“The arms, and between the breasts?”
“Bruising. Premortem. He knelt on her.” She called to her assistant.
“Let’s get her opened up.”
“Anything you can tell me so far?” Banks asked.
Dr. Wallace paused and leaned forward, her hands on the metal rim of the table. A couple of strands of light- brown hair had worked their F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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way out of her protective head cover. “It certainly appears as if she was strangled manually. No ligature. From the front, like this.” She held her hands out and mimicked the motion of squeezing them around someone’s neck.
“Any chance of fingerprints from the skin, or DNA?”
“There’s always a chance that some of the killer’s skin, or even a drop of blood, rubbed off on her. It looks as if he cleaned her up afterward, but he might not have caught everything.”
“There was something that might have been semen on her thigh,”
Banks said.
Dr. Wallace nodded. “I saw it. Don’t worry, the lab has samples of everything, but it’ll take time. You ought to know that. Fingerprints?
I don’t think so. I know it’s been done, but there was so much slippage in this case. Like when you open a doorknob, your fingers slip on its surface and everything gets smeared and blurred.”
“Did she struggle?”
Dr. Wallace glanced away. “Of course she bloody did.”
“I was thinking of scratches.”
Dr. Wallace took a deep breath. “Yes. There might be DNA in the samples the SOCOs took from under her fingernails. Your killer might have scratches on his forearms or face.” She paused. “Frankly, though, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. As you can see, her fingernails were bitten to the quicks.”
“Yes, I’d noticed,” said Banks. “And the bruising?”
“As I said, he knelt on her arms, and at one point on the center of her chest, probably to hold her down while he used his hands to strangle her. She didn’t have a chance.”
“You’re sure it’s a man?”
Dr. Wallace gave him a scornful glance. “Take it from me, this is a man’s work. Unless someone’s girlfriend did the strangling after the boyfriend raped and sodomized her.”
It had been done, Banks knew. Couples had acted in tandem as sexual predators or killers. Fred and Rosemary West. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Terry and Lucy Payne. But he thought Dr. Wallace was probably right to dismiss it in this case. “Were all the injuries inf licted while she was alive?”
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“There’s no evidence of postmortem maltreatment, if that’s what you mean. The bruising and tearing in the vagina and anus both indicate she was alive while he raped her. You can see the marks on her wrists where he held her. And you can see her upper arms, neck and chest for yourself, as well as the bruising on her thighs. This was a rough and violent rape followed by strangulation.”
“How did he restrain her while he was raping her?” Banks mused out loud. “He couldn’t have done it with his knees on her arms.”
“He could have had a weapon. A knife, say.”
“So why not stab her? Why strangle her?”
“I couldn’t tell you. He may simply have used threats to control her.
Isn’t it often the case that rapists will threaten to kill their victims if they don’t cooperate, or even to hunt them down later, harm their families?”
“Yes,” said Banks. He knew his questions might sound crude and insensitive, but these were things he had to know. That was why it had always been so easy with Dr. Glendenning. Working with a woman pathologist was different. “Why kill her at all?” he asked.
Dr. Wallace looked at Banks as she might a specimen on her table.
“I don’t know,” she said. “To shut her up, perhaps. Maybe she recognized him or could identify him. That’s your job, isn’t it, to figure out things like that?”
“I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud. Bad habit of mine. I was also just wondering if there was any evidence that the strangulation was part of the thrill, rough sex gone wrong?”
Dr. Wallace shook her head. “I don’t think so. Though he was certainly rough with her. As I said, it very much looks as if he had one knee pushing against her chest as he strangled her, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, in that position to perform a sexual assault on her. I’d say in this case that he strangled her when he’d done with her.”
“Dr. Burns estimated time of death at between midnight and two a.m. on Sunday morning. Do you agree?”
“I can’t find anything that would argue against that estimate,” Dr.
Wallace said. “But it
