"The word is 'evil.' "
"I guess we won't know about other drugs for a while."
"We'll test for the usual suspects. But it will be weeks," I tell her.
She spreads out more photographs, sorting them as if she is playing solitaire. "How does it make you feel, knowing this might have been you?"
"I don't think about that," I answer.
"What do you think about?"
"What the injuries are saying to me."
"Which is?"
I pick up a photograph of Kim Luong_a bright, wonderful young woman by all reports, who was working to put herself through nursing school. "The blood pattern," I describe. "Almost every inch of her exposed skin is smeared with bloody swirls, part of his ritual. He fingerpainted."
"After they were dead."
"Presumably. In this photo"_I show her_"you can plainly see the gunshot wound to the front of her neck. It hit her carotid and her spinal cord. She would have been paralyzed from the neck down when he dragged her into the storeroom."
"And hemorrhaging. Because of the severed carotid."
"Absolutely. You can see the arterial spatter pattern on the shelves he dragged her past." I lean closer to her and show her in several photographs. "Big sweeps of blood that start getting lower and weaker the farther he dragged her through the store."
"Conscious?" Berger is fascinated and grim.
"The injury to her spinal cord wasn't immediately fatal."
"How long could she have survived, bleeding like that?"
"Minutes." I find an autopsy photograph that shows the spinal cord after it has been removed from the body and centered on a green towel, along with a white plastic ruler for a scale. The smooth creamy cord is contused a violent purple-blue and partly severed in an area correlating with the gunshot wound that penetrated Luong's neck between the fifth and sixth cervical disks. "She would have been instantly paralyzed," I explain, "but the contusion means she had a blood pressure, her heart was still pumping, and we know that anyway from the arterial blood spatter at the scene. So yes. She was probably conscious as he dragged her by her feet along the aisle, back to the storeroom. What I can't say is how long she was conscious."
"She would have been able to see what he was doing and watch her own blood spurting out of her neck as she bled to death?" Berger's face is keen, her energy at a higher wattage that burns brightly in her eyes.
"Again, it depends on how long she was conscious," I tell her.
"But it's in the realm of possibility she might have been conscious the entire time he was dragging her down the aisle, back to the storeroom?"
"Absolutely."
"Could she talk or scream?"
"She might not have been able to do anything."
"But saying no one heard her scream, that wouldn't mean she was unconscious?"
"No, it wouldn't mean that necessarily," I reply. "If you've been shot in the neck and are hemorrhaging and being dragged…"
"Especially dragged by someone who looks like him."
"Yes. You might be too terrified to scream. He might have told her to shut up, for that matter."
"Good." Berger seems pleased. "How do you know he dragged her by the feet?"
"Bloody drag pattern made by her long hair, and trails of blood from her fingers above her head," I describe. "If you're paralyzed and being dragged by your ankles, for example, your arms are going to spread. Like making angels in the snow."
"Wouldn't the human impulse be to grab your neck and try to stop the bleeding?" Berger asks. "And she can't. She's paralyzed and awake, watching herself die and anticipating what the hell he's going to do to her next." She pauses for impact. Berger has the jury in mind, and I can tell already that she didn't earn her incredible reputation accidentally. "These women really suffered," she quietly adds.
"They most certainly did." My blouse is damp and I am cold again.
"Did you anticipate the same treatment?" She looks at me, a challenge in her eyes, as if daring me to explore everything that went through my mind when Chandonne forced his way through my front door and tried to throw his coat over my head. "Can you remember anything you thought?" she prods. "What did you feel? Or did it all happen so fast…"
"Fast," I cut in. "Yes, it happened fast," I go back. "Fast. And forever. Our internal clocks quit working when we are panicking, fighting for our lives. That's not a medical fact, just a personal observation," I add, groping, feeling my way through memories that aren't complete.
"Then minutes might have seemed like hours to Kim Lu-ong," Berger decides. "Chandonne was with you probably only minutes as he chased you through your great room. How long did it seem?" She is completely focused on this, riveted to me.
"It seemed…" I struggle to describe it. There is no basis for comparison. "Like a flutter…" My voice trails off as I stare at nothing, unblinking, sweating and chilled.
"Like a flutter?" Berger sounds faintly incredulous. "Can you explain what you mean by that, by flutter?"
"Like reality distorts, ripples, like wind ruffling water, the way a puddle looks when wind blows across it, all of your senses suddenly so acute as the animal's survival instinct overrides the brain. You hear air move. You see air move. Everything seems in slow motion, collapsing in on itself, and endless. You see everything, every detail of what is happening, and notice…"
"Notice?" Berger prods.
"Yes, notice" I talk on. "Notice the hair on his hands catching light like monofilament, like fishing line, almost translucent. Notice that he looks almost happy."
"Happy? What do you mean?" Berger quietly asks me. "Was he smiling?"
"I would describe it differently. Not a smile so much as the primitive joy, lust, raging hunger you see in the eyes of an animal about to be fed fresh raw meat." I take a deep breath, focusing on the wall inside my conference room, on a calendar with a Christmas snow scene. Berger sits rigidly, her hands motionless on top of the table. "The problem is not what you observe, it's what you remember," I go on more lucidly. "I think the shock of it all causes a disk error and you can't remember with the same degree of intense attention to detail. Maybe that's survival, too. Maybe we need to forget some things so we don't keep reliving them. Forgetting is part of healing. Like the Central Park jogger dragged off by a gang, raped, beaten, left for dead. Why would she want to remem- her? And I know you are well acquainted with that case," I add with irony. It was Berger's case, of course.
Assistant District Attorney Berger shifts in her chair. "But you do remember," she quietly points out. "And you had seen what Chandonne does to his victims. 'Severe lacerations to the face.' " She begins skimming Luong's autopsy report out loud. " 'Massive comminuted fractures of right parietal bone… fracture of right frontal bone… extending down the midline… bilateral subdural hematoma… disruption of cerebral tissue beneath with accompanying subarachnoid hemorrhaging… depressed fractures that drove the inner table of the skull into the underlying brain… eggshell-like fractures… clotting…"
"Clotting suggests a survival time of at least six minutes from the time the injury was inflicted." I return to my role of interpreter for the dead.
"A hell of a long time," Berger observes, and I can imagine her making a jury sit in silence for six minutes to show them just how long.
"The crushed facial bones, and here"_I touch areas of a photograph_"the splits and tears to skin made by some sort of tool that left a pattern of round and linear wounds."
"Pistol whipping."
"In this case, the Luong case, yes. In Bray's case, he used an unusual type of hammer."
"A chipping hammer."
"I can see you've done your homework."
"A funny habit of mine," she says.
"Premeditation," I go on. "He brought his weapons to the scenes versus using something he found when he got there. And this photo here"_I pick out another horror_"shows knuckle bruises from punching. So he also used his fists to beat her, and from this angle we can see her sweater and bra over there on the floor. It appears he tore them off with his bare hands."