“Had it made at great expense.” She fingered the golden numbers: 101st Airborne. “First in, last out.”
“You see duty in Iraq?”
“Pakistan and Iraq. Fucked up place in a fucked up world, yeah.”
“Fucked up? Which one?”
“Both.”
“Oh, yes, of course. How're we doing there in the Mideast now? Think we'll win the post-war economic crisis?”
“The natives have gone ape-shit for American goods, means and ways. They love all things Western and are embracing apple pie, Elvis, McDonald's and Fox News Network.”
“Sounds like Japan.”
“Been there? Tokyo?”
“Yeah, that and Beijing, China-worlds apart. Beijing is 1930 America, while Tokyo is futuristic America-Minority Report time.” Jessica looked into the hefty agent's wide face, and the full-figured Pete smiled back. “Best I get to work, Agent,” Jessica added now.
Petersaul nodded and stepped aside. “Yeah, best, but”- she broke into an Elvis oldie- “didja-eva, eva get, eva get one, eva get one-a-those girls boys…”
Smacks of a virgin to such horror and trying to compensate, Jessica thought, likely her first year out of the academy with a lot of questions and horror ahead of her, unless she dropped out of this line of work. Jessica calmly replied, “I believe I've seen every kind of iced and diced corpse, male and female, in the book, thanks to my boss at Quantico, Agent Petersaul.”
“So I've been told by Darwin. Sexual mutilation murders, hearts ripped out, vaginas and breasts butchered, cranium's opened and brains scooped out.”
Others listened in with interest.
“However, I can safely say that I've never come across a victim with so horrid a gash of flesh removed from her body as this unfortunate woman.”
Unfortunate, she rolled the word over in her mind. The understatement of the century, for this crime rivaled even the Skull-digger's work. Where he robbed his victims of their gray matter, cannibalizing it, whoever had done this latest, most-warped atrocity had robbed his victim of her entire vertebral column.
“Whataya suppose he does with the spine?” asked the young lady agent.
Darwin craned to hear Jessica's reply.
“I couldn't begin to speculate at this moment. Some kind of voodoo soup calling for backbone… who knows?” Jessica moved closer to the corpse, taking in the scene around the body, her gaze following the hardened, dark brown and bristled flow of blood radiating outward from the deceased toward the door-a river true to current, origin the body. “I can tell you this much, the knife he used was no bowie or other hunting knife, but a precision instrument. Whoever he is, he's done this sort of work before. Perhaps not as extensively as this, but he's trained on precision cutting tools, possibly started as a kid on small animals, insects even, rodents, working his way up to cats, dogs, rabbits, anything he could save his lunch money up for.”
The tall, black and mustached Xavier Darwin Reynolds, the local special agent in charge, was the man who had personally lobbied to put the crime scene on hold until Dr. Jessica Coran could get there from FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. “Sick but slick sonofamotherlessslut whore… He used that mop.” He pointed to a bristling-with-blood mop resting in a corner. “Used it to cover his shoe prints, as he backed from the crime scene and out the hallway, but we got a partial bloody scuff on the outside hallway carpeting.”
“Yeah, I saw the cutaway patch,” she replied.
“It isn't much, but we're doing our damnedest to make something of it, maybe get it blown up, find some sort of shoe sole markers.”
“But no one saw this guy coming or going?” she asked, knowing the answer. “He had to have been covered in blood.”
“We suspect he brought a change of clothes,” countered Agent Reynolds.
His badge read X. Darwin Reynolds. Jessica thought the man in the wrong time, age, and profession. He ought to be a sixth-century king of Nubia as he towered over everyone in the place, his skin beautiful and onyx. Jessica had to crane her neck to make eye contact with the man. She imagined him at home on the streets where he grew up here in Milwaukee, at the neighborhood bar, likely a gold necklace bulging below his dark dress shirt and tie, and yet he somehow fit in here at the gruesome crime scene, too. Perhaps the blood of kings, that genetic seed, did reside in Darwin, the genes of African royalty transplanted to the small kingdom of an FBI field office in a midsize, Midwestern Mecca.
