'Hughes. What do you have?'
'I'd put her death at roughly three to five hours ago. Suffocation. Her windpipe is broken.'
'The stab wounds?'
'Postmortem. No defense cuts on her hands or arms, and not enough blood lost to have been inflicted while she was alive. See how one edge is rough, the other smooth?' He used a latex-gloved hand to stretch one of the wounds open. 'The blade had a serrated edge. Maybe a hunting knife.'
'Raped?'
'Not from what I can tell. No signs of semen. No visible trauma to the vagina or anus. But this isn't an autopsy.' Max was fond of adding that final caveat, though I'd yet to see an instance when the autopsy didn't corroborate every one of his observations.
'The mouth?'
'No apparent damage. Tongue intact, protruding slightly. Consistent with strangulation. No bite marks. The blood in the mouth seeped up through her throat after she died. That coincides with the pooling of blood in her face. She was stored upside down.'
'She was found face-first in a garbage can.'
Hughes made his mouth into a tight thin line, and then reached into his pocket for a clean handkerchief to wipe the rain from his glasses. By the time he tucked it away, the glasses were wet again.
'Looks like you've got a real psycho here.'
'We'll need the report on this one right away, Max.'
He opened up the yellow plastic tackle box that housed the tools of his trade and began bagging the corpse's hands. I left him to his work.
More cops and newsies and gawkers arrived, and the carnival atmosphere of an important murder got into full swing. It would offend me, if I hadn't seen it so many times.
Benedict finished his impromptu statement for the media and began selecting uniforms for the door-to-door witness search. I went to pitch in. It boosted morale for the men to see their lieut pounding pavement with them, especially since it was probably futile in this instance.
The killer had dumped a body in a public place, where it was sure to be found. But he'd done it without attracting any attention.
I had a feeling this was only the beginning.
Chapter 2
MORNING. THE STALE SWEAT THAT CLUNG to me and the sour taste of old coffee grounds were constant reminders that I hadn't slept yet.
As if I needed reminders. I have chronic insomnia. My last sound sleep was sometime during the Reagan administration, and it shows. At forty-six my auburn hair is streaked with gray that grows faster than I can dye it, the lines on my face shout age rather than character, and even two bottles of Visine a month couldn't get all the red out.
But the lack of sleep has made me pretty damn productive.
Spread out before me on my cluttered desk, a dead woman's life had been reduced to a collection of files and reports. I was combining all the information into a report of my own. It read like a test, with none of the blanks filled in.
Twelve hours had passed and we still didn't know the victim's name.
No prints or hairs or fibers on the body. No skin under the fingernails. Nothing solid in the door-to-door reports. But this lack of evidence was evidence in itself. The perp had been extremely careful.
The victim wasn't sexually assaulted, and death had resulted from suffocation induced by a broken windpipe, as Max had guessed. The lesion around her neck was six millimeters thick. It didn't leave fibers, which would indicate rope, and didn't bite into the skin, which would imply a thin wire. The assistant ME suggested an electrical cord as a possible weapon.
Ligature marks around her wrists and ankles bore traces of twine. Staking out every store in Illinois that sold twine wasn't too clever an idea, though it was mentioned.
The stab wounds were postmortem and made by a thick-bladed knife with a serrated back. There were twenty-seven wounds in all, of varying depth and size.
We were unable to pull any fingerprints from the garbage can Jane Doe was found in. Even Mike Donovan's prints had been washed away by the rain. The contents of the can were an average assortment of convenience store garbage, except for one major item.
Mixed in with the wrappers and cups was a five-inch gingerbread man cookie. It was heavily varnished, like an old loaf of lacquered French bread that gourmet restaurants use for decoration. An elite task force of two people was assigned to Chicago's hundred-plus bakeries to try and get a match. If they failed, there was an equal number of supermarkets that sold baked goods. Double that figure to include the neighboring suburbs. A huge job, all for nothing if it was homemade.
If this weren't such a somber situation, the image of two detectives flashing around the picture of the gingerbread man and asking 'Have you seen him?' would be pretty funny.
I took another sip of some coffee that the Gestapo could have used for difficult interrogations, and felt it bleed into my stomach, which didn't approve. The caffeine surging through my veins left me nauseous and jittery. I gave my temples ten seconds of intense finger massage, and then went back to my report.
She was killed roughly three hours before Donovan discovered her body at 8:55. Depending on how much time the perp spent with her corpse, he could have killed her anywhere within a hundred-mile radius. That narrowed it down to about four million people. Take out women, children, the elderly, everyone with a solid alibi, and the 20 percent of the population who were left-handed, and I figured we had maybe seven hundred thousand suspects
