aficionado and we’ll be able to track the line to his tackle box.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Sam turned her mike back on and bent over her work. “The body is five foot one inches tall and weighs sixty-nine pounds. Body Mass Index is thirteen point four. The body is cachetic, with temporal wasting, prominent bone protrusions, concave abdomen. Pale oral mucosa, pale conjunctivae with some minor petechial hemorrhage. A vitreous fluid level is taken.”
Taylor glanced at McKenzie, expecting him to freak, but he stood his ground and watched. Good. He was toughening up.
Sam took the victim’s hand, pinched a fold of skin between her gloved thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. The skin tented and stayed that way. The silent attendant took a picture. She moved to Allegra’s abdomen and repeated the action. The results were the same.
“Skin is ashy and has exceptionally poor turgor. No one can say this girl was just plain skinny. I’m seeing severe dehydration, for starters,” Sam said.
Taylor nodded. “About that. Baldwin mentioned something last night. He’s been dealing with a serial case in Italy.”
McKenzie brightened. “II Macellaio or II Mostro?”
“How do you know about them?” Taylor asked.
“Oh, I follow serial-killer cases. I find them fascinating.”
Ha. McKenzie didn’t have a clue what it would be like to really follow a serial killer. He wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic.
“II Macellaio. Tell me what you know,” she said.
“Well,” McKenzie began, suddenly blushing at being the center of attention.
She needed to train him away from that, and fast. The minute A.D.A. Page, who was cute as a button and fierce as a shark, got him on the stand, started asking him questions and he blushed, the jury would assume he was lying.
“Relax,” she said. “I’m just curious, okay?”
He continued to redden, though he nodded his head yes. “II Macellaio likes to have sex with dead girls,” he managed.
“Ugh,” Sam said, but Taylor nodded her approval.
“It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, McKenzie, but you’re right. He’s a necrosadist, a killer that murders in order to have sex with the dead victim. Very rare. And he poses his victims like famous paintings after he’s through with their bodies. Which is where I was going. Baldwin said several of the earlier cases’ COD was starvation, but II Macellaio moved on to strangulation. I guess he got tired of waiting for them to die.”
Sam had moved on to the next phase of her exam, had the victim in stirrups and was between her legs taking samples. “Yo, we’ve got lubricant here. Starvation and necrophilia, huh? Sounds like a nice guy. If that’s the case for Ms. Johnson, and I can’t say one way or the other until I finish the post, he’d probably need some lube to get things in the right place, if you know what I mean.”
“Why?” McKenzie asked.
Sam kept working, but spoke over her shoulder to him. “When you’re severely dehydrated, all your fluids dry up. All of them. Your blood thickens, your blood pressure drops dramatically, you’d feel sluggish and unable to move around. With no nourishment at all, it wouldn’t take long to be dry as a chip. That’s why her skin is tenting, there’s no fluid in the body to help the skin return to its normal state. It would be a rough way to go. But here’s our piece de resistance. Stuart, could you help me roll her? Gently, now.”
It didn’t take much to get the girl over onto her face. Taylor saw the pattern on the girl’s back and sucked in her breath.
Sam traced her finger along the girl’s back. “Yeah. Pretty wild, huh?”
McKenzie cocked his head to the side. “Is this lividity?”
Sam shook her head. “There’s a little bit of lividity, but this is more like prolonged exposure to whatever caused the pattern.”
“Burns, maybe?” Taylor asked.
“Nope. I think it was something she was on. For a while. It created massive indentations in the skin, and once she died, the lividity settled in. That’s the only reason we can still see it. She’s been dead for a few days, you see the level of decomp. Lividity would have passed by now.”
Taylor looked at McKenzie. “What time did the neighbor call it in?”
He consulted his notebook. “5:30 in the evening. Said there was no body when she came over in the morning.”
The lab tech documented the scene, and Taylor moved closer to get a good look. Postmortem lividity was one of the most significant clues a cop had to determine whether a body had been moved or not. The girl’s entire back, including her arms and legs, was a dusky black, much darker than her skin, with perfectly round, equally spaced cocoa-colored circles every few inches along her body. The circles were only an inch or two in diameter, and were equidistant from one another. It wasn’t readily apparent at the scene, but her left arm had what looked like a seam down the outer edge, as if it were wedged against something sharp. This was past lividity, this was almost scarring.
Taylor had never seen anything like it. “It’s like she has polka dots. What in the world would cause that?” she asked.
“That’s something you’ll need to figure out. She was certainly on her back for an extended period of time when she was still alive, lying on something that had these holes.” Sam nodded to the tech and they rolled the girl over onto her back.
“Why not on the back of her arms?” McKenzie asked.
“Good question. She was shoved up against something, that’s what caused that line down her arm. Maybe they were crossed on her chest? I don’t know.”
Taylor took a lap around the table, looking closer. The fishing line had cut into the girl’s flesh and the marks were clearly visible, concentric circles around her body. “So the knife to the chest was just massive overkill? That didn’t cause her death? What about the lack of blood?”
“The knife acted like an anchor. It helped hold the body up. There wasn’t any blood to spill at that point; it was coagulated and her heart wasn’t pumping.”
Taylor nodded. “Okay. I’m comfortable with the working theory that Love Circle was the secondary crime scene. There’s no way the neighbor would miss the body if it was already in the house. She seems like the type to open a few cabinets and drawers, if you know what I mean. So Allegra was killed elsewhere, then strung up on the post. But why would you do that in someone else’s house? I need to talk to the home owner. That’s just fishy as hell.”
Sam moved toward the scalpel on the tray by her right hand. She used the blunt end to part the knife wound, pointing her finger at the meager layer of yellow just below the dermis. “This chick has zero subcutaneous fat. I mean it’s less than an eighth of an inch. Starvation would certainly do that. What else did Baldwin say about this Mach guy?”
McKenzie perked up again. “II Macellaio. The Butcher. You say it like this-eel matcha lie o, emphasis on the matcha. Though why they call him that is lost on me. He doesn’t cut them up or anything.”
Taylor gave the kid some points for getting the pronunciation correct.
Sam was moving along. She opened the torso and McKenzie stared in fascination at the dead girl’s desiccated organs. “Are they supposed to be so gray?” he asked.
“Honestly, no. And they’ve atrophied, which is why they look so shrunken.” Sam moved through her work, dissecting, observing, taking samples and making notes. She talked to McKenzie the whole time, explaining how starvation worked, that your system breaks down proteins, carbohydrates and fat in different sequences, that the carbs are burned first, then the fat, then the proteins. When the body starts feeding itself on the protein, or muscle mass, death occurs. In someone so small, like Allegra, death would come quicker than a full-grown, nourished, healthy woman. Without water and sustenance, death could occur in as little as a week.
Sam moved to the girl’s head and Taylor turned away, purposefully letting her mind wander as the Stryker saw buzzed to life. She went back to the crime scene. Why choose a house that isn’t your own? To send a message. To frame someone. To obscure your true meaning.
