“ 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.
“ Sorry, Doctor.”
“ Okay, I'm sorry. I was out of line on that,” he replied. “But what are you getting at here?”
“ I won't know until I get back to Quantico. I need electron microscopic photography on this.” With her scalpel she sliced a deep square of skin around the pale jugular section, her eyes intent on the area of the clean, deep cut that was necessary. She then realized yet another hidden message below the surface. “Oh, God,” she moaned.
“ What is it?” Stadtler was now crazy, and he all but pushed her aside. “What?”
“ Here, and here.” She pointed with her scalpel, which fit neatly into the cut on either side of the jugular, and each went deep, but there were two cuts and they did not connect. The long slash that connected each was superficial at the center. Something else had penetrated the jugular, and the scar from this wound was near invisible below the larger throat slash that hid it.
She explained this to Stadtler.
He was shaken. “I… I thought you examined this last night.”
“ Obviously not close enough.”
“ What… does it mean?”
“ It means that a second instrument was used at the jugular, and this large laceration is just a cosmetic masking of that fact.”
“ What other instrument?”
“ I don't know, and I won't know unless I take part of her throat back with me to Virginia.”
He stared long at her. “I suppose it's… necessary.”
“ Absolutely.”
He stepped away and then turned. “Gets worse every moment, doesn't it? Maybe I'm getting too old for this business. This world, perhaps.”
“ Given the dismemberment, it'll be a closed casket, of course.”
“ Yes, well, what's one more missing part?” said Stadtler. “No one will miss it.”
Jessica finished removing the square cake of flesh from the throat, and Stadtler's silent, able assistant held out a small jar filled with preserving fluids for the pulpy, layered section. “This information remains in this room, gentlemen,” she told them. “We've got to keep this to ourselves. Not a word.”
The estimate of time of death was made the more precise by a combination of items: livor mortis, the dark discoloration of death, and the degree of that coloration; algor mortis, the cold touch of death; and rigor mortis, the degree of stiffness or limberness told them much. Annie “Candy” Copeland had died between midnight and 2 A.M., the night before her discovery. According to Stadtler, the last man to see her alive was a swinish, small-town pimp who used her and put her on the street, a man named Scarborough, known locally as Scar. The man was under arrest for suspicion of murdering Annie Copeland.
Finished with Copeland's corpse at last, Jessica stepped away from the autopsy table, the hum of the A.C. drumming in her ears. She peeled away her rubber gloves and the mask, depositing both in the bins provided at the door. “Please have a copy of your report, along with the samples I've taken, ready to leave with me for Virginia. We'll be leaving the municipal airport sometime this afternoon. If there's a problem getting everything to me by fourteen-ah, two o'clock-please contact me, either at the inn or at the airport.
Stadtler nodded, and their eyes met, and in the silence between them, she came to realize that somewhere along the way, she'd gained his respect. He said, “Dr. Coran, I'll see to it personally.” She breathed deeply, licked her lips, and in a near feline expression of gratitude, she said, “Dr. Stadtler, it has been a very worthwhile experience working with you and your staff.” She was grateful that she was no longer his “dear Dr. Coran.”
She peeled away the green garments of her trade just outside the autopsy room in an anteroom where more bins stood, and where she could wash up. She splashed some water on her face and glanced into the mirror, taking her reflection in. She felt that she looked as if she'd been on a week's binge, and somewhere in the back of her head she heard the wafting music of a Jimmy Buffet tune strike up.
' 'Wasting away in Wekoshaville,'' she said to her reflection. Fieldwork was tough. Maybe she should've stayed in the lab.
She tamped her face with a clean, white linen, straightened her outfit, fixed her lipstick and then pushed through the door, going for the nearest exit. She needed the one thing Wekosha was good for-fresh air.?
