Without her medication, bloating set in, along with the natural expansion of the tissues by the water. It’s how and why I was able to get fingerprints from her.” He held up a single vial with a tiny lump of flesh in a preservative gel. “It’s one of Tammy Sheppard’s fingertips. It was enough to ID her with a missing persons report. You want a witness list?”
Thorn hung back, but Powers rushed them with a long- bone X ray, the left femur and knee. “It’s from our victim. She once had a compound fracture. You can see it here, just below the knee; and just above, here, you also see a simple spiral fracture,” he said, pointing with a ballpoint pen. “It has gone a long way in IDing Jane Doe number three.
” Thorn momentarily joined them, piping in with, “As for your victim, Dr. Coran, we found absolutely nothing to distinguish her. Her insides are as clean a slate as her out- sides.”
“ And all three were strangled, repeatedly?” she asked. “The water in the lungs-”
“ Lungs full to bursting, but yes, signs of multiple lacerations and strangling,” added Thorn.
“- about the throat and wrists, just like the others, and that information was not released to the press,” added Powers.
“ So, there’s little chance any one of these was a copycat killing,” surmised Santiva.
“ Virtually none…” Coudriet put aside the little vial he’d been tightly holding, a dark shadow coloring his features.
“ Parents of the IDed Jane are on their way.” Jessica only half heard Powers’s last remark as she stepped into the autopsy rooms, where all three victims lay beneath sheets, well within view of one another, separated only by glass partitions. The three bodies looked like an endless trail of reflected images here, as if a mirror were being held up at each end.
Three in one, one after the other; the bastard had cut them loose close enough to shore to insure that they would float straight into the hands of authorities. Had the SOB learned via TV or newsprint of her and Santiva’s arrival and the organization of a task force? Was that the cause of his sudden rage? Either way, all three victims had been long dead before their arrival. It was like stepping into a dark theater in the midst of a play about insanely vented evil. She stood silent vigil over the bodies for a moment, looking into each room from where she stood, realizing anew the enormity of the moment. In each death room lay a separate victim of the Night Crawler, three young women who had most likely not one thing in common before now, and who now had everything in common.
“ If they could only talk,” whispered Coudriet in her ear.
Peeling back the sheet in the first room, Jessica recognized the remains of the young woman she had earlier examined in the field. She went next to the second room and looked into the bloated face of another victim, this one with features still adhering. This one was Coudriet’s subject, the young woman he was calling Tammy Sue Sheppard. Jessica lingered, looking over the remains and instantly agreeing that this woman’s body was in far better shape than the one she had examined. Thorn and Powers, like children anxious to show off a favorite pet or toy, led her to the third body, the one they had taken charge of in the field. “Want to show you this,” announced Powers, his glasses bobbing as he tore away the sheet covering the swollen, draining body. There was a terrible gash in this one’s left side, just below the rib cage.
“ Looks like another shark bite,” said Thorn.
“ Measures up rather shallow for a large shark, but a small one might’ve done the damage,” Powers instantly added.
Jessica’s mind worked over the possibilities: auto crash wounds sometimes looked bad, but seldom was so large a section of flesh missing from the torso; she’d seen hatchet- type weapons such as meat cleavers do as much, but the cut would be clean-cleaved in two. “It’s more than a simple fall or collision,” she agreed. “And the edges of the wound are really quite jagged.”
“ In keeping with a shark bite, I’d say,” Thorn quickly defended, as if his reputation were on the line.
“ Try an outboard motor,” said Dr. Coudriet. “I’ve seen outboard motor cuts a lot down here; somebody, or something like a manatee, gets tangled in one of those things, it can take out a hell of a chunk of flesh.”
“ Along with the sailor’s rope and knot, it all points back to a boat being the killing ground,” suggested Santiva.
“ The bodies may’ve traveled a good distance across the channel, too, in which case a speeding boat may’ve hit her,” cautioned Coudriet.
Jessica agreed but did not say so. “We have lots of work to do here, Eriq. I’ll see what I can learn from the Sheppard body in particular.”
Eriq nodded as he said, “Word’s come down that her parents are on their way to ID the body, so I wouldn’t do any carving until-”
“ A little late for that,” said Coudriet, recalling his bag of fingertips, “but not to worry. We’ll have her presentable at the window.”
“ I’ll go talk to the parents,” Eriq said, “and I understand there were a couple of young ladies with her the night of her disappearance. I’m seeing them today; see what they can give us. Touch base with you later.”
“ Right, and good luck.” Eriq nodded and disappeared through a corridor, led by Powers to where civilians, and parents in particular, awaited officialdom. “No doubt having the FBI on the case will do wonders putting the concerns of the victims’s relatives on hold,” Coudriet mocked.
“ We have released enough information that we can hope for some help in learning the identities of the other two girls,” Jessica told Coudriet. “It may take some time, but we have television and the news media on our side for the time being-”
“ Don’t count on that lasting very long.”
“ All three of them died in the exact same manner as Allison Norris, and I suspect there will be more.”
“ Shall we go to work, Doctor?”
She nodded, then went for a surgical gown and gloves. She superstitiously located her own scalpel from her bag as well, the scalpel her father had given her so many years before, the scalpel she’d used to foil Matthew Matisak’s ugly plans in Chicago. She knew she’d need all the luck and skill she could muster to end the career of the heartless Night Crawler.
The autopsies on the two as-yet-unidentified young women only corroborated what they already knew, that each had died in the same manner, at the hands of the same killer. Tammy Sue Sheppard died in identical fashion, the fantasy-murder ritual precisely the same.
But it took seven hours of intensive lab work to prove it beyond any doubt, so Jessica was seven hours on her feet as they performed three autopsies simultaneously, each M.E. in communication with the other. By the time it was over, all the doctors were exhausted.
It was after six p.m. when suddenly Santiva showed up and said, “I’ve got something for you to see, and there’s someone I want you to meet right away.”
“ Eriq, I’m beat. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?” Jessica pleaded.
“ There’s been another letter from the killer.”
She was tearing away the rubber gloves she’d used during the autopsy, tossing them into a trash bin, thinking how stupid it was to expect anyone to replace rubber gloves at every single step of an autopsy or evidence-gathering. “As we expected there would be,” she said far more calmly than her heart was beating.
“ Here’s a copy. Read it, then meet me in the corridor. The eyewitness hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with us. I thought perhaps if she talked to you, another woman, it might be productive of something.”
She waved her hands in the air. “Jesus, Eriq, at least let me change and scrub and throw some water in my face, and while I’m doing that, do you think you could find me a nice garden salad?”
“ Jess, this is important.”
She took in a deep breath as she tore away her surgical garb and deposited it in a gurney. She then took the copy of the killer’s note in hand and walked into a nearby locker room where female internists and lab technicians changed. Coudriet and the other doctors had disappeared after the triple-autopsy like scattering rats, leaving the technicians to find freezer space for the bodies.
Santiva stormed into the women’s locker room behind her, saying, “I know you’ve been on your feet and you’re stretched to the max, Jess, but I think you’ll want to talk to Tammy Sue Sheppard’s girlfriend. The girl remembers something of the man Tammy Sue disappeared with the night she didn’t come home.”
