“Result!” Copeland said, triumphantly punching the air. If that was the case, they had his DNA, and it was no longer a case of if they solved the murder, but when.
Claxton examined the dead girl’s legs and feet next, and to no one’s surprise found more track lines along her inner thighs and between her toes.
“Right,” Claxton said, “Let’s turn her onto her front. Unlike a standard post-mortem, which begins with a Y shape incision being made on the front of the torso, the start of a special post-mortem generally involves the deceased being placed face down. The initial incision is made across the shoulders, and the skin is then peeled back so that the pathologist can begin his internal examination of the body. Dillon stepped back to the very edge of the room, feeling sick. The others were so engrossed in the procedure that they didn’t even notice his abrupt withdrawal, or the greenish pallor of his skin.
When Tracey was eventually placed on her back and cut open from the front, Claxton picked up an instrument that reminded Dillon of a pair of gardening shears and cut out the chest plate, exposing the heart and lungs. Because the victim had suffered an arterial bleed out there was hardly any blood left in the chest cavity. He called the photographer forward and directed him to take shots of all the internal injuries, which he described in great detail on his little recording device.
When the photographer had finished, he took blood samples, which would be sent to the lab for toxicology. When that task was completed, the pathologist used a small knife to expertly remove all the internal organs: heart, lungs, pancreas, spleen, and what remained of the intestinal tract, liver and kidneys. Claxton inspected each one and weighed it. Histology samples were taken and passed to Copeland.
Lastly, the bladder, uterus and ovaries, or rather what was left of them after the genital attack, were removed, exposing the full horror of the killer’s onslaught. Claxton sawed through the pubic bone, unfolded her vagina and called the photographer forward to record the terrible injuries. Dillon turned away, thinking that even a whore deserved a little dignity in death.
“I can honestly say I have never seen anything like this,” he heard Claxton say. “It is quite astonishing.”
“Talk us through it, please, doctor,” Dillon asked, turning to face them again.
“In my opinion, the killer probably used a hunting knife in the genital attack. The blade would have been pointed, extremely sharp along the cutting edge and serrated along the other. It penetrated almost thirteen inches inside her. I can’t tell how many times because her insides were decimated by him twisting the blade backwards and forwards inside her.” He mimed the action, twisting his wrist like he was revving a motorcycle, several times to demonstrate.
“Sweat Jesus,” Copeland whispered.
Even bubbly little Emma, who spent more time with the mutilated and putrefying corpses that populated her morgue than she did with the living, and who firmly believed that she had become immune to anything that her job could throw at her, visibly blanched.
“The angle of insertion suggests that she was lying down at the time of the attack; the blows were powerful, the movement frenzied. Her fallopian tubes and cervix are, to put it in layman’s terms, shredded like mincemeat. Even though she would have bled out pretty quickly from the arterial haemorrhaging in her neck, it is quite possible that she was still alive when the knife was inserted into her vagina, and I base this on the degree of bleeding and bruising both within and around the attack site. The stomach wounds, on the other hand, were almost certainly administered at his leisure after she had expired.”
Dillon could feel the room starting to spin, and he leaned against the wall and forced himself to take slow deep breaths until everything returned to normal. He wondered how people like Claxton and Emma slept at night. Perhaps, instead of counting sheep, they counted bodies on cold metal slabs. They were so matter of fact about the whole thing; cutting up human beings as routinely and casually as teenagers dissecting frogs in the school lab.
Copeland and Calvin weren’t much better; they were perfectly comfortable in this depressing environment and seemed to find the whole process fascinating. Even Ned, the photographer seemed pretty chilled out.
All he felt was revulsion. And that, he told himself, was a good thing.
“Was there any sign of the missing bits of intestine inside her abdominal cavity?” Calvin asked as Claxton moved towards the top of the table.
Claxton shook his head. “No. Are you sure they weren’t left at the scene?”
“I processed the scene myself,” Calvin said. “There was nothing like that there.”
“We know he’s a trophy taker,” Dillon said. “Maybe he took it home and is keeping it in a jar of formaldehyde.”
“Why would anyone want to keep human flesh?” Copeland asked, and then grinned wickedly. “Perhaps he just hadn’t had time to go to the butcher’s and needed some offal to feed his dog.”
“I said we’d come back to the head,” Claxton said as he placed the point of his knife against the skin behind the right ear and pressed down sharply. He drew the blade along the top of the head to the skin behind the other ear. Dillon was appalled to realise that he was humming while he worked. He couldn’t suppress the shudder that passed through him; this part of the autopsy always turned his knees to jelly.
With the scalp split, the pathologist pulled on the skin at the top and peeled it down to the level of the eyebrows, folding it over like a grotesque Halloween mask. Dillon tried to ignore the sickly slimy noise that accompanied the movement. Claxton peeled the rest of the skin back the other way, exposing the remainder of the
