Light laughter followed.
“Is it all right?” Ira Sands was saying to Jessica. She only half heard him. “Do you understand?” he continued in her ear.
Jessica could not recall the last time the sight of a wound had so disturbed her to the core. Jaded, having seen so much, it crept up on little cat feet, this dizzying combination of clamminess, perspiration, and nausea. Surprised she could still get this affected, her thoughts returned to her first FBI case: the body of a young woman called Candy found hanging by her ankles, the fly infested leavings of Mad Matthew Matisak after he'd jammed his now-infamous handheld Spigot into her jugular, in order to control the flow of her blood as he robbed her of every ounce.
It had been Jessica, the novice FBI M.E. who had discovered the small, telltale hole made by the spigot within the massive throat slashing, which had been done to mask the mark of the spigot. But while she eventually put him away, it had been at a dear price, losing her first real love to Matisak's madness.
He had maimed her physically, too. She'd had to use a cane for almost two years following his attack on her. To this day, the psychological scars he'd inflicted remained.
She felt some strange and eerie connection here but could not make it out. Just a feeling, a foolish one, as foolish as Darwin's notion that the killer was like the Claw. This maniac was no Matisak, either. Still, she felt the same iciness and fear of this demon as she had with Matisak. She felt it in her throat, her chest, her heart and her stomach.
“Come now, Dr. Coran,” said Sands in a bid to help color return to her face. “I've read your book. You've seen bodies without hearts, others missing their brains even.”
“All… all the… same, not… notwithstanding, I fear, Dr. Sands, I'm feeling just a might… light-headed.” She finished with a little gasp.
“Go out and come back in. No one else need know. Go,” he encouraged her.
She stared into his kind eyes, studying them, as another voice inside her head advised she stand her ground-her father's voice. Her tough, uncompromising military father's old advice. He, too, had seen some awful deaths-horrid battlefield wounds-and in his days as a medical examiner for the military, he had learned discipline and mental toughness, but she could safely say that not even her father had ever seen anything like this. Nor had her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft who'd done thousands of autopsies. How was one to combat such a sight as this?
Sands placed a hand on hers and said, “Would you like us to step out together?”
She heeded his advice, getting to her feet. To hell with what the men at the crime scene thought, she told herself. She announced clearly, “Yes, Dr. Sands, I'm sorry, but I need to take a moment.”
He pointed toward the balcony off the bedroom. She stepped out into the November breeze, and she watched as the others, including Sands, filed out and into the light. They had merely needed someone to say “uncle” and to lead the way.
THREE
Is God himself a detective in the dark void, trailing a killer the deity himself created, trying to uncover the unknowable unknown created from the whole cloth of his own inner tensions?
Milwaukee awoke with-the sound of blaring horns and rush-hour traffic jamming the nearby interstate. X. Darwin Reynolds hovered nearby, taking a protective stance over Jessica, acting as a shield. Along West Allis Boulevard Jessica could see the signs of commerce dotting the horizon, Exxon, Econo Lodge, H amp;R Block, Burger King, Popeye’s, KFC, McDonald's, BP, Cooney's Funeral Home, Bridge-stone Tires, Schwinn Bike Outlet, Costco, Jewel-Osco and Joe's Crab Shack.
Jessica said to Darwin, “Imagine a Milwaukee resident of a hundred or even fifty years ago, standing here, staring at the once tree-lined avenue and asking, 'What have they done to my home, Momma, what have they done to my home?'“
Before entering the death scene a second time, Jessica filled her nostrils with Caine's Ail-Purpose Odor Firewall. The scent was an improvement on the old Vicks VapoRub.
The brutal sight was no less brutal, but the odors of a week-old corpse were somewhat tamed by Caine's Firewall, first developed for firemen and crematorium workers and anyone else working with burn victims, such as police officials, paramedics, pathologists and medical examiners.
The scene must be tolerated in order for her to perform her duties. She'd come way too far to be here just to crap out now. No walking away from this, not even in her mind. But she must somehow remain aloof, above the horror in order to deal with it in a controlled, professional manner, and to stand her ground with Darwin Reynolds and the other men and women present, especially the young ex-marine, Petersaul.
She composed herself with great gulps of the last vestiges of the early morning Milwaukee air. She said to Darwin, “Air here is supposed to be filled with the fumes of… what… ninety-nine local breweries? My best friend and right hand in the lab, John Thorpe, told me that if things get too hairy in Milwaukee, the natives just suck up the brew from the fumes. Does it work?”
“Takes the sport out of drinking. Most of us like to sidle up to a bar and down a tall one.”
“One big swilling swear-never-to-get-drunk-again fest, eh? I understand, every Friday and Saturday night.”
“We gotta be imaginative to compete with neighboring Chicago somehow.”
Traffic below seemed like the world was rushing by the open balcony with the death room inside; the jaded world, ignoring the collection of squad cars and coroner's vehicles that had converged on the apartment house in this residential neighborhood. People in Milwaukee appeared as world-weary of strobe lights and sirens as military men were to exploding bombs lobbing overhead. Still, the requisite crowd had gathered, curious, asking questions, pushing at the barriers. Newspapermen and camera crews in particular clamored to be on the inside, gathering news. She heard a familiar phrase from the beat cop holding everyone in check, a kind of mantra at such scenes: “Can't let out no names or take any pictures till the next of kin's been notified. You know that.”
Jessica thought again of the worst monster she had ever chased down and killed, Mad Matthew Matisak. No creature of the night she'd ever hunted compared in utter brutality, until now. This ripping out of a woman's spinal cord, this ranked a Tort 10 on the torture scale if the victim were alive when he splayed open her back, and from the coloration around the naked wound, it would surprise Jessica to learn otherwise.
Matisak's blood-drinking measures had exacted a slow kind of torture, the draining of his victim's very lifeblood, and so it had rated a Tort 9 on the torture scale. The scale of torture represented in the spine-thief case she looked at today did not compare with regard to the time it took to die. The Olsen woman did not suffer long. Still, in Jessica's book, this monster rated a ten for sheer animal brutality, and it made her wonder if it were not some sickening animal need that drove him, some genetically predisposed urge toward gnawing on bone, a throwback to the caveman mind dwelling in us all.
It felt in her own bones-scuttling like a spider along her own spine-as if the putrid disease of evil carried about by the criminally insane Matisak had unaccountably returned, maybe had never really left. Perhaps in a new guise, a new shape, a new form, but the same evil nonetheless. “Cut of the same satanic cloth, this one,” she muttered to herself.
“What's that?” asked Reynolds, his forehead creased in consternation.
“Confound bastard is like a fiery coal from hell's own hearth.” She took in another deep breath. “Should've brought some whiskey along.”
Jessica re entered the death room and stepped to the body again. “This one,” she said to the others in the room, “this one may lead me into early retirement. You say she lived alone, that she hardly socialized or went out?”