Jane was about seventeen, maybe eighteen, my age. Her hair was shoulder-length, sandy blond, and layered around her bangs and face. It had been curled and cut professionally not too long ago. Her face was narrow, and she was beautiful. She looked a little cocaine-thin in her features and the rest of her body, but her face was flawless, not a scratch, not a bruise to mar her features.
The rest of her body was a nightmare. Her skin was mottled with bruises of blue, black, green, yellow, and purple, like a savage topographical map of alien continents. She had been cut, narrow incisions with razors and scalpels and deep, ugly gashes with heavy, cruder blades. Some of the wounds were fresh, others days, weeks old. Scar echoes, souvenirs of distant pain, crisscrossed her body. She had track marks, also of different ages, chronicling her use. The oldest spots were in her arms, newer ones were in her feet and between her toes. The exceptions were a few ugly, bruised marks on her inner forearms near the junction of veins in the wrist. She’d had IVs in both of her arms recently. The slender wrists had some of the oldest scars—white, pale crossroads of choices made when it felt like there were no more options. They mirrored my own wrists.
She had been whipped, brutally and recently. Her back, buttocks, and breasts were dull red ribbons of split flesh. Again, raised scar tissue spoke that this was not a new experience for Jane. There were signs of trauma and traces of seminal fluid in the wounds where her nipples had been before they were torn off. Her genitals and rectum were also savaged, torn, cut, bitten, and penetrated. She had been burned with brands, most likely a fireplace poker, and with electricity. An odd-shaped brand appeared on her left thigh. It was an old wound.
The perfect, almost angelic head resting on the desecrated altar of her body somehow made it all the more obscene, all the more mad.
Rosaleen spoke evenly and professionally into a small handheld cassette tape recorder as she documented the minutia of each atrocity. She took photographs, Polaroids, 35 mm, and videotaped the examination. Only once did I see her resolve falter for just a second. There was a catch in her voice, and I saw her eyes flutter; I thought she might cry, but she didn’t, and she continued through all the physical examinations, all the tests and the analysis, undaunted. I could never do the job Rosaleen does.
Six hours later, she clicked off the recorder, pulled off her stained rubber gloves, and rested against an empty steel table. She look haggard. I handed Rosaleen a Pepsi Nico and I had retrieved from a row of machines near the elevators. She took it and I saw gratitude in her eyes for the simple act, behind the weariness. “She’s had multiple children and several abortions,” she said. “She shows signs of long-term alcohol and opiate abuse among other drugs and physical abuse stretching back a long time, badly healed broken bones, radial fractures. It’s all evil, but nothing specifically occult or ritual in the manner of her death,” she said. “How about in the placement of her body at the scene?”
Nico and I had been reviewing the photos the sheriff’s department had taken last night and reading their reports. “Her body was placed in a Y shape,” Nico said. “The sea to her left hand, the land to her right. Rocks were placed around her feet, which were facing east. It feels ritualistic, but I have no clue what mystic tradition.”
“It could be a psychopath,” Rosaleen said, “an offender with his own internal cosmology and mythology, acting it out on the victim.”
“Then he’s a magical psychopath,” Nico said. “The real stuff was flying around at the scene. It wasn’t a spell to call anything over, but it was legit magic.”
I looked at the grainy, black-and-white photo of Jane’s body on the beach. Her arms were raised above her head; even her fingers were each meticulously spread like … I sorted through the pile of pictures until I came to the one of her feet, the rocks piled around them and over them … over them as if her feet had been …
“Okay, let’s see if she can help us any on this,” Nico said to Rosaleen. “You good with that, Rosie?”
“Of course,” Rosaleen said, but I heard the ice crack, the hesitation slip into her voice. I was walking over to Jane’s body. I felt the fragments of memory shift and slip.
“Laytham, get the door … Laytham?” Nico’s voice. I was looking at the deep, savage wounds on Jane’s body. The placing. They began at her throat … Then next was a hole where her heart used to be. The next was at her solar plexus; it bordered between the floor of her lungs and the top of her intestines.
I heard the door click and lock. Nico adjusted the blinds on the glass of the door to obscure the room. He stood near the door to guard it. He was giving me an odd look but said nothing. Rosaleen removed several bones from her forensic bag. Each was wrapped in a different color of silk cloth. The cloths were embroidered with complex symbols around a circle. The first bone she removed was a human skull. She placed the cloth it was wrapped in on the steel table, on the circle side up above Jane’s head, and then carefully placed the skull on the cloth. She repeated the process. Each bone was human and placed at specific spots around Jane’s body. Long bones for arms and legs and then small spinal vertebrae opposite the skull, at the feet, completing the circuit of marrow around the dead girl. Rosaleen stepped around me as I stood looking at wounds.
“Laytham,” she asked, “is everything okay?”
“I think I know why she’s mutilated the way she is,” I said, “at least in part. These big,
