“Are they able to scream?”
“I’d be shocked if they could manage more than a hoarse whisper, but people surprise you sometimes. Everyone is different.”
Amanda tried to process all this new information. “But what you’re saying is that Lucy Bennett was choked.” She remembered Pete’s earlier terminology. “Strangled to death.”
He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I’ll need to see the lungs. Strangulation causes aspiration pneumonitis—the inhalation of vomit into the lungs. The gastric acids eat into the tissue. This gives us something of a timeline. The more tissue damage, the longer she was alive. Was she strangled into unconsciousness and then thrown off the roof or was she strangled to death and then thrown off the roof?”
“Why does it matter?” Either way, Lucy had been murdered.
“When you catch your perpetrator, you’re going to want to know the details of the crime. That way, you can make sure you’ve got the right guy and not some nut looking for a headline in the newspaper.”
Amanda didn’t see a scenario where she would be catching any perpetrator. She wasn’t even sure why Pete was answering her questions. “But why would the killer give details of the crime? That would just make the case against him stronger.”
“He won’t realize he’s walking into the trap you set.” Pete told her, “You are a lot smarter than he is. Your perpetrator is a man who cannot control himself.”
Amanda considered the statement, which didn’t strike her as wholly true. “He was smart enough to try to cover the crime.”
“Not as smart as you think. Throwing her off the roof was risky. It called attention to the crime. It opened up the possibility of witnesses. Why not leave her in the apartment and let a neighbor report the smell a few days—weeks—later?”
He was right. Amanda remembered the Manson murders, the way the bodies were posed. “Do you think the killer was sending a message?”
“Possibly,” Pete allowed. “We can also assume that he knew the victim fairly well.”
“Why do you say that?”
Pete gripped his hands around the top of the sheet. “Remember to breathe.” He pulled away the covering, exposing the rest of the body.
Amanda put her hand to her mouth. Nothing rushed up her throat. She didn’t pass out. She wasn’t even woozy. As with Roz Levy’s photos, she expected a violent reaction inside her body but was met instead with steely resolve. That same locking sensation from Techwood ran up Amanda’s spine. Her stomach actually stopped churning. Instead of fainting, she felt her vision sharpen.
Amanda had never seen another woman entirely nude before. There was something sad about the way her breasts hung to the side. Her stomach was saggy. Her pubic hair was short, as if it had been trimmed, but the hair on her thighs was grotesquely unshaven. Blood and viscera leaked between her legs. Her body had been pummeled. Bruises blackened her stomach and ribs.
Pete said, “In order to hurt somebody like this, you have to hate them. And hate does not come without familiarity. Just ask my ex-wife. She tried to strangle me once.”
Amanda glanced up at him. There was no suggestion behind his smile. He wasn’t just creepy, he was downright strange. And polite. Amanda could not recall the last conversation she’d had with a man where she wasn’t constantly interrupted or talked over.
Pete said, “You could be very good at this.”
Amanda didn’t know if that was much to write home about. It certainly wasn’t conversation for the dinner table. “Can you tell me anything about the nail polish?”
He took a latex glove out of his pocket. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Amanda didn’t want to, but she took the glove. She tried to shove her hand into the stiff latex.
“Wipe your palm first,” Pete advised.
Amanda wiped her sweaty hand on her skirt. The glove was still a tight fit, but once she managed to force her fingers into the tips, the rest of her hand easily followed.
Gently, she reached out for Lucy’s hand. The skin felt cold through the glove, or maybe Amanda was just imagining that. Instead of being limp, the body was stiff.
“Rigor mortis,” Pete explained. “The skeletal muscles contract, locking the joints. Onset varies depending on temperature and lesser factors. It starts in as little as ten minutes and lasts for up to seventy-two hours.”
“You can tell how long she’s been dead by how stiff she is.”
“Precisely,” he confirmed. “By the time I got to our victim yesterday afternoon, she had been dead approximately three to six hours.”
“That’s quite a window.”
“Science is not as precise as we’d like to believe.”
Amanda tried to turn the arm. It wouldn’t move.
“Don’t worry about being gentle. She can’t feel pain anymore.”
Amanda heard the sound of her throat working as she swallowed. She wrenched up the arm. There was a loud popping sound that sent a knife into Amanda’s chest.
“Breathe in and out,” Pete advised. “Remember, it’s just tissue and bone.”
Amanda swallowed again. The sound echoed in the room. She looked at Lucy Bennett’s fingers. “There’s something under her fingernails.”
“Very good catch.” He went over to the cabinet in the corner. “We can send it to the lab for analysis.”
Amanda wished she had Roz Levy’s magnifying glass. It wasn’t grime under the girl’s fingernails. “What do you think it is?”
“If she fought back, it’s probably skin scratched off her attacker. Let’s hope she managed to draw blood.” Pete was back with a glass slide and something that looked like an oversized toothpick. “Hold her steady.” Pete scraped the wooden pick under the fingernail. A long piece of skin came out. “If there’s enough blood in this skin tissue, and you find a suspect, we can analyze his blood and see if it’s the same type, whether he’s a secretor or nonsecretor.”
“We’d need more than blood to convict him.”
“The FBI is doing amazing work with enzymes right now.” He tapped the skin tissue onto the slide. “In ten years’ time, they’ll have samples from everyone in America stored on thousands of different computers all around the country. All you’ll have to do is send the sample around to each computer and bingo, within months you’ll know your perpetrator’s name and address.”
“You should tell that to Butch and Rick.” The two homicide detectives would probably laugh in his face. “This is their case.”
“Is it really?”
She didn’t bother answering the question. “I guess I don’t have to tell you how much trouble Evelyn and I would be in if they found out we were down here poking around.”
Pete put the slide on the counter. “You know, the GBI can’t find enough women to meet their quotas. They’re going to lose their federal grants if they don’t fill up the slots by the end of the year.”
“I work for the Atlanta Police Department.”
“You don’t have to.”
Pete obviously didn’t know Duke Wagner as well as everyone else she’d met today. Forget Butch and Rick. Her father would have a canary if he knew Amanda was at the morgue. Touching a dead person. Talking to a hippie about leaving her steady job to be the token woman on the state’s police force.
In for a penny, she supposed. There was still the reason they’d come here in the first place. Amanda turned the woman’s hand out, exposing the wrist to the light. There they were—the familiar white scars. “She tried to kill herself before.”
“Maybe,” Pete allowed. “A lot of young women cut themselves. Generally, it’s for attention. Your victim was obviously an addict. You can see that from the track marks. If she wanted to kill herself, she would’ve doubled down with the needle and her old friend H.”