been washed; the skin was pale now, glinting wet under the bright light, the petechiae now more visible, like a very fine rash. Jenner c
ould still make out traces of whitish gray adhesive around the mouth.

  He turned his attention to her chest—there was a possibility that he’d killed her by compressing her thorax, perhaps kneeling on her until she died—but Jenner found no chest wall bruising.

  He looked at the hands; he suspected that Whittaker’s examination of them had been cursory—it always had been. He peered at the fingernails, clipped by Whittaker during the sexual assault workup. Nothing to see.

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  He studied the wrists, the ragged purple-black bolt holes.

  He couldn’t tell if it was just a trick of the light, but there seemed to be a blue discoloration of the wrist distinct from the holes. He incised the forearm and inspected the tissue underneath. A film of blood spread in a poorly defined band around the wrist, separate from the bolt injury. A handcuff mark, perhaps?

  He incised the other wrist and found a similar subcutaneous film of blood; the wrist hemorrhages weren’t like the well-circumscribed patterned skin injuries caused by handcuffs. The bleeding was more marked over the backs of the wrists and, he saw as he extended the incision, continued down over the backs of the forearms: he had bound her wrists together, probably palm to palm.

  Moving her wrists, trying to determine the exact position of her hands in the ligature, he noticed a pale area at the base of the left thumb. He squinted—it was pretty faint. He took his right glove off, closed his eyes, and gently stroked the skin.

  He felt a slight depression in the surface.

  He walked to the doorway and turned out the lights, then took the plastic bag containing his Maglite and his Zeiss hand lens from his pocket. The waning daylight from the clerestory windows was just a mud gray glow, the room otherwise dark.

  He pulled over a metal stool and sat next to the girl’s body.

  He shone the flashlight over the right wrist, tilting the beam, tilting his head, turning her wrist. There it was: two, maybe three, shallow depressions at the base of the right thumb, in the fleshy part of the back of the hand.

  He went to the other side of the table and examined the other wrist under the light. Again, depressions in the base of the thumb.

  He was looking at bite marks. The killer had bitten her, tied her wrists together and bitten her across the bases of her thumbs.

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  He wanted a second opinion; he needed confirmation. He knew it was petty, but it was important to him that he find something that Whittaker had missed. And that people in the office found out about it.

  He strode down the hallway to the Anthro room. Annie was perched on a stool at the steel table, a little frown of concentration on her face as she touched the pincer tips of a head-span calipers to a crumbling brown skull. She peered up at Jenner over half-moon glasses when he came in.

  “Annie, sorry to bother you, but can I borrow your eyes? I think I’ve found something.”

  “Ooh. Field trip!” She smiled. “Sure, Jenner.”

  In the autopsy room, he showed her the marks. After a few seconds with the hand lens and flashlight, she gave a low whistle.

  “Yeah, dental imprints. Score one for Jenner!” She walked around the table and inspected the left wrist. “On the right, I think you’ve got a deeper depression from a cuspid, and next to it an overlapped incisor. Left is a bit too faint for me to call.”

  She smiled at him proudly and tousled his hair again, as if he were an eight-year-old, her eight-year-old. “Whittaker missed them?”

  Jenner nodded. “Look, do you think you could tell him you found them? That you happened to be walking by, had a quick peek at the body, and noticed them? I really don’t want to deal with him.” He knew the word would get out that he had found them.

  “Edward Jenner, modest to a fault. Sure, I’ll take the credit.

  Want me to call an odontologist? Don’t you swab these for saliva and epithelial DNA?”

  “Well, that’s a problem. Whittaker hosed the body down after he’d finished his external exam, and he rinsed her a few times during the autopsy. Anything that was there is gone now.”

  “Damn.”

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  Annie looked down at the girl’s body.

  “Tell you what, Jenner. I have some UV film in the refrigerator. We can photograph the injuries when you’re done.

  The crushed tissue should show up pretty well on UV—we should be able to get a decent sense of the teeth patterning and the shape of his dental arches. Whittaker could have the odontologist excise the skin.”

  “I doubt the impressions will be good enough to stand up in court. And Whittaker’s not going to want to carve up the daughter of a prominent lawyer.”

  “You’re the boss. Or should have been.” She winked and left to find the photographer.

  Jenner felt a little high from his find. The UV bite mark photos might reveal a full imprint of the dental arches, good enough to ID a suspect. He returned to the body.

