He pursed his lips below his mask and nodded, his eyes studying her closely. “I do not know perhaps as much as the FBI, my dear Dr. Coran”-it grated her nerves to have someone refer to her as my dear doctor-”but I do know that under poor lighting conditions, we doctors miss a lot.”
He had obviously been relishing this moment, she thought. “And what did you find, Dr. Stadtler, that I overlooked? Or, rather, that you assume I overlooked.”
It was a bloodless autopsy, the first such that she had ever witnessed. She came closer to the corpse, its slashed eyes now familiar to her.
Stadtler continued in a voice that overflowed with smugness, a ribbon of contempt snaking through. “The girl's feet, below the ropes…” His pause was calculated. “Slashed.”
Despite the fact she was angry with herself for the oversight, she said, “Achilles tendons, I know.” The lie caught Stadtler and his assistant off guard. “But that's what autopsies are for, to be sure.” She'd paid absolutely no attention to the feet other than to note that they had been bound.
“ Yes, well,” Stadtler muttered like a chess player whose king has been cornered, “both tendons were severed.”
“ Making it impossible for her to stand, let alone run from her assailant.” She located a frock, a cap and a mask in a nearby supply cabinet. In an autopsy room only the minimal rules of sanitation applied. It was highly unlikely that the “patient,” as dead as she was, was contagious. As Jessica readied herself, she thought anew of the girl's ordeal. Even if she had had a chance of escape, with her heel tendons severed, she'd have had to drag herself away, pulling herself along like a two-armed lizard. She wondered if the killer had watched her drag herself about before he hauled her up to the rafters by the rope. Doubtful. There'd been no blood trail to substantiate this. Why then cut the tendons? Another precaution against the police, to confound the issue?
There was a policeman from Wekosha in the autopsy room who hadn't said a word. She recognized him from the murder scene the day before and she guessed it was he who had replaced the arm. She gave him a cursory smile before hiding behind her mask. He volunteered something. “Dr. Coran, I'm Captain Vaughn. Wekosha and the county sheriffs office are combining on this killing.”
“ Good idea.” She went first to the tendons to examine the scars there. Working from the feet up on an autopsy was how she had learned her craft at Bethesda from perhaps the best man in the business, Dr. Aaron Holecraft. Holecraft was semiretired now, but he wasn't above talking to a former student about a puzzling case. She knew she'd have to see him when she got back to Quantico about the Wekosha vampire case. She knew that Holecraft had seen some Tort 9s in his day.
The wounds had been cleaned thoroughly by Stadtler's assistant. “Did you get any pictures of the tendons before you cleaned them?” she asked the assistant.
Stadtler spoke up instead. “Why? Didn't you, my dear doctor?”
“ I'm not sure if the photographer last night got them, no.”
“ In any case, we'll be happy to provide them,” said Stadtler as if he had won a small victory.
The dull-faced, heavy-set Vaughn piped in. “We're checking every MDSO file we have.”
She rattled off the letters in her head as she worked and asked, “Mentally disturbed sex offenders?”
“ Yes, ma'am.”
“ Waste of time, Captain.”
“ What?”
“ This crime is not sex related, not in the usual sense, anyway.”
“ What? But she was strung up nude, and there was evidence of… of semen in her, wasn't there?”
“ All right, all right.” She realized she shouldn't have challenged him. “Go ahead with your search. Arrest everyone in your files who's ever flashed an eleven-year-old.”
“ But you think we'd be wasting our time?”
“ Yes, I think so.”
“ Just the same, we've got to work on every possibility.”
“ Understood. Now, can we have a little quiet in here?” Jessica said in a harsher tone than she meant. “This is an autopsy, and we are taping for transcripts later, I presume, my dear Dr. Stadtler?”
Stadtler frowned at this and said, “Of course,” as he flicked the recorder on.
The autopsy proceeded quickly now, and a few old track marks were found on the girl's arms, indicating drugs, but without blood, it would take very sophisticated equipment and tests to secure readings from the pancreas, the liver and other organs to show the necessary trace elements to say whether she was or was not drugged. Jessica took a sliver from each of the organs; these would go in formaldehyde-filled vials all the way to Quantico for expert eyes there. Stadtler took his own specimens, saying that he could get them examined in Milwaukee. Most of the girl's scars, other than the mutilation on the night of her death, told her biography, one of wounds and scars gathered over her lifetime. There were old, healed-over burns, stitch marks, an indication she once had had a C-section, likely giving birth or death in an unwanted pregnancy. She'd led a tortured life, and she had died a torturous death. So sad, Jessica thought.
While she couldn't yet know the identity of the monster who had killed Candy, she could see what the victim had eaten, breathed and injected. A lot of medical people became hardened like cops, having seen it all time and again, and they'd often say that the way a person died was a reflection of the way she lived. That some people lived in such a way as to attract violence; that most murder victims unintentionally courted death by placing themselves in high-risk situations. Doctors working on a dying gunshot victim frequently found remnants of other bullets in the body. Most successful suicides had scars from previous adventures. But what life-style exacted the kind of price this abused child and young woman had suffered?
Much of the autopsy was done in silence until the doctors agreed or disagreed on one thing and another. Stadtler thought the liver a bit jaundiced, while Jessica thought it had the look of pate, indicating alcoholism and the road to cirrhosis. They agreed on the condition of the kidneys, that one was underweight-scales don't lie-and due again to alcohol abuse, it had prematurely shriveled in size. Her ovaries, like the kidneys, had become wrinkled and smaller. Rough living showed through.
There were no indications whatever that she was struck in the head, the brain sustaining no injuries other than an excessive amount of fluids, including some pockets of blood which were prized by the doctors. Now a useful blood test could be accomplished, and poisons ruled out.
They were almost finished with the autopsy when Jessica's attention was caught by some bluish coloration about the throat and neck wound. She blinked. Maybe it was the blue fluorescent lighting. The natural blue of the wound itself when blood gushed up from the severed arteries? Still, she brought a large magnifying glass on a swing arm to bear on the wound.
“ What is it?” asked Stadtler, instantly curious. “Didn't you already do that?” He was asking about the depth and length measurement of the wound itself.
She replied with a question. “Have you checked the condition of the windpipe?”
“ What for?”
She instantly ran her hand into the open chest cavity and up through the throat, massaging the layers of gristle that form the upper part of the windpipe, the cricoid cartilage, and she knew in an instant that the blue coloration around the throat was not due to the blue light or to the slash. She knew for a fact that the killer had also strangled his victim; but he had done so with so gentle a touch that it was not obvious, or likely provable.
Her confusion gave her away. The three men stared at her. “Just curious,” she lied.
“ Anyone can see she's not been strangled,” said Stadtler. “May we get on with it?”
“ I'm going to have to take a section here,” she said, indicating the throat.
“ What? What for? We were praying we'd save something of her for burial,” Stadtler said sarcastically.