How old could she have been? he thought. Fifteen, maybe sixteen? A hot anger kindled in his abdomen. Avital was staring at him and he realized he was clenching his fists. Quickly he relaxed them, felt the fingertips tingle.
"Was the hair like this when you found it?" he asked.
"Like what?" asked Steinfeld.
"Clean. Combed."
The technicians looked at each other.
"Yes," said Avital.
Steinfeld nodded and paused expectantly, as if waiting for another question. When none came he shrugged and went back to work.
Daniel leaned in closer and sniffed. The stench of death had begun to issue from the corpse but through it he made out the clean, sweet scent of soap. Someone had washed her.
He raised his head and continued examining the face. The mouth hung slightly agape, revealing a hint of white but widely spaced teeth. The lower ones were crowded and chipped. An upper canine was missing. Not a rich girl. Pierced ears but no earrings. No tribal tattoos, scars, birthmarks, or blemishes.
"Any identification?"
"Life should be so easy," said Steinfeld.
Daniel stared a bit longer, then ceased his inspection of individual features. Shifting his perspective, he regarded the face as an entity and searched for ethnic characteristics. She appeared Oriental, but that meant little. It was a rare Jerusalem face that told a definite ethnic story-Arab, Ashkenazi, Druze, Bukharan, Armenian. Each had its prototype, but the overlap was substantial. He'd seen too many blond, blue-eyed Arabs, too many swarthy Germans to be confident about racial guesses. Still, it would have been nice to find something, somewhere to start
A shiny green fly settled on the lower lip and began exploring. He shooed it away. Forced his eyes downward.
The throat had been cut deeply from ear to ear, severing gullet and trachea, separating the ivory knobs of the spinal cord, millimeters from complete decapitation. Each small breast was circled by stab wounds. The abdomen had been sliced open under the ribs on the right side, swooping down to the pelvis and back up to the left. Glossy bits of tissue peeked out from under the flap of the wound. The pubic region was an unrecognizable mass of gore.
The fire in his belly intensified. He covered the body from the neck down.
"She wasn't killed here," he said.
Steinfeld shook his head in agreement. "Not enough blood for that. Almost no blood at all, in fact. Looks as if she's been drained."
"What do you mean?"
Steinfeld pointed to the wound flap. "No blood on the body. What's visible under the wound looks pale-like a lab specimen. Drained."
"What about semen?"
"Nothing conspicuous-we took scrapings. Levi's internal will tell you more."
Daniel thought of the destruction that had been visited upon the genitals. "Do you think Dr. Levi will be able to get anything from the vaginal vault?"
"You'll have to ask Dr. Levi." Steinfeld snapped the evidence case shut.
"Someone cleaned her up thoroughly," said Daniel, more to himself than to the techs.
"I suppose."
There was a camera next to the case.
"You've taken your pictures?"
"All the usual ones."
"Take some extra ones. Just in case."
"We've already shot three rolls," said Steinfeld.
"Shoot more," said Daniel. "Let's not have a repeat of the Aboutboul disaster."
"I had nothing to do with Aboutboul," said Steinfeld, defensively. But the look on his face bespoke more than defensiveness.
He's horrified, thought Daniel, and fighting to hide it. He softened his tone.
"I know that, Meir."
"Some defective from Northern District on loan to the National Staff," the technician continued to complain. "Takes the camera and opens it in a lighted room-bye-bye evidence."
Daniel's mind longed to be somewhere else, but he shook his head knowingly, forced himself to commiserate.
"Protekzia?'
"What else? Someone's nephew."
"Figures."
Steinfeld inspected the contents of his case, closed it, and wiped his hands on his pants. He glanced toward the camera, picked it up.
"How many extra rolls do you want?"
"Take two more, okay?"
"Okay."
Daniel wrote in his note pad, rose, brushed off his trousers, and looked again at the dead girl. The static beauty of the face, the defilement Young one, what were your final thoughts, your agonies ?
"Any sand on the body?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Avital, "not even between the toes."
"What about the hair?"
"No," she said. "I combed through it. Before that, it looked perfect-shampooed and set." Pause. "Why would that be?"
"A hair fetishist," said Steinfeld. "A freak. When you deal with freaks, anything's possible. Isn't that right, Pakad?"
"Absolutely." Daniel said good-bye and climbed back up. Laufer was back in his Volvo, talking on the radio. His driver stood behind the barrier, chatting with Afif. The old Hagah man was still sandwiched between the two officers. Daniel caught his eye and he nodded formally, as if in salute. Daniel began walking toward him but was stopped by the deputy commander's voice.
"Sharavi."
He turned around. Laufer had gotten out of the car and was waving him over.
"So?" the deputy commander demanded when they were face to face.
"As you said, butchery."
"Does it look like the bastard's work?"
"Not on the surface."
"Be specific," ordered Laufer.
"This one's a child. The Gray Man's victims were older- mid- to late thirties."
The deputy commander dismissed the point with a wave.
"Perhaps he's changed his taste," he said. "Acquired a lust for young whores."
"We don't know this one's a whore," said Daniel, surprised at the edge in his voice.
Laufer grunted, looked away.
"The wounds differ as well," said Daniel. "The Gray Man made his incision laterally, on the left side of the throat. He severed the major blood vessels but didn't cut nearly as deeply as this one-which makes sense, because the Gadish woman, the one who'd survived long enough to talk, described his knife as a small one. This poor girl was just about decapitated, which suggests a larger, heavier weapon."
"Which would be the cause if he's gotten angrier and better-armed," said Laufer. "Progressively more violent. It's a pattern with sex fiends, isn't it?"
"Sometimes," said Daniel. "But the discrepancies go beyond intensity. The Gray Man concentrated on the upper trunk. Struck at the breasts, but never below the waist. And he killed his victims on the spot, after they began to fellate him. This one was murdered elsewhere. Someone washed her hair and combed it out. Scrubbed her clean."