Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  The girl’s condition was fair. The vascular access incision under the right collarbone was tightly sutured, there were barely visible cotton plugs in the nostrils, and, lifting up her lip, Jenner found a gingival suture lashing the mouth closed.

  The hair and eye makeup had yet to be done, but Divell’s team had used a colored embalming fluid, foundation, and lipstick, and her face looked almost natural. The funeral director had done a good job, and Jenner said so.

  The autopsy incision, too, looked as if it had been nicely sealed, but the chest was covered by a waterproof Inco Pad taped down along the edges, tacked with sutures at the corners.

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  Divell said in his deep voice, “Doctor, I see you’re inspecting the materials and methods we chose to use for closure of the chest area. The injuries were somewhat unprecedented, and it became apparent that a complete cutaneous seal was impossible. We managed as best we could.”

  Jenner nodded, and Divell gestured to the head of the table.

  “You have observed that Ms. Smith’s head, previously severed from her body, has been fully reattached. The cranium has been stabilized on the neck through the use of a length of wooden dowel. Obviously, the neck incision will have to be concealed by careful clothing choice. But I feel that we have done the best job possible under the circumstances.”

  Jenner nodded appreciatively and murmured, “Indeed.”

  “Doctor, I’d like to ask you to preserve our workmanship as best you can, to whatever extent will not conflict with your professional responsibilities.”

  “I’ll certainly do my best, Mr. Divell.”

  “I believe you, sir. The gowns, protective gloves, and disposable scalpels are to your left.”

  With that, Divell left the room; he didn’t actually bow, but he gave the impression.

  Ana gave the corkscrew another twist, which wedged the cork solidly against the neck of the bottle. Shit. Jun, her guardian for the night, was watching a video in the TV room with Kimi; she should have asked him to do it.

  She pulled it out, but she’d shredded the cork. She screwed it in again as straight as she could, then tried wiggling it, but that just sent showers of shavings into the wine. Oh well.

  She’d just use the tea strainer when she poured.

  She took the bottle, the strainer, and the glass, and went into Jenner’s bedroom. She turned on his stereo; the CD was something soft and repetitive, and it sounded good in the quiet of his bedroom. She sieved herself a glass of wine, then 98

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  went to the window. She sipped, looking out over the brick tenements north of Little Italy. Beyond NoLIta, the East River. And beyond that, Brooklyn. And beyond that, the rest of the world that wasn’t New York City.

  She lay down on Jenner’s bed. She felt small on it, small and alone.

  She wished he were there. She should talk to him. He was obviously pretty fucked up; maybe if she could get him to talk, he’d feel better. He’d feel better, and maybe be glad she was there.

  She drained the glass, set the strainer on it, and poured another; she was feeling warm now, a little tipsy. She’d just about finished Jenner’s whisky, so she’d switched to wine.

  And now she was getting drunk.

  On wine—how fucking grown up!

  She’d grown up in Orlando—Silver Lake, the nicest part, but still Orlando. Orlando was a party town, where everyone had a drug of choice, from the little kids tweaking on Coke and Skittles before their feet even hit the tarmac at Disney to lawyers doing rails of blow in expensive restaurant bathrooms. And she was one of them, too, a party girl. And proud of it.

  She swirled the wine in the glass, watched the liquid slosh around. When she first started drinking, vodka was her drink. She used to sneak out at night to meet her friend Carmen, who’d wait for her at the end of the gravel drive, hidden behind the big magnolias in her Jetta convertible.

  They’d go to warehouse parties and dance all night to DJ

  Icy and Sandra Collins. Sometimes, for a laugh, they’d go to crappy clubs where the DJs played trashy Euro-trance; they’d let the businessmen buy them drinks, and then they’d dance with each other in white foam five feet deep, out of their minds on Ecstasy, laughing at the men who gaped at them as their wet clothes turned transparent.