  At the foot of the autopsy table, he crossed the girl’s legs to make her body easier to turn over, then stood on the side of the table and reached across to grasp her right arm. He pulled her toward him, gently supporting and protecting her face as she rolled onto her front.

  He examined the areas under the skin of the back and neck, again looking for signs of compression. He was about to cut into the base of the neck when he stopped: there was a curious group of brown marks just below the hairline. At first he thought it was from something she’d been lying on, but the markings were too sharply defined, little dull red-brown curlicues about one-eighth of an inch long.

  A necklace imprint, dark from drying? There had been no jewelry, but perhaps it had been torn off, like the earrings. But a necklace torn from her neck would create linear scratches, not a row of neat little marks.

  He wiped them with a damp paper towel, to make sure that it wasn’t dried blood. It looked like some kind of burn; it had been carefully inflicted.

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  his flashlight and hand lens. Tearing the bag open, he laid it gently on the marks, smoothing down the surface and pressing the margins with spread fingers to keep the plastic taut.

  Carefully, with a fine-point Magic Marker, he traced the row of figures onto the plastic. He lifted the plastic sheet from the neck, waved it gently to dry it, and then folded it and tucked it into his pocket.

  He had just finished his exploration of the subcutaneous tissues of the back and his posterior neck dissection when Annie Carr returned. Antwon was on his way. Taking off his gown, Jenner showed her the curious pattern just below the hairline.

  “Ha! Whittaker’s going to just love this.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Annie. Call me and let me know what you find, eh?”

  “Sure thing. Look after yourself. It’s good to have you back, Jenner—think about sticking around, okay? It’s not the same without you.”

  They hugged good-bye, then Jenner headed to the loading bay. With a bit of luck, he’d be at the Waldorf by 5:00 p.m. He was already thinking about what he’d say to Tony Delore.

  The Delores had a suite on the Astoria Level, the Waldorf’s concierge floor. Mrs. Delore, a handsome, graying brunette in a white shirt and tweed jacket, met Jenner in the entryway and led him into the lounge. Mr. Delore was on the phone, laptop open, jotting down addresses and times as he spoke with a funeral home.

  She offered him coffee, which he declined, and a drink, which he also refused. Where her husband was crisp and authoritative on the phone, she seemed to fade into the background. She sat opposite Jenner, but didn’t make small talk; there seemed to be a tacit agreement that Mr. Delore would run the show.

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  After Jenner had waited for an appropriate length of time, Delore stood, terminated his conversation, closed his laptop, and joined them. A tall
man with gray hair and dark eyebrows, he was wearing a navy suit, a blue shirt with crisp white collar, and a dark tie. Rather than sit next to his wife on the couch, he drew over another chair, positioning himself so that the three of them sat in a triangle.

  “Sorry, Dr. Jenner. Just talking with your district attorney, making sure he’s keeping some pressure on the police.”

  He leaned over and shook Jenner’s hand perfunctorily. “We know each other a little bit from the National Governors Association meetings.”

  He opened a clipboard and laid it on the table, placed a pen neatly across it, then said, “Now. DA Klein tells me you went to the scene of . . .” He flushed, reached up to tug at his tie. “Yes, that you’ve been to the scene where . . .”

  He closed his eyes, then tilted his head down, his lip working as he began to cry.

  His wife stood and put a hand on his shoulder; he tried to wave her away, but she caught his hand and stayed. She pulled him to her and stroked his head as he wept.

  Jenner said, “Mr. Delore, I can’t imagine how hard this day has been for you. Perhaps it would be better if we spoke a little later.”

  Delore, sobbing, tried to shake his head, but his wife said,

  “I think that would be best, Doctor. We have your telephone number. When he’s had a chance to get some rest, my husband will call you.” She nodded to Jenner, grateful.

  Jenner stood as she helped her husband to his feet, then put an arm around him and led him from the room.

  Jenner let himself out.

  Ana was still in his bed when he got home. She got up quickly and made a feeble show of tidying the bedroom.

  He shooed her into the TV room and ordered pizza.

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  They ate at the kitchen table, both too tired to speak. After dinner, she took a long bath. She tried to make him take the bed, arguing that he was much taller than she was, and that she felt really guilty, him being uncomfortable on the couch. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted that she keep the bed.

  It wasn’t a wholly altruistic act, he realized: at some level, he liked her gratitude. Still, at six-foot-two, for him the couch was an uncomfortable prospect; it was just as well he was exhausted.