“I’d rather blame it on the person who did it.”
“I didn’t say it’s why.” Lucy’s face is bright as if she’s found an answer. “I said the mass murder and your part in it —”
“My part in it?”
“Try not to be defensive, please,” Lucy says very calmly. “I’m saying it could have exacerbated what was already going to happen. That’s what I mean. I think Gail was targeted but maybe he decided to kill her now because what’s been all over the news excited him and fed into his sick shit.”
“I saw it on CNN that you were there and then it was mentioned that you’d returned to Cambridge.” Anne agrees and I don’t want to hear it. “The killer could be interested in you. It’s not your fault if it influenced him.”
“Are we about ready?” I say to her as I envision the young man behind my wall in the rainy dark. “We need to move quickly.”
31
For the next half hour we take photographs.
We fill in anatomical diagrams and recover trace evidence from the body’s surfaces and orifices, and I find more bluish-colored fibers. They’re inside her nose and mouth and in her hair. They’re on her tongue and caught between her teeth and inside her nostrils as far up as I can reach. I puzzle over how they got there.
They didn’t come from the white stretchy cloth she was wrapped in and it would make no sense that they’re from whatever clothing she had on when she was abducted and killed. Dr. Venter’s comments resurface as I work. He suspects Julianne Goulet inhaled fibers from a Lycra material that might be a blue, and I very well may be looking at something similar.
“On autopsy we need to check her airway and lungs for these,” I say to Anne, and I use forceps to lift a fiber as delicate as gossamer.
I place it on a slide, protecting it with a cover slip.
“She might have aspirated fibers? That would seem unusual unless it was something that shed like crazy.” Anne opens a Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, a PERK.
“I doubt it,” I reply. “If it shed like crazy, they’d be everywhere. But if a blue fabric covered her face while she was violently gasping for breath, that could be an explanation.”
“Like when people are smothered with a pillow,” she considers. “I’ve seen tiny particles of feathers and fibers in their airways and lungs.”
“But usually there’s no significant injury because a pillow is soft.”
“I’ve always thought it’s an explanation for some cases of SIDS. Postpartum depression, and Mama uses a soft baby blanket or a baby pillow.”
“Jesus, the two of you are depressing,” Lucy says.
I carry the slide to a counter where there’s a polarizing light microscope, and, turning the objective lens to 100×, I adjust the focus and peer through the binocular eyepiece. The fiber is actually a group of them fused together, multicolored, like bundles of electrical wiring, pale green and peach but predominantly blue.
“Synthetic.” I return to the table. “Beyond that, Ernie will have to figure it out,” I add as I continue to think of the bluish Lycra fibers recovered in Dr. Venter’s case. “In her hair, in her teeth, up into her sinuses.” I remove a plastic speculum from its sterile wrapper. “That makes me strongly suspect she was suffocated with a fabric that’s stretchy and a multifilament synthetic weave is going to have some flexibility.”
“Like the polyester pants I used to wear as a kid.” Anne clips fingernails, collecting them in an envelope. “Just stretchy enough to show every roll of flab, and, yes, as hard as it is to believe, I was a bit of a butterball and never went to the prom. So the fibers aren’t from the cloth she was wrapped in because it’s white.”
“No, they’re definitely not from that,” I answer. “The white cloth was the finishing touch after she was dead. He kept her someplace where he could pose her body, leaving her in the position she’s in now until rigor was fixed enough to move her.”
“You can tell that how?” Lucy stands back from the table, watching us.
“Her postmortem artifacts,” I reply. “The position she’s in now was the one she was in as she cooled and began to stiffen as her livor and rigor formed.”
“He positioned her arm out like that deliberately.” Lucy holds hers out and drops her wrist.
“Yes.”
“Like a clay sculpture hardening,” Anne says.
“That’s bizarre.” Lucy ponders such a detail. “Why?”
“Why do any of these people do what they do?” Anne replies.
“It must mean something.”
“I think for people like this they don’t even know what it means.” Anne hands me an envelope to initial. “They do these awful things but if you asked them why, they have no idea.”
“That’s probably true,” I agree.
“It may go back to when they were a baby or too young to remember,” Anne says. “You know, like the time when I slammed this door and didn’t know a cat was back there and broke its tail. I never got over it, but what if that was my signature if I were a criminal? I was traumatized when I was ten and always do something to cats. I break their tails.”
“You know what?” Lucy says. “You’re sick.”
“Tell her I’m not,” Anne says to me.
We begin to swab orifices, all of them.
“She was wrapped in something else while she was alive,” Lucy returns her attention to what’s on my table.
“It would explain the fibers under her nails, in her hair and mouth,” I reply as my mind sorts through possibilities.
A way to restrain his victims without leaving a mark, I recall thinking as I reviewed the D.C. case reports.
I remember sitting up in bed and envisioning each excruciating death, a transparent plastic bag from a spa store called Octopus taped over a victim’s head, her face turning a dusky bluish red, her eyes wide and terrified as arterial blood pumps and veins are obstructed by duct tape around her neck, a shower of pinpoint hemorrhages appearing on her lids and conjunctiva. It’s like attaching a balloon to the end of a hose. Water gushes in and has no place to go and pressure builds and the balloon ruptures, and I imagine the roaring in the victim’s head and her desperation to breathe. But Gail Shipton had no bag over her head and maybe he didn’t use the plastic bags to kill any of his victims.
Maybe Dr. Venter’s hypothesis is correct. The bags are a morbid ornament the killer incorporates into the way he symbolically poses the bodies when he leaves them displayed and he didn’t bother with that finishing touch in Gail Shipton’s case because she interrupted his ritual and fantasy by dying prematurely. It could be he actually suffocates his victims with a soft, stretchy fabric, possibly one made of Lycra, and this could explain their lack of defense injuries. It could explain the fibers deep in Gail Shipton’s nasal cavities and in Julianne Goulet’s airway and lungs.
People being smothered fight like hell and there’s no evidence these women did. As Benton says, it’s as if they died willingly, and that just isn’t possible. People don’t. In suicidal asphyxiations, biology has the final say after they have decided their lives away and set the plan into motion. They claw at the noose around their neck as they dangle and flail after they’ve kicked over what they were standing on. They rip at the bag over their head and they fight until the end when they drown. Pain and panic change their minds as every cell screams to stay alive and I imagine wrapping someone from head to toe in a synthetic fabric that has some give. Something stretchy.
The pelvic exam reveals no evidence of sexual assault, no semen, no contusions or inflammation, and I work swiftly. I have a mission in mind, an additional scientific step before the autopsy, and snapping a new blade into the scalpel I make the Y incision, running down the length of torso, detouring around the navel. I reflect back tissue but don’t remove the breastplate of ribs just yet. I find the bifurcation of the aorta in front of the sacroiliac joints at the pelvic brim. Using angiocatheters, I cannulate the left external iliac artery and begin pumping in large syringes of pink embalming fluid laced with a non-ionic contrast agent that will light up neon white on CT.