  And now . . . she was drunk on wine! She felt like she Precious Blood

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  should be wearing pearls and a twinset. She smirked. One more glass.

  She read the label out loud as best she could: “Puligny-Montrachet.” She sipped, and even tipsy knew it was good; she’d remember it, maybe impress someone. She turned the bottle to read the back label.

  “Whoa . . . forty dollars . . .”

  Fuck. She didn’t know it was that expensive; she hoped he wouldn’t be pissed at her. She gulped it down, then lay back.

  The cat jumped up and rubbed against her, purring as she pressed his little head to her side. He climbed on her chest and nuzzled her chin until she giggled and pushed him away; later she relented, letting him curl up against her arm and tip his head on her shoulder.

  She was starting to feel pretty wasted now. Drowsy.

  The cat was asleep.

  She would finish the bottle, then hide it so he didn’t see.

  Dowling had edged closer. Barely—he stood in the doorway, bracing for the worst. Within a few minutes, Jenner had almost forgotten the cop was there.

  The original prosector’s external description was ade-quate—hair and eye color, ears pierced four times on the right, twice on the left, small butterfly tattoo over the left pelvic brim.

  Jenner was eager to see the wounds.

  He started with the face, sponging off the foundation makeup, glad that Divell wasn’t there to watch his work being undone. The face and upper neck were generally free of injury, but the lipstick wiped away to reveal discoloration of the lower lip. Jenner rolled the lip downward; on the inner surface, a split in the lip had been sealed with embalmer’s wax, the tissue nearby discolored gray. He remembered Andie Delore’s bruised mouth.

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  There was no way to be sure how she got the wound, whether she’d fallen forward onto the floor or if the killer had punched her in the face. A straightforward fall would probably have caused bruising of the outer lip, nose, or cheek as well; it was likely a blow.

  He imagined the girl at home, reading or watching TV

  when the doorbell rang. The unexpected caller would have surprised her, and yet she opened the door for him—did he use the cop line, or did he just quickly overpower her, punch her in the mouth, force his way in? The setting was remote, unlike with Andie Delore.

  Jenner tore open a disposable scalpel package and cut the anchor sutures at the corners of the Inco Pad. He peeled up the horizontal band of surgical tape at the bottom and then lifted the pad upward, stripping it from the chest to expose the wound.

  The chest and abdomen were soaking in cavity fluid, the formaldehyde solution used to preserve the inner organs.

  When Jenner uncovered the wound, the formaldehyde fumes rose in a vicious blast; the two stood back for a while, nostrils burning, eyes watering, until Dowling found the extractor fan switch.

  When the room had cleared, they went back to the body.

  It was an extraordinary injury. Two oblique, gaping wounds of the central chest, crossing to create an X shape.

  Each limb of the X might have been a separate wound, as the intersection point was extremely ragged; without knowing the inflicting weapon, it would be hard to tell.

  He turned to Dowling. “Hey, do me a favor. There’s a magnifying glass in my coat pocket—can you pass it to me?”

  Jenner examined the wound more closely; under the hand lens, the edges of the wound looked striped. Jenner leaned back a little to get a wider view, and the striping pattern became more apparent. In the lower right limb of the X, he could make out a row
of subtle, parallel, wedge-shaped abrasions along the wound margin.

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  “Bobby, I think we’ve got something here.”

  The detective stood behind him, peering over his shoulder.

  Jenner turned his head. “You’ll have to come here if you really want to see it.”

  “Why don’t you just describe it to me, Doc?”

  Jenner snorted, then said, “God, Bobby—there are gnats in Africa with bigger balls than you.” He pointed to the wound.

  “These are patterned injuries here. They look pretty horrible, but they’re shallow—they don’t enter the chest cavity.

  There’s no vital reaction here, either, so they were inflicted after death.”

