He studies the three buttons closely with the lens, nudging each one with a gloved finger.
“If you look at them from the side”—he shows me—“they’re not dented in at all, are in really great shape, which adds to the value. You’d never sew something like this on a jacket. Who the hell does that?”
“Well, she did, or someone did,” I reply.
Removing her wet blouse, I decide it’s purple, not burgundy. The tag at the back of the collar is Audrey Marybeth, size six.
“Maybe she was involved in antiques,” I add. “Maybe she collected or was a dealer, or the buttons belonged to someone in her family.”
The bra underneath is loose around her chest, the cups several sizes too big, and I estimate the body has lost at least twenty percent of its weight due to dehydration. She dried out while concealed someplace freezing or near-freezing, cold enough to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing the decomposition that is beginning with a vengeance now. Minute by minute her odor is stronger, and I’m asking for trouble. I imagine Judge Conry calling lawyers to the bench, wanting to know where I am, discreet at first, and then demanding.
“Plenty of people collect in this part of the world.” Marino has a hard look on his face, his mood turned sour. “You go in some of these junk shops and can buy vintage buttons, almost anything you can think of. Police, fire department, railroad, military. But you don’t sew them on clothes, not even nickel-plated ones that go for five bucks apiece. Not even ones in really shitty shape you can buy in bulk.”
“Since when are you an expert in vintage buttons?” I spread the blouse open next to the blazer.
“You really don’t care.” He’s looking at the clock, and it’s exactly two.
“What I care about most right this minute is getting what we need while there’s still a chance.”
Mostly I’m thinking about DNA. I’ve had cases where semen could still be recovered after a remarkably long time inside orifices, the stomach, the airway, deep inside the vaginal vault, and I’m not going to assume it’s too late to get anything from this body, no matter how long she’s been dead. The enemy of DNA is bacteria, and she’s invisibly beginning to teem with it, and it literally will eat her to the bone.
I can gauge the breaking down of her tissue by the way she smells, insidiously foul at first and then much stronger and fast becoming a bristling stench from organisms that originated in her bowels but were dormant while she was kept dry and very cold or frozen. As she has warmed by degrees in the bay, in the boat and van, and now inside this room, the bacteria that cause putrefaction are having their way with her. They have begun a process I might be able to retard slightly by refrigeration but certainly can’t stop. She’s decomposing rapidly right before our eyes.
“Remember when I first got into metal detectors?” Marino is asking, and I really don’t recall.
“Vaguely.” I reach around to unzip her long gray skirt, discovering a bunched area of the waistband that has been cinched.
Three heavy-duty staples fasten inches of the material together. Stainless steel, no sign of rust.
“Why the hell do that?” Marino looks on.
“Like I said, she’s not a size six anymore.”
“If she ever was.”
“When she was alive, she was bigger than this,” I reply. “That much is a fact.”
“But if the skirt slid off her because it was too big, it wouldn’t have been lost because of the rope around her ankles and the dog crate,” he says. “Why go to the trouble?”
“It depends on when it was done. All I can say with certainty is someone made the waistband smaller.” I pull the skirt down over her wrinkled bare pale legs, surprised to find what’s left of sheer pantyhose.
The stockings are in tatters, ripped off mid-thigh, and in my mind I see her alive. I see her terrified, locked up and trying to escape.
Clawing, pounding a door, breaking her nails. Frantically moving around shoeless on a surface covered with something dark red.
Then nothing; the picture blanks out. I can’t imagine what happened to her stockings except the legs weren’t cut with anything sharp. The ultra-sheer nylon has runs all the way up through the control top, and what is left around the thighs is shredded, torn unevenly, like ragged transparent gauze loose around her sallow dead skin. Did she rip off her hose mid-thigh? If so, why?
Or did someone else do it?
The same person who stapled the skirt around the waistband and arranged jewelry so it wouldn’t fall off the body and be lost.
Like the jacket, the skirt is distinctive, quite stylish, constructed of two jersey layers that flow into a raw-edged handkerchief hem, Peruvian Connection, size six. I spread it on the sheet to dry as Marino resumes reminiscing about our early days together in Richmond, when apparently he became quite the treasure hunter, using a metal detector he kept in the trunk of his unmarked Ford to search crime scenes, primarily outdoor ones, for metal evidence, such as cartridge cases.
“Mainly when I was working evening shifts and had most of the day off,” he’s saying, but the memory doesn’t make him cheerful and boisterous, the way he usually gets when he talks about our past.
His voice has a hard, unforgiving ring that reminds me of a shovel striking stone.
“I’d go out early in the morning to old battlefields, woods, riverbanks, looking for coins, buttons, whatever I could find. Got a belt buckle that cleaned up real good. You probably remember it.”
I don’t think I do, but I know better than to tell him.
“Brought it to your office and showed it to you,” he says, and he’s always liked massive buckles, especially motorcycle ones. “Oval-shaped, with U.S. stamped on cast brass in real big letters.”
I place nude panties and the pantyhose and the bra on a sheet, and move the surgical light closer. I check her for lividity as Marino again examines the antique buttons, leaning close, shining a light on them.
“No sign of livor anteriorly,” I note.
“What about when someone’s been dead and maybe in a cooler or freezer this long? Maybe they won’t have it anymore.”
“Unlike rigor, livor doesn’t completely go away. It leaves a telltale sign.” I look at her from head to toe, taking time I don’t have, moving the overhead lamp as I search for the slightest hint of staining from when her circulation quit and blood settled due to gravity.
“I eventually sold it for five hundred bucks. Wish I hadn’t now, because it sure as hell was worth more than that,” Marino resumes talking about treasure hunting. “Also a two-piece CS buckle I found in Dinwiddie. Could have brought me a couple of grand if I hadn’t needed quick bucks when Doris bailed, ran off leaving me with a shitload of debt. She’s probably still with that douchebag car salesman, except I think he’s selling Aflac now.”
“Maybe you should find out.”
“No way in hell. A real entrepreneur she’s become,” he says sarcastically. “Covers bricks with cloth and sells them as doorstops, no kidding, I mean, go figure. Like a symbol, huh? Something that gets in the way, an obstruction, a stumbling block, but not how she looks at it, of course.”
“Maybe you should try to talk to her and find out from her how she looks at it.”
“You can pull it up on the Internet,” he says angrily. “Open Says Me. The name of her website. I hold open your world to possibilities. I can’t believe it.”
It figures he’d bring up his ex-wife when we don’t have time to talk about her. I pull the body on its left side, and it’s so light it feels hollow.
“There can be a lot of money in historic stuff like buttons, medals, old coins, but there’s also such a thing as respect.” He’s back to that. “What you don’t do is sew antique military buttons on a jacket or a coat to make a friggin’ fashion statement.”