and safe confines of the “store.” But now she was to head up her own assembly line for the follow-through on this case. This time, she was to see the whole picture. And she did; she got it right in her face.?
THREE
Jessica had given up on getting the sophisticated fingerprint equipment promised them by the Milwaukee field office. She might have had results with an ultraviolet imaging system that intensified light 700,000 times at a crime scene. But she must make do with what she had, a field generator and headlights flooding through the windows and doors. She tried to take it in stride; besides, the chances of actually capturing a print from the killer in the terribly disturbed crime scene was scarce at best. She had noticed that someone had actually picked up one of the dead girl's parts and returned it to her, laying it below the body like an offering, and it wasn't very likely that it had been the killer's doing, but someone who had been moved by the awful scene.
Still, she had gone through the motions, using the best technology available to her, the MAGNA brush. It was an ingenious device, small enough to carry in her breast pocket. The MAGNA made it possible to develop fingerprints on all kinds of materials, even those that once resisted processing. The locals were making their own prints with conventional tools and seemed to her in the stone age.
Everything would have to await her return to Quantico, where fluids and stains found at the scene, along with fibers, could be identified, and where DNA results might show them something. But such tests took time.
The local law guys were getting antsy now, wanting very much to cut the corpse down, close down the death house. She couldn't blame them. It was one of those universal instincts, an urge to tidy up the helpless victim, to right the wrong so far as it could be righted, to at least put the helpless form of the victim in a more natural pose; they wanted someone to clean her wounds, not to measure and poke and take slivers of tissue from her. They wanted to put the ugliness from view.
Along with the urge to clean and tidy up came the accompanying illusion that doing so was not only helpful but the morally right thing to do.
Her father had told her about such things as this; he had been witness to it countless times, and so had she now. But he also taught her that such urges were both natural and good, despite the harm they often did in destroying evidence and the desired sanctity of a crime scene. Such human urges certainly served the living; they certainly served to “soften” the scene, but thankfully, and somehow, Otto's long-distance proviso that the corpse not be touched by anyone had prevailed, amazing as it seemed. Once again, she guessed it was the sheriffs doing, a man named Stowell. She knew that to these men she appeared hard, perhaps even perverted, to have kept them so long from releasing the body from its silent torment, its bonds and its unholy position. The kind of well- intentioned mentality that caused no end of problems at crash sites where victims of burning Boeing 707s were too soon lifted off and placed all in neat little rows, creating a nightmare of identification problems for the medical examiner.
She had been called in on such a case with the terrible fate of Pan Am flight 929. It had been her first mass- death site and it would prove a massive undertaking in more ways than one. Identifying mangled and charred bodies, fitting limbs torn and hurtled about a debris field of some hundred and fifty yards, was enough of a challenge for any forensics specialist. She had been an assistant M.E. on call at Washington Memorial when the news of the crash came over. Such an announcement is like an invitation to a frat party, and so within the hour all roads leading to the crash site were congested with off-duty cops, reporters, camera crews, voyeurs of every stripe. Anyone with the remotest excuse to be on hand converged on the site, including politicians prepared to be interviewed.
Fire engines lined the way along with ambulances, along with more cops than necessary. The terrible secret amid the mayhem and confusion was the looting which was typically blamed on the local population. At a busy airport like Dulles International the first on scene were those whose job it was to rescue the living and protect the bodies of those who'd died. At the Pan Am crash the first to arrive were the Port Authority police, followed by the WPD, the firemen and the emergency medical supply teams, nurses, doctors, morticians and then nearby residents. The amount of looting was unforgivable.
The relatives of the dead were in an impossible situation, Kafkaesque in its nightmarish proportions. They saw evidence of the police, the firemen and the medical teams rushing in to save or identify their loved ones. How then might they question a missing broach, a lost diamond, a wallet? Without recourse, there was no way to accuse anyone or even prove that something had been stolen.
Pan Am 929 had been a “rich” flight, coming in from Buenos Aires, the passenger list reading like the social register of Washington, D.C. But by the time Jessica had arrived on scene, it looked like a planeload of paupers. Another reason to put the bodies all in a row, she guessed, in order to frisk them for rings and things-things that might quickly identify the charred and mutilated remains.
She overheard one policeman say to a distraught young woman, “You say your mother always wore this ring? But can you say you actually saw it on her hand when she boarded the plane in Buenos Aires?''
An archbishop on his way back to Rome via D.C. was located, his body intact, but his gold and amethyst ring and cross, along with a Rolex, had vanished without a trace. Outraged, one police lieutenant ordered all wallets and jewelry removed from the bodies under the watchful eyes of his men, and these items were tagged with a number corresponding to a number given each body, and placed in plastic bags sent to the police property room so that no further thievery would occur. It was at this point that Jessica and other M.E. s had come on the scene, having battled rush-hour traffic to get there. By then there was not much personal property left, and the bodies, all neatly numbered and assembled in a row, and covered over by a green tent, had been stripped of whatever personal effects might identify them.
As a medical examiner, Jessica's main concern was to identify unrecognizable bodies. The easiest, quickest and least painful method of doing so was through the use of personal effects and the passenger list, with its seat number for every passenger. At the untouched “pristine” scene, the M.E. could see patterns of injury, relationships of body parts, enabling her to work out the exact details of what happened, and why one passenger's head was severed and another's left intact.
While she was working over the bodies at the crash site, Jessica had been painfully aware that influential people at the FBI had their eyes on her, as she was awaiting an appointment to the academy. The tragedy of Flight 929 became a litmus test for her. Two of the passengers aboard had been with the Bureau. She got the appointment, but she reserved the right to maintain a little contempt for all those who had profited in one form or another from the tragedy, including herself, all those superlatives about ambition notwithstanding.
Now in Wekosha, Wisconsin, with a single body to work with, she was expected to have all the answers, but without the necessary lab time, all she could manage was the same as Stowell or Lumley: guesswork. However, one clear fact in all of this stood out. Without a doubt the killer had literally “milked” the dead girl of her blood. She pictured an enormous vampire bat at the girl's throat, huddled there, lapping up her life with a vile tongue and incisors.
Otto returned from outdoors, looking controlled and tightly wired once again. He extended a hand to help her to her feet from her kneeling position there at the throat.
“ I've got all I need,” she told Otto, “and I'm ready to leave.”
Lumley lost some saliva and tobacco when he blurted out, “You mean we can cut her down now?” His tone was sarcastic and brittle.
Sheriff Stowell fixed him with a stare.
Jessica said simply, “Yes, but do so very carefully and gently. We don't want any mortician wounds confusing anyone later.
“ We'll be careful,” said one of the Wekosha cops.
Jessica left quickly, now anxious to breathe the crisp, cold air of the Wisconsin countryside, filling her lungs with it while the car was loaded with her equipment and findings.
The night here had a silence that seemed impenetrable, the stillness like cold lead leeching into her bones. The darkness of the deep woods was complete and mysterious. It was such an isolated place, both peaceful and dangerous at once. It reminded her of a hundred hunting camps she had visited with her father on excursions for deer. The end result of their hunt was a gutted carcass, and when she heard the grunting and noise of the men inside as they released the dead girl from her bonds, she thought of the horror that she had somehow put on hold