  Dowling nodded. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

  “I think they were made by some kind of instrument with moving teeth; inside the X, the teeth are moving, and they create this wide scrape along the side as they cut. Here’s the important part, down here in the lower part. This row of parallel scrapes, about half an inch apart.”

  From behind him, Dowling muttered, “Great. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to photograph it, too. Shoot it up close to show the individual elements, but also far enough away to show the pattern. We need to see both the wood and the trees, okay?”

  Armed with a purpose, Dowling became more comfortable. He popped open the clasps on the camera case, assembled the camera, and set about documenting the injuries.

  “I’m seeing what you mean, Doc. Good eye. Any idea what he used?”

  The flash went off again.

  “Something between a large electric knife and a small chainsaw. Nothing too powerful, though, or the skin would be more chewed up. An electrical instrument would also explain that misty blood-spatter pattern. I think that he shut off the weapon before he pulled it out of the wound, which created the imprints of the teeth. Even if she were already 102

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  dead, the speed of the tooth motion would likely spray the blood all over.”

  “How about a hedge trimmer? Would that do it?”

  Jenner handed Dowling a short, L-shaped ruler, developed by the American Board of Forensic Odontologists to document bite-mark and other dental evidence. With the ABFO

  ruler in the shot, it would be easier to get a sense of the actual size and shape of the injury from the photo.

  “You know, that actually makes more sense than an electric knife. The knives are designed to cut, to leave smooth edges, whereas a hedge trimmer is a much coarser tool.”

  “I keep telling ya, Doc—Mrs. Dowling didn’t raise no cretin.”

  After Dowling had finished, Jenner turned his attention to the trunk. The organs were inside the torso in a bag; he removed them, and examined them on a side table. Jenner focused on the neck and the genital organs, areas where in-experienced pathologists tend to miss subtle trauma; there were no injuries in either region. She wasn’t pregnant, and she had never given birth.

  He turned her over gently. Her hair was long and dark, and Jenner gathered it in his fist and swept it upward. In the back, the suturing wasn’t as neat as at the front—it didn’t need to be. He cut the coarse embalmer’s twine and carefully opened the suture line.

  When the embalmer had attached the neck to the trunk, the skin had been partly tucked into the wound. As Jenner removed the sutures and eased the head forward, the wound seemed to blossom. The wound edges were clean, with little scraping; it was a high incision, running into the hairline of the nape of her neck. Jenner wasn’t surprised that the original prosector had failed to shave the base of the scalp to examine it properly—forensic pathologists called it “the distraction of the dramatic”: the guy had been so focused on the brutality of the injury that he’d missed the findings associated with it.

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  As the skin released from the wound, a neat row of dark figures unfurled along the upper margin of transection.

  He turned to Dowling and said, “Bingo.”

  He bent over the back of the neck with the hand lens. Now close behind him, Dowling blocked his light. “Move, please, Bobby.”

  Dowling came round to his side.

  Under the lens, the figures turned into a little parade of black ciphers. The killer had taken his time, neatly engraving them one by one onto the skin. There was no vital reaction, no bleeding—this had been postmortem, done after death.

  They’d have to be—she couldn’t have stayed still for this.

  The markings had a leathery, dry surface, the skin burned to char. There were variations in the form of each repeated character, so he had done it freehand, rather than with a series of individual brands. The elements of each cipher—

  verticals, horizontals, obliques, and curves—were evenly burned, making the instrument unlikely to have been a tool repeatedly reheated prior to application of each element; the only instrument Jenner could think of that would produce burns of that detail and consistency was a soldering iron, a very fine one, the sort used in computer and electronics repair.

  He leaned back and held the lens out for the detective to look.

  Dowling asked, “What is it? Russian?”

  “I don’t think it’s Russian. Greek, maybe?”

  Jenner pulled a sheet of plastic wrap from his case. When Dowling had finished photographing, he placed the plastic over the wound, and did his best to trace the ciphers with a felt-tip pen. It was difficult, since the head was now mobile, and the lower parts of the markings were caught in the wound, and obscured by drying in the skin, but he did his best.