Reynolds had the bearing of a man aloof and in absolute control of his own emotions and circumstances, even giving off the illusion of controlling the environment immediately around him. She imagined him to be one of those men who somehow remained dry even in a thunderstorm. Yet the wisp of a shadow of a tear formed in his eye for Joyce Olsen, which he quickly wiped away with a harsh utterance designed to cover the emotion. Jessica liked that. She knew now that the man who had called Quantico and had specifically requested her help cared deeply about this victim. Why? Had he known her? Or had the sheer horror of the crime perpetrated against the woman moved him? Either way, he'd scored points with this FBI medical examiner and profiler. Jessica felt an instant rapport and bond with X. Darwin, her very own Samuel L. Jackson look-alike if you shaved off twelve, maybe thirteen years.
At the same time, she hated Milwaukee, hated having taken on this horrid mutilation murder, hated Darwin for dragging her away from the ranch she and Richard Sharpe now cohabited just outside Quantico among the dogwood in the Virginia hills. The case had literally pulled her from their bed, from Richard's embrace in fact. Not to mention all the safety of all that comforted her both physically and emotionally. The call had pulled her from several ongoing, urgent cases as well-cases she'd had to dump on John Thorpe's shoulders.
Staring again at the godforsaken, god-awful evil and butchery done the victim, Jessica wondered why she continued in this line of work, why she didn't take early retirement, return to private practice and save her sanity.
“Playing safe cases for insurance fraud scoundrels?” Richard had asked in his most biting sarcasm, tinged all the more since he had a British accent. “Right you are, Jess.”
“I could. And I'd be damn good at it. Like a Sue Grafton character,” she quipped.
“Or rather become another in the new breed of ex-coroners selling their expertise to the highest bidder.”
“You mean like the fellow-what was his name? Bayless, Baydum, Baylor-who testified for the O.J. defense?”
“Balden?”
“Always going to sue people for blackening his name when he's done such a good job of it himself…”
“Like the M.E. who did the same in the Blake trial, and then the Peterson trial?”
“I couldn't live with myself.” She knew herself too well to ever settle into such a life. “But I could take up where I left off before I was invited into the FBI by Otto Boutine- God, so long ago.”
“Back to the pain and turmoil of running the D.C. Coroner's Office? How wonderful that they're offering you your old job, but their facilities have not changed in twenty odd years!”
“The State of Virginia Medical Examiner's Office is state-of-the-art, and they want me there.”
“Take early retirement and take up a hobby. Read all those J.A. Konrath suspense novels you've been hoarding and start one of your own, as you keep threatening to do.”
“If you think an autopsy is hard, try writing a novel…. I'm just not talented at juggling a thousand decisions at once.”
“The hell your aren't! You absolutely write circles around that Madeleine Cromwell person, and you could easily knock her silly ass off the bestseller list,” he said, adding, “and I so loved that short story you did, The Unread.”
“I'll never write a bestselling novel. I can't write that much cheese into it.”
He laughed at this. Nowadays, with Richard at her side, she was seriously contemplating the possibility of a writing career. She'd already written two successful nonfiction titles mixing forensics and philosophy, harrowing true-crime tales and hard-won pearls of wisdom. Still, to do a fullblown crime novel with the intricacies of characterization, setting, dialogue, to keep twenty plates in the air at once while riding the unicycle of plot across a high-wire of tension? Book reviewers had a lot of balls to complain about anyone capable of putting a novel together, perhaps the most complex piece of artwork on the planet, not unlike sculpting images from stone. She so admired authors like Matheson, Bloch, Konrath, Castle, Weinberg, Jens, Bonansinga, Geoffrey Caine and Evan Kingsbury. She only dared dream she could replicate their success if given the freedom and time to write, drawing on the cases she had worked over the years as backdrop to her fiction. “No one would believe my cases if I dressed them up as fiction,” she'd told Richard. “They're hard enough to believe as truth.”