She allowed the others in to collect their samples, but not before she had the photographer snap close-ups of the eyes. Only Dr. Balsam seemed curious about her attention to the eyes.
“ You suspect strangulation, Doctor?” he asked her.
“ Perhaps.”
“ Why, then, slash her throat, if he has strangled her to death?”
“ She was not strangled to death,” Jessica assured him.
“ The day I can't see a strangulation murder, I will retire,” he replied.
She smiled and carried on. The two mortuary men had had enough and were gone for a smoke. Over her shoulder was Kaseem, who was being pushed out by the D.A. There was no one in the room, including Jessica, who did not feel slighted. Some had been feeling slighted since Janel McDonell had died. It was an Iowa City city case; it was the jurisdiction of the county; no, the state. And here come the federals and the military. Kaseem's uniform lent an air of respectability about him, and it helped to keep peace, perhaps, but it was just one more symbol of the numbers of jurisdictional levels at play in the crowded room where Janel McDonell's empty shell mocked their petty concerns.
Jessica hated such ridiculous jockeying, but she was also practical and realistic. Lewis had warned her about the situation, and he had been right. It was an election year in Iowa, and the D.A. might be running for governor. Distrust, along with the fetid corpse, turned the air in the room thick. Perhaps the only way to dispel all the distrust was to have the autopsy done in the open, in full view of everyone connected with the case, and yet she had orders not to divulge information about the condition of Janel McDonell's throat to anyone but Otto.
She wasn't likely to get out of this room with that secret fully intact, she realized.
Dr. Lewis did the honors of opening up the mortician's stitches. All of the internal organs were still intact and the toxicologist and the others were anxious to get at them in order to reaffirm their original findings and put this case back to rest, back into the grave.
While they took their samples, pairing off over organs they felt particularly important, Jessica felt into the throat through the deep well of the chest for any damage done in the area of the larynx.
Dr. Balsam stared at her in deep consternation and curiosity. He said in a near whisper, “You came looking for something very specific, I see. What is that?”
She removed her hand from the location and quickly cut away that part of Janel's throat that might tell them if her killer was the same man as the Wekosha blood-taker.
“ What're you doing?” asked Balsam.
“ I have to take a section of the jugular back to Quantico with me,” she told him.
He stared into her eyes. “Yes, I see that you do.”
She realized that Balsam had accepted her among a special company of doctors-as his equal. He said nothing more, and the others knew to follow his lead.
“ You can put her back away now,” she told Balsam. “I'll see to it. I'll also report what you've taken from the body in my report, send it on to Boutine. Meanwhile, you've got a plane to catch-”
“ Thank you, sir.”
“- and a killer,” he added.
She'd made arrangements for a military transport back to Quantico, if she could be at the airfield by noon. She told Kaseem of her plans, but he had gotten carried away with slicing samples from the liver, stomach and other organs to pay her much mind. He definitely had not learned much either about exhumations or the FBI case she was building. He had especially not learned about the case.
On her way to the airfield in a police car, she wondered if J.T. had had any of the various problems she had faced today.?
TWELVE
The news broke in Washington and all over the country, thanks to United Press International, and everyone who could read, and everyone who owned a TV or radio, knew the nasty secret of the bloodthirsty killer of Wekosha, Wisconsin: that he bled his victim to death, drank his victim's blood in a ghoulish, vampiristic manner and carried the rest of her blood off with him. The newspaper painted as lurid a tale as they could with a few powerful images and details they'd so diligently scrounged for in the Copeland girl's case.
Boutine had been right, and they had been fortunate to have the almost forty-eight hours granted them before the story went public. At least they had made some headway on the physical evidence. They had quietly gone about the two additional evidence-gathering forays into Illinois and Iowa.
J.T. was late in returning with the specimen from the Trent girl, and thus far it hadn't been analyzed; however, the McDonell specimen was a definite match. Jessica had run the tests herself, using the SEM, which destroyed the specimen but preserved on print the images necessary to compare with those made on the Copeland girl. The match was unmistakable, down to the depth of the incision, the circular “pucker” of the wound to the jugular, all of it, including the severe but cosmetic throat slash which more or less masked the true cause of death. Like Candy Copeland's, Janel McDonell's life had been syphoned off with her blood through some sort of tube that fed the vampire that had killed her, and that filled his containers for any future “brews” he might like to drain.
She wondered how many more had suffered and died at the hands of this methodical, plodding, diabolical killer who left so few signs of himself. She wondered how they were ever going to catch him, since they had nothing but microscopic clues to his identity.
She got on the phone and telephoned a doctor friend and asked him twenty questions.
“ Can you get for me a sample of any and all tubes and equipment you use to drain off a patient's blood? Say from a wound.”
“ Suction devices, you mean, or syphoning devices.”
“ That, and anything else you can think of that would drain off or take away unwanted fluids.”
“ Hell, you've just described a dialysis machine.”
“ Only if they've created a hand-held model, lightweight and portable.”
“ Now it's all fluids?” he asked, a little exasperated.
“ Any bodily fluid, yes, Mark.”
“ Like in the case of a cancer patient whose lungs have filled with fluid?”
“ Yes, anything at all that would act as a catheter, a drain to release blood, urine, anything.”
“ That's a tall order, Dr. Coran.”
“ It's important. It could help save a life.”
“ I read about your Wisconsin vampire. This has to do with him, doesn't it?”
“ Please, Mark, keep this between us… please.”
“ Sure, sure. Nice to see your name in print, I should think. Dr. Jessica Coran! Sounded like you're Dick Tracy, and that with you on the case, the killer's days are numbered.”
“ Wish it were so.”
“ At least they got your name spelled right.”
“ How soon can you get the stuff to me?”
“ Tell you what.”
“ Yes?”
“ I've got surgical equipment catalogues that're filled with all kinds of gadgets. You might save yourself some time-”
“ Good idea. Send them over first, and I'll try to narrow the field from the books.”
“ Consider it done.”
She hung up, taking a deep breath, realizing the day had disappeared and her neck was getting as stiff as a board. She'd not been contacted by Boutine or anyone else since her return, and once when she called Boutine, she was told curtly that he was out and would not be returning all day. She left a message with the secretary for him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. She then called his home number. He'd told her to call there whenever necessary. Again, she got the answering machine and her frustration with him was rising.
She had heard from J.T. at noon, grousing long distance about how he planned on never going back to Paris