  He held the sheet up to Dowling, who gave a low whistle.

  “Nice, Doc.”

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  It was 1:00 a.m. They were almost finished. Jenner positioned her on her side so that the embalmer could reseal the wound.

  “Okay, Bobby. I need you to stand by the lights for a second. When I say now, switch them all off.”

  Jenner took out his Maglite and turned it on, setting it so that the light was soft.

  “Okay, hit the lights.”

  He lifted her left wrist and slowly turned the hands under the dim yellow light, inspecting them on both sides, first the palm, then the backs of the hands, then the fingers, one by one.

  “There they are.”

  When he turned the lights back on, Dowling saw Jenner was smiling.

  Jenner showed Dowling the dental imprints over the bases of the thumbs. He’d worried that the embalming process might have reinflated the tissues and destroyed the depressions, but there they were. The killer’s teeth were there, on the thumbs. Far too late for salivary epithelial DNA, but his teeth were there. Even Dowling could make out that overlapping incisor.

  I’ve got you, you bastard. You are mine.

  Jenner sat alone at the desk, writing his notes. It was going on 2:00 a.m., and Dowling, after finishing the photographs and promising to have an odontologist document the bite marks, had headed home to the new Mrs. Dowling. Divell had taken care of the resuturing himself, and had done it surprisingly quickly; for a small man, he hefted the body about with ease.

  Jenner was still writing when Divell left, admonishing him to “please be certain that you have extinguished all of the lighting prior to your departure.”

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  Jenner wrote his last line of notes and then stretched, looking around. He liked the quiet. He tried to imagine what it would be like to spend an entire life working in a place like this; he couldn’t.

  On the wall opposite him was a promotional calendar from an embalming chemical supplier. In it, a gaunt Saint Dismas, the patron saint of funeral directors, knelt in prayer in front of the cross on which he would be hung, his eyes raised to heaven, his bony hands clasped fervently. Next to Dismas was a portrait of another patron saint of the funeral industry, Joseph of A
rimathea, hands again pressed together, eyes locked on silver rays coming from a cloudy sky. No doubt accidentally, the two images had been hung so that both saints’ lines of sight focused on an electric bug zapper high on the wall.

  Jenner tilted the chair back and looked at them, amused.

  And then stopped being amused.

  The hands. The position of their hands. Praying fingers, the bases of the thumbs pressed together; Jenner could almost see the lips curling back, exposing the crooked teeth as they bit down onto the bound hands.

  Bingo.

  thursday,

  december 5

  Exhilarated, he drove well over the speed limit most of the way back to the city. The traffic was surprisingly steady for the hour, an endless stream of tractor-trailers in both directions, all going too fast in the moonlight.

  Jenner was sure he was right. The killer had forced both girls into a praying posture, bound their wrists together, then bit them.

  Who prayed like that? Christians, obviously. Muslims pray with open hands, he thought. Jews? Jenner didn’t know how Jews prayed.

  But perhaps it wasn’t a religious posture at all—maybe he wanted them to beg, to assume a universal position of supplication or submission. But that didn’t seem right. A person could beg in any position, and this seemed too stylized to be anything other than a religious gesture.

  Smith’s family was religious. How do Mormons pray?

  Could this have been something related to Smith’s family, enmity toward Smith’s family?

  But then how would Andie Delore fit in? Tony Delore had said he’d never heard of Sunday Smith. The Delores were Catholic, but Delore didn’t strike Jenner as a religious man, and Jenner had seen none of the trappings of faith in Andie’s apartment. The Russian triptych, but that seemed purely decorative.

  He pulled back, trying to reestablish perspective. The million-dollar question was: How did he choose them? He went back to basic criminology, remembering the basic cri-teria for victimology drummed daily into the heads of police cadets around the world: Availability, Vulnerability, and Desirability.