“ Jess, it's me, Otto.”
“ What time is”-she yawned-”it?”
“ Getting on toward ten, and you said you'd like to see the body in the morgue before we head back to Virginia.”
“ So I did.”
“ Stadtler isn't exactly waiting for you with bated breath.”
“ Fish-baited breath, maybe.”
“ That's why I like you so, Jess, but let's not piss anyone else off at us before we leave, okay?”
“ Is that an order?”
“ Consider it cheap advice. You comin'?”
“ Give me ten-no-twenty minutes, Chief. I've got to shower and dress.”
“ Meet you in the lobby.”
“ Grand.”
She quickly grabbed something to wear, realizing that she'd have to let her hair dry along the way, and that lately she hadn't given a thought to her appearance. She rushed from bed to bath, and later when she slipped from the shower, she heard a knock at the door.
“ Boutine, dammit, I'm not ready.”
The knock persisted and someone was saying something on the other side, but she couldn't make it out. She threw on a robe and opened the door. A waiter stood outside holding a breakfast tray.
“ Room service, compliments of 605.”
Boutine could be thoughtful, she said to herself. “Oh, please, on the table.” She rushed ahead of him to clear away the things she'd tossed over the table. Then she fumbled for a gratuity, but the waiter told her it was taken care of, and he promptly left.
She rushed down the toast and coffee and scrambled eggs as she continued to dress. She was a half hour getting to the lobby, where she found Boutine engrossed in the Milwaukee Journal.
“ Anything about the case?”
“ Too damned much. I swear I don't understand reporters. You politely ask 'em for cooperation and they nod and say yes, sir, anything you want, sir, and then they weasel information outta some schlock deputy P.R. officer, tack on a few innuendos, and they're practically blowing whatever careful case you might make against a suspect before you've even got the bastard in custody.”
“ They got the vampire angle?” She was upset now.
“ No, not yet.”
She sighed, pursed her lips and nodded. ' 'Thank God for that much.”
“ Faxed a copy of the one good print you found to Quantico.”
“ And I take it, it's not on file, right?”
“ Right, Sherlock.”
“ Stands to reason.”
His quizzical stare lingered over her. “I didn't have much hope that it would check out either, but what made you think so?” 'Nature of the crime places this guy as one of the general population. Likely to be white, middle to upper class, blends in like a sci-fi horror alien who's taken over a human body. Possible dual, if not quadruple, personality, leads stellar life by day, model neighbor, belongs to the Rotary, relatives and friends think of him as just a regular guy who stays pretty much to himself. Lives with his mother or alone, and if he is married, he's a mouse, completely dominated by her. Away from home a lot; goes hunting for human blood by night. But we'll be lucky to find a parking ticket with his name on it, much less a record.”
“ Maybe you ought to be in psychological profiling, Doctor.”
“ Maybe. Any event, this case may be unsolvable.”
“ No one said it was going to be easy.”
“ Thanks for breakfast,” she said. “Nice gesture.”
He shrugged. “We're on expense account.”
“ Just the same-”
“ Glad you enjoyed it.”
As they went for the door, she told him, “We've got to come up with a few more details that'll stay in-house.”
“ That's one reason we insisted on the autopsy.”
“ Poor woman's suffered some very unkind cuts, and now we're going to literally open her up to more. I can see why the locals hate us.”
“ Something else you ought to know,” he said, placing a gentle hand on her arm as he led her to the waiting car. “Having to do with her severed arm? At the crime scene?”
“ I know about that.”
“ What do you know about it?” He half smiled, incredulous, certain that he knew something she did not. The smile softened his granite features and she saw the boy who enjoyed puzzles and games surface in him. Word at Quantico had it that he was into sophisticated computer war games and simulations for relaxation, and that he was currently helping in the design of a software package that would simplify the work of police psychological profiling, and that this system might one day be textbook material in every criminalistics course in the country and quite possibly every police precinct in the land.
She said to his smile, “One of the cops picked up the arm from somewhere else in the room and laid it to rest beside the body.”
“ How the hell did you know that? This guy comes to me early this morning, says he can't sleep, saying he's scared shitless you'll find his prints on her somewhere, and that he was one of the first on scene, and that he had-”
“ Picked up the arm and placed it with the body without thinking.”
“ And told no one, no one. So how could you know?”
“ Human nature and human folly,” she said, climbing into the car, leaving him to wonder and frown.
Inside, Boutine gave the driver directions, and then he turned to her. “Out with it.”
She thought of the need of rescuers at crash sites and other scenes of horror and mutilation, how often they wanted to put the pieces back together, line the bodies up in neat rows. But she said, “Well, the arm was severed by some kind of cutting tool, big tool by the look of things, but in any event, it would not have fallen into place as it was, at an exact angle from where it'd come off. Whoever placed it there did so with some attention to anatomy, fitting it as closely to the socket as possible, pointing straight away. At first, I thought maybe the killer had placed it there, reset it, so to speak. But I ruled that out quickly for two reasons.”
“ What reasons?” He was clearly fascinated.
“ First, the other missing piece, the breast, was halfway across the room, the other one dangling by a thread of skin. If the killer was obsessively interested in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, he would have been motivated to do so for all the pieces, not just the arm.”
“ Good point.” He understood obsessive behavior.
“ As for the second reason, I saw the displaced dust where the arm had been originally thrown. It hit one of the walls. left a faint sign of fluids and left a mark at the foot of this mark on the floor. I assumed then that it had been moved.”
From the inn it took them twenty minutes to get to the hospital. It was attached to a university teaching complex. Once inside, they were led down a long corridor and a flight of steps to the morgue belowground. It looked like a hundred thousand such places tucked away in hospitals across the country, a kind of earthly perdition for the remains, until which time as cause of death could be determined, a death certificate signed and the body turned over to the family.
Boutine stopped short of the morgue door, and his booming voice seemed out of place in the silence. “Make it quick. We have to be back in Virginia at sixteen hundred hours.”
“ Understood, but I thought you were joining us.”
“ No, thought I'd talk to some of the relatives, see what I might gather about the girl.”
“ Good luck.”
“ Same to you.” He took her hand to shake, but he held it a bit longer, saying, “You did excellent work last night, but you know that, don't you?”
“ Doesn't hurt to hear it from you. But it's a little premature. So far we don't have a thing.”
She pushed through the door where the local coroner and an assistant stood over the body; they'd begun to run some tests already.
“ Ahhhh, Dr. Coran… nice of you to join us,” said Dr. Stadtler, whose forehead was discolored by age spots, as were the backs of his hands.
She replied coolly, “I was up pretty late last night.” Stadtler's having left the scene hours before her still rankled them both.