division heads in the agency. No one, she hoped, expected her to do the work of three.
Scratch that, she thought, coming to a halt in her thinking. Yes, they did expect from her the work of three, and if she came up short, no one would shed a tear for her when they closed the door behind her. She was no novice to the squeeze plays and maneuvering that went on in an investigatory agency. She had once been the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., and she lasted in the job for only as long as she could stand the political bonds that repeatedly tied her hands, making demands of her to twist and distort the truth to suit the D.A.'s office, the police or some other constituent.
She dug into the waiting morass of work. But the catalogues Mark had brought kept tugging at her.
She then put aside everything to concentrate on the hefty books.
There were indeed many strange devices that medicine put to use, but she found nothing that came close to the weapon used by the killer. Twice she thought she might have it; both times the item she was looking at was a form of the tracheotomy tube. Could the killer have used such a tube on his victim? If helpless, her hands bound, with the insertion of such a tube to the jugular, blood would stream out and leap across the room. There had been no blood trails, no trajectory patterns; instead the surge of the Copeland girl's blood was controlled from the outset. There had been the soft chokehold around the victim's neck which had almost gone undetected. Then there were the slashes to the throat, purely cosmetic, some of the blood syphoned from the dead girl, more or less painted on the wound, after death, smeared on by a pair of gloved hands or, quite possibly, a brush.
Dr. Stephen Robertson, her blood specialist, had come to her door only an hour before with news that his microscopic examination of the photos Jessica had taken of the victim's throat at close range had shown a bizarre pattern of dried lines in the blood, and in the blood itself a single sable brush hair. Robertson hadn't a doubt that the cosmetic wound had been “touched up” with a paintbrush.
“ Three-quarter-inch, red sable,” he had said, taking a seat as they shared the mental image of a killer so methodical as this. “So the guy's an artist?” she replied, sounding cooler than she felt over the new revelation.
“ Not too many loonies stop to paint the victim's wounds.”
“ To make them look ordinary, don't you see? To cover the tubular wound to the jugular. Make us miss it. But he didn't count on us; doesn't know who he's dealing with. Thinks we'll all fall for his stage tricks.”
“ A little of the artist, a little of the theatrical scamp.”
“ And a lot of medical know-how,” she finished for him. “Look, I want you to go to work studying the photos made in the McDonell and Trent cases. See if we can make another point of comparison on these brush marks.”
“ If we ever get a suspect, he'll be nailed six ways to Sunday, sure… understood, Chief.” But he was staring at the other files, the ones she hadn't hefted to him. “And the others?”
“ Let's concentrate on the two we've managed to get on exhumation for now.”
“ How long, Jess? How long do you figure this creep's been getting away with this?”
“ Not sure… no way to tell.”
“ But you have a suspicion?”
“ A year, maybe. Maybe more.”
“ Good God.” He seemed deflated a moment before bouncing back. “You doing any good with those catalogues?”
“ So far? No.”
“ My guess would be some sort of glass tube, bevel-pointed. One side of the wound is a millimeter deeper than the other.”
“ My sentiments exactly, but how did he control the surge? Blood would have been coming through that tube like a punctured dam, given her position, upside down-the amount of pressure.”
“ Then you decrease the pressure.”
“ How?” she asked.
“ Tourniquet. Valve of some sort. ”Tourniquet,” she repeated. “Remember the marks to the throat that 1 mentioned?”
“ Like a gloved strangulation.”
“ Fainter even than that. Could a tourniquet cause such a wound?”
He looked thoughtfully across at her. “We need to get hold of one, try it out. I should think if it was tight enough, a simple hospital tourniquet could cause such bruising below the surface.”
“ Get hold of one, and we'll test it out.”
“ On who?”
“ On you.”
“ Me?”
“ One of us!”
“ We'll flip a coin.”
“ You're on.”
He did so, saying, “You call it.”
“ You know, I could just order you. You know that, don't you?”
“ Yeah, but you won't. Call it,” he repeated.
She frowned. “Heads.”
He showed her the coin. “Sorry.”
Her frown deepened. “All right, you happy? You get to put me in a chokehold.”
“ Hey, even us married guys have our fantasies.”
They laughed good-naturedly at this.
But behind her laughter, she wasn't so sure she wanted to be used as a guinea pig, no matter the cause. She'd have to submit to the test, unless she could find a stand-in. Before he could race away, she looked up tourniquets in the catalogues beside and around her, Robertson pitching in according to his nature, and they found the most portable and the most innocuous-looking hospital tourniquets, the sort that wouldn't frighten a prostitute, that might look a bit kinky in a bedroom, but just might excite anyone into autoerotic behavior. They even learned that some tourniquets were used in surgery to slow the flow of blood to an area. It had been at this point that Robertson had seen enough and had left, and Jessica began to think about Otto. Boutine's P.P. team was scheduled to meet at two, but this may have been canceled, given Boutine's personal situation. The wake was this evening, the funeral service the following morning. Still, she had been working as if the meeting would come to pass, trying desperately to put as many of the pieces together as possible.
She was engrossed in the med tech catalogues when Albert Hardy, huffing and puffing about the costs incurred on J.T.'s trip to Paris, burst into her office. Hardy was a beefy man with red cheeks and a drinker's red nose, and when he got excited and overheated, he looked like a man about to explode. She spent ten minutes calming him down and another ten minutes explaining that she hadn't time to go into the details for the expenditures incurred in Paris, Illinois, that she had an important, high-level meeting that she had to prepare for and that he would, for the moment, have to deal with the problem on his own.
Hardy fumed. “I'll just see what Chief Leamy has to say about all this.”
“ Good idea,” she responded coolly, “do that.” She then ushered him to and through the door, but no sooner was he gone than in stepped Dr. Zachary Raynack, an M.E. with more years on the force than anyone, and a man who had been passed over when she was given direction of the forensics division. Raynack held deep-seated animosities toward her for this reason, and it hadn't been lost on her that the McDonell girl in Iowa and the Trent girl in Illinois had been his cases, and that he had done various tests on the tissues and samples forwarded to the FBI from these remote places. There had never been an opportunity for him to see the entire truth of these deaths, not long-distance.
He slammed her lab door behind him.
Raynack had dark features giving way to a gray, peppery look about both the bushy eyebrows and the head. Still, at almost fifty, he had a full head of hair. He wore thin wire-rim glasses over a wide face that was pockmarked from some childhood affliction, it seemed. He was known as one of the sharpest minds in criminal investigation. The reputation was well deserved, but in the past several years his health and his professionalism had fallen off, or so it seemed to Jessica. Zachary had always had a low tolerance for what he considered his “ignorant” colleagues, and this “professional intolerance” hadn't slacked off in the slightest, but had rather grown to cancerous proportions. And it had been for this reason that few people could work with Dr. Zach, as he was known about the building, and
