took reports from the rangers who’d found the body, waited for sunrise to have a careful look at the victim.
The blood had dried red-brown, streaking the skin and the surrounding asphalt, running down the parking lot in rivulets, some of the spatters still tacky.
Petra stood by the corpse, sketching the surrounding terrain and the body, tabulating the wounds she could see. At least seventeen cuts, and that was only the front.
Bending and getting as close as she could without messing anything up, she examined torn flesh; the lower lip almost completely severed, the left eye reduced to ruby pulp. All the damage on the left side.
If you could see your squeamish kid now, Dad.
Twenty-one previous bodies notwithstanding, viewing this one in sunlight jolted her with nausea. Then something worse hit her: the pain of sympathy.
Poor thing. Poor, poor thing, what led you to this?
Outwardly, she maintained. No one watching would have seen anything but trim efficiency. She’d been told she looked efficient. An accusation thrown at her by Nick, implying competence wasn’t sexy. Along with all the other garbage he’d dumped on her. Why hadn’t she realized what was going on?
She liked being thought of as businesslike. Had found a business she liked.
A month ago she’d gone to a Melrose salon, ordered the reluctant stylist to lop off six inches of black hair, and ended up with a short ebony minimal-care wedge cut.
Stu had noticed right away. “Very becoming.”
She thought it framed her lean, pale face pretty well.
Her clothes were picked for nothing but practicality now. Good pantsuits bought on sale at Loehmann’s and Robinsons-May that she took home and tailored herself so that they fit her long frame perfectly. Mostly black, like today. A couple of navys, one chocolate-brown, one charcoal.
She wore MAC lipstick, deep red with a brown tint, a little eye shadow, and mascara. No foundation; her skin was white and smooth as notepaper. No jewelry. Nothing a suspect could yank.
The victim wore foundation.
Petra could see it clearly where the crimson hadn’t settled. Traces of blush, powder, mascara, applied a little heavier than Petra’s, to the eye that remained intact.
The damaged eye was a sightless black-cherry hole, the eyeball collapsed to folded cellophane, some of the jellylike humor leaking out and specking the nose.
Nice nose, where it hadn’t been slashed.
The right eye was wide, blue, filmed over. That dull dead look. You couldn’t fake it-there was nothing like it.
Flight of the soul? Leaving behind what? A casing, no more alive than a snake’s molt?
She continued studying the corpse with an artist’s precision, noticed a small but deep cut on the left cheek that she’d missed. Eighteen. She couldn’t flip the body till the crime-scene photographer was finished and the coroner gave the okay. The definitive wound count would be the pathologist’s, once he had the corpse stretched out on his steel table.
She added the cheek wound to her drawing. Might as well be careful-the coroner’s office was a zoo; doctors made mistakes.
Stu was over with the coroner-an older man named Leavitt-both of them serious but relaxed. None of that tasteless joke stuff you saw on cop movies. The real detectives she’d met were mostly regular guys, relatively bright, patient, tenacious, very little in common with cinema sleuths.
She tried to look past the blood, get a sense of the person beneath the carnage.
The woman appeared young, and Petra was pretty sure she’d been good-looking. Even savaged like that, dumped in the parking lot like refuse, you could see the fineness of her features. Not tall, but her legs were long and shapely, exposed to mid-thigh, her waist narrow in the short black silk dress. Big bust-maybe silicone. Nowadays when Petra saw a slender woman with a healthy chest, she assumed surgery.
No sign of any bizarre leakage in the torso, though with all that blood, who knew. What would happen to silicone breasts when slashed? What did silicone look like, anyway? Eight months in Homicide, the issue had never come up.
Panty hose ripped, but it looked like asphalt wear. No obvious sign of sexual assault or posing, no visible semen around the ruined mouth or the legs.
Big hair. Honey-blond, good dye job, a few dark roots starting to show, but nice, expertly done. The dress was a jacquard with hand stitching, and the way it was pulled up and bunched around the shoulders, Petra could read the label. Armani Exchange.
The shiny things Petra hoped would yield prints were a diamond tennis bracelet on the left wrist with nice- size cut stones, a sapphire-and-diamond cocktail ring, a gold Lady Rolex, small diamond studs in the ears.
No wedding band.
No purse, either, so forget instant identification on this one. How’d she end up here? Out on a date? Big hair, minidress-a callgirl lured onto the streets by an extra bonus?
The purse gone, but the jewelry hadn’t been taken. The watch alone had to be three grand. So not a mugging. Unless the mugger was an even-stupider-than-usual street fool who’d taken the purse and panicked.
No, that made no sense. All these wounds didn’t spell panic or robbery. This piece of dirt had taken his time.
Snatching the purse to fake robbery, not thinking about the jewelry?
She pictured someone ripping away out of rage. Deep wounds, no defense cuts, but defense cuts were rarer than most people thought, and a decent-size man wouldn’t have had much trouble subduing a woman this slender.
Still, it might indicate someone she knew.
The wound overkill sure did.
Had the blond woman been caught off guard?
Petra’s brain flooded with fast-motion images. She quelled them. It was too soon to theorize.
God, it looked ferocious. A predator’s attack. The massive frontal disemboweling wound was her guess for the fatal one, but most of the punishment had been concentrated on the face.
Gutting the woman, then trying to wipe away her beauty? Such intense hatred; an explosion of hatred.
Something personal. The more Petra thought about it, the more that made sense. What kind of relationship had led to this? Husband? Boyfriend? Some reasonable facsimile of a lover?
A beast let loose.
Petra unclenched her hands, jammed them into the pockets of her pantsuit. DKNY, Saks overstock, lightweight crepe, true black. Comfortable, so she’d worn it to the Freshwater stakeout.
The blond woman’s dress had just a touch of blue in it. Blue-black rinsed in rusty water.
Two women in black; the mourning had begun.
Stu continued to confer with Leavitt, and Petra stayed by the corpse, a self-appointed guardian.
Protecting a molt?
As a little girl in Arizona, on summer digs with her father and her brother Dick, she’d found plenty of shedded skins, the lacy donations of snakes and lizards, collected them, tried to braid them, fashion lanyards. They’d turned to dust in her hands, and she’d started to think of reptiles as fragile, too, and somehow less frightening.
But they continued to poison her dreams for years. As did scorpions, wildcats, owls, horned toads, flying beetles, black widows, the seemingly endless stream of creatures that came in off the interstate.
Poor Dad, sentenced to hour-long nightly routines-stories and dumb jokes and obsessive-compulsive checking rituals, all so his youngest child would sleep and allow him some single-parent quiet time.
When he finally got some solitude, what did he do with it?
Knowing Dad, any spare time was spent grading papers or working on the textbook that never got finished. A tall glass of Chivas for fortification. She knew he kept a bottle in his nightstand and that it was emptied often, though she never saw him really drunk.
Professor Kenneth Connor, physical anthropologist of medium repute, now fossilized by Alzheimer’s, dead prematurely, twenty months ago. She remembered the day; had been chasing a stolen Mercedes all the way down to Mexico when the station patched through the hospital call. Cerebral accident. Fancy name for stroke. The neurologist suggesting Dad’s brain had been weakened by placque.
