“Possibly, but I'm not at all certain at this point.”
While Jessica and Kim were talking, Dr. Shockley had been on his cell phone, taking heat for having not responded to the call at the murder scene. Jessica imagined that a nearby hospital pathologist or someone on Parry's team had had to be called in to walk the grid and to pronounce the victim dead before authorities ordered it shipped off to Shockley.
Dr. Shockley now said, “Couldn't tell you for a certainty, but I'm suspicious that my superiors are pissed off. Meantime, I am tired and I am retiring-for the night at least. Jessica and Kim, good night. Carl will be nearby to help you out and to lock up.”
The sound of the closing door reverberated throughout the lab when the old man disappeared. Jessica said, “I agree. Let's save our sanity and get out of here for now. Come at it fresh in the a.m.”
“Agreed. Bed is waiting.”
The women made their way out of the semidarkened crime lab, secure in the belief that they had done all that was possible for the night, and that Carl would put Anton Pierre's body on ice; they found the elevator and took it to the ground floor.
“If we extrapolate from one body to the next, all that appears before us is a series of fine, hairless, flawless young specimens.” You are your father's daughter, Jessica, she heard herself say to this. Reducing a life to the word specimen had been an ongoing argument between them when he was alive. He maintained that an ME must be as objective and emotionally controlled as his scalpel. She maintained that the more the ME knew about the personality of the victim, the more he or she could tell with a scalpel.
“You were right, Jessica, to suggest that our victims have, if not the actual and physical status of virgins, then the mental state of virgins. Petryna's soul was virginal on exiting this life in the sense that she and the others never harmed a living thing, ever. They were the kind of people who, as they say, couldn't harm a fly. I get that much from my readings.”
“Are you sure they all had this sort of nature?”
“I'm quite sure of that much.”
“Meaning the killer may have liked them that way?”
“Perhaps…” Kim muttered. “I couldn't say for a certainty.”
“A big maybe.” In the cramped car of the elevator, Jessica bit her lower lip as she went over what she had seen so far. Her thoughts felt at odds, a bewildered one combating with a chaotic one, the clash creating only larger confusion. She threw in a healthy dose of anger and frustration at having missed out on Anton Pierre's crime scene. She imagined how angry James and Sturtevante must be at the forensics team at this moment-missing in action during a key crime-scene investigation. She excused her absence on the grounds of complete exhaustion as the elevator doors opened at ground level, and she and Kim made their way to the hotel on foot, taking in the night air.
Once they reached the brightly lit hotel, they staggered to the lobby elevator and rode it up to their rooms. They said their good-nights when Jessica, her room on a lower level, stepped off the elevator. Jessica imagined that Kim, like herself, would fall directly into bed and into a deep silence and weariness called sleep.
The following day at Shockley's morgue
“Sad to see such healthy people die so uselessly,” Dr. Shockley muttered. “When I think how useless my old bones have gotten… Sad to see these bodies go to the crematorium or the grave. Waste of excellent cadavers, which we could use around here for instructing the med students.”
“You're not into the body-snatching business now, are you?” Jessica asked, knowing what a great demand existed for such excellent specimens as the three corpses now in Shockley's care.
“If I thought I could talk the next of kin into it, I'd split the proceeds,” he said, and cackled again.
“Well, you routinely hand them the papers to sign for permission to harvest body parts, so why not pursue it with the families?”
“One in a million can walk away from the remains of a loved one. Forget about it. Still, just look at this Adonis. Hardly looks dead, does he? Am I right? What a specimen of Homo sapiens.”
“Fact is he looks like that statue of David,” Jessica observed.
“Michelangelo's David?” Kim asked. “I don't see the resem-”
“No, no, not Michelangelo. The infamous one that looks like the boy David most likely looked like, the one by the sculptor Donatello.”
“Oh, yes, I know the piece you mean. A portrayal of David at the time of his slaying of Goliath, presented as the pubescent child he had to have been at the time rather than a muscular Hercules.”
“Donatello, living in the mid-fifteenth century, defied conventional wisdom. He believed in being true to nature and history. I've always admired his perfectly horrifying rendition of the street prostitute Mary Magdalen as well.”
They had come back fresh to examine Anton Pierre's body, and Jessica, staring hard at the handsome face through a high-intensity magnifying glass, noticed an unusual pattern. “I see a blemish or the faint remains of a rash, I believe, on his forehead.”
They had found small areas of patchy redness on all the victims caused, Jessica believed, by the toxin.
“Just another rust-colored rash?” asked Shockley, coming closer to have a look.
“No, no discoloration. Rather a faint shadow under the scope. Take a look.”
'Teardrops,” said Shockley.
'Teardrops? No way. Teardrops form a line as they drop down the face. These are polka-dot fashion. Besides, they're above the eyes.”
“Let me put some infrared light on the subject,” Shockley suggested. “Hit the light switch on the wall beside you, Dr. Desinor.”
Kim did so, and except for the red glow of the infrared light Shockley held over the dead man's striking features, pitch darkness surrounded them. Their white lab coats turned a Day-Glo purple.
Studying the supposed rash more closely now, Jessica could clearly see a pattern of small circles with rivulets running away from each, all under the red glow, all about the young man's forehead.
'Teardrops,” Shockley again said.
“But the splatter pattern is… all wrong, as if…”
“Yes, I agree. Jessica, dear, we finally have something the killer left behind.”
“Then the tears are his; the killer's left his secretions on the victim?” asked Kim.
“We'll have to lift his DNA with great care. I have just the fixative and gel for the job,” Shockley assured her.
“Are you sure? We damage it, it's gone. Are you sure we shouldn't simply do an electron bombardment photo?”
“And destroy the only evidence we have?”
“We'd have the photos.”
“Photos will tell us nothing. We can't test the photos for human DNA properties. These teardrops, if we can lift and fix them, can tell us if our killer is male or female, his approximate age, skin color, what kind of secretor he is, possible blood type. Of course, this will take some time.”
“The green,” said Kim, taking Jessica's arm. “It was green tears that I saw. The green reflecting pool. He cries in the color green.”
“Green tears?” asked Jessica, her voice giving way to confusion.
“I didn't recognize it before, but the green pool I saw- he cries in green for all the lost hopes, dreams, intentions of this world that have never come to fruition. He cries for the loss of angelic aspirations.”
An attendant in blue surgical garb stuck her short-cropped head through the door and said, “Pardon, Dr. Shockley, but the red light is spinning again, and there's a call for Dr. Coran and Dr. Desinor. The caller says it's urgent.”
“I'll take it,” said Jessica.
Kim followed Jessica back toward her temporary office to take the call, but Kim said she had to find some caffeine and sugar quickly or she would keel over, so they parted near the elevators. Jessica took the call alone.