Firewall, first developed for firemen and crematorium workers and anyone else working with burn victims, such as police officials, paramedics, pathologists and medical examiners.
The scene must be tolerated in order for her to perform her duties. She'd come way too far to be here just to crap out now. No walking away from this, not even in her mind. But she must somehow remain aloof, above the horror in order to deal with it in a controlled, professional manner, and to stand her ground with Darwin Reynolds and the other men and women present, especially the young ex-marine, Petersaul.
She composed herself with great gulps of the last vestiges of the early morning Milwaukee air. She said to Darwin, “Air here is supposed to be filled with the fumes of… what… ninety-nine local breweries? My best friend and right hand in the lab, John Thorpe, told me that if things get too hairy in Milwaukee, the natives just suck up the brew from the fumes. Does it work?”
“Takes the sport out of drinking. Most of us like to sidle up to a bar and down a tall one.”
“One big swilling swear-never-to-get-drunk-again fest, eh? I understand, every Friday and Saturday night.”
“We gotta be imaginative to compete with neighboring Chicago somehow.”
Traffic below seemed like the world was rushing by the open balcony with the death room inside; the jaded world, ignoring the collection of squad cars and coroner's vehicles that had converged on the apartment house in this residential neighborhood. People in Milwaukee appeared as world-weary of strobe lights and sirens as military men were to exploding bombs lobbing overhead. Still, the requisite crowd had gathered, curious, asking questions, pushing at the barriers. Newspapermen and camera crews in particular clamored to be on the inside, gathering news. She heard a familiar phrase from the beat cop holding everyone in check, a kind of mantra at such scenes: “Can't let out no names or take any pictures till the next of kin's been notified. You know that.”
Jessica thought again of the worst monster she had ever chased down and killed, Mad Matthew Matisak. No creature of the night she'd ever hunted compared in utter brutality, until now. This ripping out of a woman's spinal cord, this ranked a Tort 10 on the torture scale if the victim were alive when he splayed open her back, and from the coloration around the naked wound, it would surprise Jessica to learn otherwise.
Matisak's blood-drinking measures had exacted a slow kind of torture, the draining of his victim's very lifeblood, and so it had rated a Tort 9 on the torture scale. The scale of torture represented in the spine-thief case she looked at today did not compare with regard to the time it took to die. The Olsen woman did not suffer long. Still, in Jessica's book, this monster rated a ten for sheer animal brutality, and it made her wonder if it were not some sickening animal need that drove him, some genetically predisposed urge toward gnawing on bone, a throwback to the caveman mind dwelling in us all.
It felt in her own bones-scuttling like a spider along her own spine-as if the putrid disease of evil carried about by the criminally insane Matisak had unaccountably returned, maybe had never really left. Perhaps in a new guise, a new shape, a new form, but the same evil nonetheless. “Cut of the same satanic cloth, this one,” she muttered to herself.
“What's that?” asked Reynolds, his forehead creased in consternation.
“Confound bastard is like a fiery coal from hell's own hearth.” She took in another deep breath. “Should've brought some whiskey along.”
Jessica re entered the death room and stepped to the body again. “This one,” she said to the others in the room, “this one may lead me into early retirement. You say she lived alone, that she hardly socialized or went out?”
“That's right, a reclusive type,” replied Agent Reynolds. “Vic's name's Joyce Dixon-Olsen, aged forty-eight, a loner, lived with her dog, Shep. Dog's at his vet's… nice, good-natured as all hell.”
“I suppose it'd be asking too much to hope that someone in a forensics capacity got to the dog before he was shampooed?”
Sands frowned and shook his head. “Gone long before I got here, I'm afraid.”
“He was one hell of a mess, a long-haired cocker spaniel,” Reynolds replied apologetically. “First on scene took better care of him than he did securing the body, I'm afraid. Dog lover.”
Jessica kneeled beside the blood-soaked corpse, and looked into the woman's face, turned as it was sideways against the carpet. Jessica mentally traced the features, thinking she had character written right into them, that she appeared to be someone who had seen and overcome much adversity until now. That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. She might be anyone's mother or aunt. “No family?”
“Ex-husband passed away two years ago. Some distant relatives in Nebraska. They've been notified,” said Reynolds in his resonant voice.
Jessica placed the ruler end of her scalpel against the wound to Olsen's cranium. “Diameter of the wound is less than an inch; the work of a small blunt object, likely a hammer of some sort as Sands said. From the concave appearance an educated guess says the hammer blow came from a ball peen styled one.”
Darwin Reynolds now knelt alongside the cadaver, too. Reynolds's black skin was as ebony as one of his African ancestors-Nigeria or Ghana, Jessica guessed from his bone structure and height. He had a broad, strong face, and a nose any Roman would kill for, all beneath those black, probing eyes. Every girl's dream, she thought, but not mine. I've got Richard.
Milwaukee Police Chief Wyatt Abrams, who had remained sullen and silent throughout, a great anger seething below his calm, had also partaken of the balcony air. A big man not to be missed by anyone, his footsteps alone announced his return from outside. Everyone else had returned ahead of Abrams. Staring down at the scene, at Reynolds, Sands and Jessica all on knees perched about the body like so many ghoulish scavengers, Abrams erupted, “I don't fucking suppose you people in Washington have anything like this in your data banks! We gotta catch this moth-erfuckingfreak before he strikes again.”
“I couldn't agree with you more,” she replied.
“Not in my city… not here. I can't look at this kind of thing again, not ever, Dr. Coran.”
“Sir… I completely understand.”
“What about those international guys you guys check with all the time, Interpol? They ever get anything remotely like this overseas someplace? Say just off a military base? Maybe our guy is some sort of military butcher or even a military medic type.”
Jessica stood and went to Chief Abrams. She walked with him away from the others. “Checked with Interpol and every law-enforcement agency that cooperates with the FBI worldwide, Chief. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever seen anything like this save Portland, Oregon, and-”
“I know, Millbrook, Minnesota.”
“But this is the first one to fall under the lens of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. It's a… a uniquely sick MO… nothing like it in anyone's computers.”
Reynolds had followed them, listening. He added, “Wyatt, it's got to be related to the Towne case in Portland, Oregon, over a year back. Ex-husband, a regular mountain man type, a black Jeremiah Johnson for the modern age, and he's on death row for the crime. He supposedly hated her enough to do something like this.” He pointed back to the mutilated corpse. “Can you really imagine that two men on the planet could conceive of and execute this exact atrocity?”
“Yeah, I can if they turn out to be bunk mates in a prison cell, or two nuts meeting on a train or at a window placing a bet, and your boy Towne in Oregon spent a lot of time in prison cells from what I gather.”
“He's locked up. Can't have done this here in Milwaukee, and there's no proof he had ever been in Minnesota, Chief.”
Abrams spoke to Jessica. “Remember that case breaking on CNN?”
She nodded.
“Reynolds thinks it's somehow relevant to this murder.”
“Didn't he say he killed the woman for her spine because she always called him spineless?” Agent Pete shouted from the kitchen where she was using Luminol spray and a blue light to scour for useful blood evidence. Obviously by now everyone in the apartment was involved in the speculation and debate.
“And in his confession,” added Sands, getting into the foray. “What was it he said at the trial? Let me see if this old brain still has it tucked away. Oh, yeah… yeah. He said, 'I guess in a way I did kinda get her hackles up. Got those spiney bones breaking skin on her backside once't or twice't… kinda made her what she was-all spine and blister.'“ All but Darwin Reynolds laughed at this.
Abrams shouted, “The man had an insanity defense at trial, and at the time, the guy was a lunatic, but jail
