It was almost two P.M. when we finally began washing the body, and for minutes, water draining through the steel tabletop was bright red. I scrubbed stubborn blood with a big soft sponge, and her wounds seemed even more gaping and mutilating when her taut brown skin was clean. Kellie Shephard had been a beautiful woman, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion as smooth as polished wood. She was five-foot-eight, with a lean, athletic figure. Her fingernails were unpainted, and she had been wearing no jewelry when she was found.
When we opened her up, her pierced chest cavity was filled with almost a liter of blood that had hemorrhaged from the great vessels leading to and from her heart and from her lungs. After receiving these injuries, she would have bled to death in, at the most, minutes, and I placed the timing of those attacks later in the struggle, when she was weakening and slowing down. The angles of those wounds were slight enough for me to suspect she had been moving very little on the floor when they had been inflicted from above. Then she had managed to roll over, perhaps in her last dying effort to protect herself, and I conjectured that this was when her throat was slashed.
'Someone should have had an awful lot of blood on him,' I commented as I began measuring the cuts to the hands.
'No kidding.'
'He had to clean up somewhere. You don't walk into a motel lobby looking like that.'
'Unless he lives around here.'
'Or got into his vehicle and hoped he didn't get pulled for something.'
'She's got a little brownish fluid in her stomach.'
'So she hadn't eaten recently, probably not since dinner, at any rate,' I said. 'I guess we need to find out if her bed was unmade.'
I was getting an image of a woman asleep when something happened either late Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday morning. For some reason, she got up and turned off the alarm and unlocked the back door. Gerde and I used surgical staples to close the Y incision at shortly past four. I cleaned up in the morgue's small dressing room, where a mannikin used for staging violent deaths in court was in a state of disarray and undress on the shower floor.
Other than teenagers burning down old farmhouses, arsons in Lehigh were rare. Violence in the tidy middle-class subdivision called Wescosville where Shephard had lived was unheard of, as well. Crime there had never been more serious than smash and grabs, when a thief spied a pocketbook or wallet in plain view inside a house, and broke in and grabbed. Since there was no police department in Lehigh, by the time state troopers responded to the clanging burglar alarm, the thief was long gone.
I got my BDUs and steel-reinforced boots from my turnout bag and shared the same changing room with the mannikin. Gerde was kind enough to give me a ride to the fire scene, and I was impressed by lush fir trees and roadside flower gardens, and every now and then, a well-kept, unassuming church. We turned on Hanover Drive, where homes were modern brick and wood, two-story and spacious, with basketball hoops, bicycles, and other signs of children.
'Do you have any idea of the price range?' I said, watching more houses flow past.
'Two-to-three-hundred-K range,' he said. 'Got a lot of engineers, nurses, stock brokers, and executives back here. Plus, I-78 is the main artery through Lehigh Valley, and you can shoot straight out on that and be in New York in an hour and a half. So some people commute back and forth to the city.'
'What else is around here?' I asked.
'A lot of industrial parks are just ten or fifteen minutes away. Coca-Cola, Air Products, Nestle warehouses, Perrier. You pretty much name it. And farmland.'
'But she worked at the hospital.'
'Right. And that's at most a ten-minute drive, as you can tell.'
'Are you aware of ever having seen her before?'
Gerde thought for a minute as thin smoke drifted up from behind trees at the end of the street.
'I'm fairly certain I've seen her in the cafeteria before,' he answered. 'It's hard not to notice someone who looked like that. She may have been at a table with other nurses, I don't really recall. But I don't think we ever spoke.'
Shephard's house was yellow clapboard with white trim, and although the fire may not have been difficult to contain, the damage from water, and from axes chopping great holes to vent the fire out of the roof, was devastating. What was left was a sad, sooty face with a caved-in head, and shattered windows that were depressed, lifeless eyes. Borders of wildflowers were trampled, the neatly mown grass turned to mud, and a late-model Camry parked in the drive was covered with cinders. Fire department and ATF investigators were working inside, while two FBI agents in flak jackets were prowling the perimeter.
I found McGovern in the backyard talking to an intense young woman dressed in cut-off jeans, sandals, and a T-shirt.
'And that was what? Close to six?' McGovern was saying to her.
'That's right. I was getting dinner ready and saw her pull into her driveway, parking exactly where her car is now,' the woman recounted excitedly. 'She went inside, then came out maybe thirty minutes later and began pulling weeds. She liked to work in the yard, cut her own grass and everything.'
McGovern watched me as I walked up.
'This is Mrs Harvey,' she said to me. 'The next-door neighbor.'
'Hello,' I said to Mrs Harvey, whose eyes were bright with excitement that bordered on fear.
'Dr Scarpetta is a medical examiner,' McGovern explained.
'Oh,' said Mrs Harvey.
'Did you see Kellie again that night?' McGovern then asked.
The woman shook her head.
'She went in,' she said, 'I guess, and that was it. I know she worked real hard and usually didn't stay up late.'
'What about a relationship? Was there anybody she saw?'
'Oh, she's been through them,' Mrs Harvey said. 'A doctor here and there, different folks from the hospital. I remember last year she started seeing this man who had been her patient. Nothing lasted very long, it seems to me. She's so beautiful, that's the problem. The men wanted one thing, and she had something different in mind. I know because she used to make remarks about it.'
'But nobody recently?' McGovern asked.
Mrs Harvey had to think.
'Just her girlfriends,' she replied. 'She has a couple people she works with, and sometimes they dropped by or went off somewhere together. But I don't remember any activity that night. I mean, that's not saying I would know. Someone could have come over, and I wouldn't necessarily have heard a thing.'
'Have we found her cat?' I asked.
McGovern did not answer.
'That darn cat,' Mrs Harvey said. 'Pumpkin. Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.'
She smiled and her eyes filled with tears.
'That was her child,' Harvey said.
'An indoor cat?' I then asked.
'Oh, absolutely. Kellie never let that cat out of the house, treated him like a hothouse tomato.'
'His litter box was found in the backyard,' McGovern told her. 'Did Kellie sometimes empty it and leave it out all night? Or for that matter, did she have a habit of emptying it at night? Going out after dark, the door unlocked and the alarm off.'
Harvey looked confused, and I suspected she had no idea that her neighbor had been murdered.
'Well,' she said, 'I do know that I've seen her empty the litter before, but always in a trash bag that went into the super can. So it wouldn't make sense for her to do that at night. My guess is, she might have emptied it and left it outside to air, you know? Or maybe she just didn't have time to hose it off and was going to do it the next morning. But whatever the case, that cat knew how to use the toilet. So it wouldn't be any big deal for him to be without his litter box for a night.'
She stared off at a state police car cruising by.
'No one's said how the fire started,' Harvey went on. 'Do we know?'
'We're working on it,' McGovern said.