“Okay,” Michael said, waiting for the connection.
“Both girls report being attacked by a man wearing a black ski mask.” Trent laid out an orange folder, a photograph paper-clipped to the top sheet. “Dawn Simmons of Buford.”
Michael did a double take, thinking this girl couldn’t be more than ten. “She’s younger than the others,” he said, disgusted by the thought of some sick fuck touching the child. She wasn’t much older than Tim.
“She was assaulted six months ago,” Trent told him. “She reports that her attacker wore a black ski mask.”
Michael shook his head. Buford was an hour away and the girl was too young. “Coincidence.”
“I think so, too,” Trent agreed. “Guys like this don’t hunt outside their comfort area.”
Without realizing it, Michael had taken a seat at the table. He put down the photo of the ten-year-old and slid it back toward Trent, thinking he’d be sick if he looked at it one more minute. Jesus, her poor parents. How the hell did people live through this sort of thing?
Michael asked, “What’s that mean? Comfort area?”
Trent went back to his professor voice. “Child sexual predators have a specific age group they go after. A man who’s sexually attracted to ten-year-olds might think fifteen, sixteen, is too old. The same goes for a man who’s interested in teenagers. He’d probably be just as disgusted as you are by the thought of molesting a girl that young.”
Michael felt his stomach clench. Trent was so matter-of-fact about it, as if he was discussing the weather. He had to ask, “You got kids?”
“No,” Trent admitted, not returning the question. Maybe he already knew the answer, probably from Greer. Michael wondered what the bastard had said about Tim.
Trent continued, “I’ve put in a call to the parents in each case to see if we can talk to the girls, perhaps get some new information now that some time has passed since the attacks. From what I’ve seen, victims of these sorts of crimes remember more as they get some distance from the event.” He added, “It might be a waste of time, but then we might hear something that they couldn’t recall during the initial interviews.”
“Right,” Michael agreed, trying not to sound annoyed. He had worked plenty of rapes on his own and didn’t need a lesson.
“I think the perpetrator is probably a well-educated man,” Trent said. “Probably in his mid- to late-thirties. Unhappy with his job, unhappy with his home situation.”
Michael held his tongue. In his opinion, profiling was a load of shit. Except for the well-educated part, Trent could be talking about most of the men in the squad. Throw in banging his next-door neighbor and he’d be describing Michael.
“The files show a clear pattern of escalation,” Trent continued.
“Cooper, the first girl, was attacked outside a movie theater; quick, efficient. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes and all of it was out of range of the theater’s closed-circuit cameras. The second, Anna Linder, was abducted right off the street. He took her somewhere-she’s not sure where-in a car. He left her right outside the gates of Stone Mountain Park. Park police found her the next morning.”
“Any tire tracks?”
“About twelve hundred,” Trent answered. “The park had just started its annual Christmas lights show.”
Michael had taken Gina and Tim to see the lights. They went every year.
“DNA?” Michael asked.
“He wore a condom.”
“Okay,” Michael said. So he wasn’t a moron. “What does this have to do with my girl last night?”
Trent narrowed his eyes, like he wondered if Michael had heard a word he said. “Their tongues, Detective.” He slid the reports back over. “They all had their tongues bitten off.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The tongue is basically like a piece of tough steak,“ Pete Hanson said, slipping on his latex gloves. He stopped, looking at Trent. ”I take you for a runner, sir. Is that correct?“
Trent didn’t seem surprised by the question. Being on the job for twelve years, Michael figured the man had been around his share of eccentric coroners.
He answered, “Yes, sir.”
“Long distance?” Yes.
“Marathons?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so.” Pete nodded to himself, like he had scored a point, though Michael had noticed that Will Trent hadn’t volunteered any information about himself.
Pete went back to the corpse lying on the table in the center of the room. Aleesha Monroe’s body was draped in a white sheet, her head exposed. The third eyelash was gone, the makeup removed. Thick sutures lined her forehead where her scalp and face had been peeled back to examine her skull and remove her brain.
“You ever bitten your tongue?” Pete asked.
Trent didn’t answer, so Michael said, “Sure.”
“Heals pretty quickly. The tongue is an amazing organ-unless it’s severed, that is. At any rate,” he continued, “biting through the tongue is not a difficult endeavor.” He rolled back the sheet, showing the top of the Y-incision but stopping just shy of baring Monroe’s breasts.
“Here,” Pete said. Michael could see deep black bruises over the woman’s left shoulder. “The distribution of the livor mortis tells us she died where you found her. On her back, on the stairs. My guess,” Pete said, “is that she was beaten, then raped, and in the course of the rape he bit off her tongue.”
Michael thought about that, pictured her on the stairs, her body lax at first as she endured the rape, then tensing, convulsing in fear as she realized what was going to happen.
Trent finally spoke. “Can you get DNA off the tongue?”
“I imagine I’ll get a significant amount of DNA off her tongue, given her profession.” Pete shrugged his shoulders. “And I’m sure the swabs from her vagina will reveal a cornucopia of suspects for you, but my guess would be that your perpetrator used a condom.”
“Why is that?” Michael asked.
“Powder,” Pete answered. “There was a trace of cornstarch on her right thigh.”
Michael knew that rubbers were often packed in powder to make them easier to use. All the condom makers used the same ingredients, so there was no way of tracing it back to a single manufacturer. Not that knowing whether he used a Trojan or a Ramses would narrow the search.
“I’m guessing it was lubricated,” Pete added. “There were also traces of a compound not inconsistent with nonoxynol- 9.”
Trent seemed to find this interesting. “Were there any traces of this on the stairs?”
“Not that I found.”
Trent surmised, “So, he must have had sex with her somewhere else, probably inside the apartment, before the struggle in the stairway.”
Michael tuned them out. A whore like Monroe wasn’t going to waste her hard-earned money on extravagances like lube and spermicide. Better to just grit her teeth and save the cash. Deal with the consequences later.
Michael said, “The condom must have belonged to the doer.”
Trent looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered Michael was in the room. “That’s possible.”
Michael spelled it out for him. “The doer didn’t mean to kill her. Why bother with an expensive condom, right?”
Trent nodded, but didn’t say anything else.
“Well.” Pete broke the silence. “As I was saying…” He went back to his lecture, opening the woman’s mouth, showing the stub where her tongue used to be attached. “There aren’t any major arteries in the tongue, barring the lingual artery, which spreads out like the roots of a tree, tapering at the ends. You would have to go into the mouth a few inches to get to it, in which case you couldn’t use your teeth.” He frowned, thinking for a moment.
