They walked in through the ER entrance, cold wind sweeping in with them as the automatic doors slid shut. Jane crossed straight to the triage window and called out, “Hello? Can I get some information out here?”
“Are you Detective Rizzoli?” said a voice behind them.
They had not seen him sitting alone in the patient waiting area. Now he rose to his feet, a wan-faced man wearing a tweed jacket over a hunter-green sweater. Not a cop, guessed Maura, noting his shaggy head of hair, and he quickly confirmed her impression.
“I’m Dr. Kibbie,” he said. “Thought I’d wait for you out here, so you wouldn’t have to find your own way down to the morgue.”
“Thanks for meeting us tonight,” said Jane. “This is Dr. Isles, from our ME’s office.”
Maura shook his hand. “You’ve already done the autopsy?”
“Oh, no. I’m not a pathologist, just a humble internist. There are four of us who rotate as Chenango County coroners. I do the preliminary death investigation and decide if a postmortem is called for. The autopsy itself will probably be done tomorrow afternoon, assuming the Onondaga County ME can make it down here from Syracuse.”
“You must have your own pathologist in this county.”
“Yes, but in this particular case…” Kibbie shook his head. “Unfortunately, we know this murder’s going to generate publicity. A lot of interest. Plus, it could end up in a splashy criminal trial someday, and our pathologist wanted to bring in another ME on the case as well. Just so there’ll be no question about their conclusions. Safety in numbers, you know.” He picked up his overcoat from the chair. “The elevator’s that way.”
“Where’s Detective Jurevich?” asked Jane. “I thought he was going to meet us here.”
“Unfortunately, Joe got called away just a while ago, so he won’t be seeing you tonight. He said he’d meet you in the morning, over at the house. Just give him a call tomorrow.” Kibbie took a breath. “So, are you ready for this?”
“That bad, huh?”
“Let’s put it this way: I hope I never see anything like this again.”
They started up the hall to the elevator, and he pressed the Down button.
“After two weeks, I guess she’s in pretty bad shape,” said Jane.
“Actually, there’s been minimal decomposition. The house was vacant. No heat, no power. It’s probably about thirty degrees inside. Like storing meat in a freezer.”
“How did she end up there?”
“We have no idea. There were no signs of forced entry, so she must have had a key. Or the killer did.”
The elevator door opened and they stepped in, Kibbie flanked by the two women. A buffer between Maura and Jane, who still had not said a word to each other since they’d left the car.
“Who owns that vacant house?” asked Jane.
“A woman who lives out of state now. She inherited it from her parents, and she’s been trying to sell it for years. We haven’t been able to contact her. Even the realtor doesn’t know where she is.” They stepped out of the elevator on the basement level. Kibbie led the way down the hall and pushed through a door, into the morgue anteroom.
“There you are, Dr. Kibbie.” A young blond woman in hospital scrubs set down the paperback romance she’d been reading and stood to greet them. “I was wondering if you were still coming down.”
“Thanks for waiting, Lindsey. These are the two ladies I told you about, from Boston. “Detective Rizzoli and Dr. Isles.”
“You drove all that way to see our gal, huh? Well, let me roll her out for you.” She stepped through double doors into the autopsy lab and flipped the wall switch. Fluorescent lights glared down on the empty table. “Dr. Kibbie, I’ve really got to leave soon. Could you roll her back into the cooler and lock up for me when you’re done? Just pull the hallway door shut when you go.”
“You going to try and catch the rest of the game?” asked Kibbie.
“If I don’t show up, Ian’s never going to talk to me again.”
“Does Ian actually talk?”
Lindsey rolled her eyes. “Dr. Kibbie.
“I keep telling you, you should give my nephew a call. He’s premed at Cornell. Some other girl’s going to snap him right up if you aren’t quick.”
She laughed as she pulled open the refrigerator door. “Yeah, like I’d ever want to marry a doctor.”
“I’m truly hurt by that.”
“I mean, I want a guy who’ll be home for dinner.” She tugged on a gurney, wheeling it out of the refrigerator. “You want her on the table?”
“The gurney’s fine. We’re not going to cut.”
“Let me just double-check that I’ve pulled the right one.” She glanced at the attached tag, then reached for the zipper. She betrayed no hesitation, no squeamishness, as she unzipped the bag to expose the corpse’s face. “Yep, this is it,” she said, and straightened, flipping back her blond hair, her face pink with the bloom of youth. A startling contrast to the lifeless face and desiccated eyes that stared up from the opening in the shroud.
“We can take it from here, Lindsey,” said Dr. Kibbie.
The girl gave a wave. “Remember to pull the door shut all the way,” she said cheerfully and walked out, leaving behind an incongruous trace of perfume.
Maura pulled latex gloves from a box on the countertop. Then she crossed to the gurney and unzipped the bag all the way open. As the plastic parted, no one said a word. What lay on that gurney silenced them all.
At four degrees Centigrade, bacterial growth is arrested, decay halted. Despite the passage of at least two weeks, the freezing temperatures of the vacant house had preserved the corpse’s soft tissues, and there was no need for menthol ointment to mask any overwhelming odors. The harsh lights revealed far worse horrors than mere putrefaction. The throat lay open and exposed by a single deep slash that had transected the trachea, slicing all the way to the cervical spine. But that fatal stroke of the blade was not what captured Maura’s gaze; she stared, instead, at the naked torso. At the multitude of crosses that had been carved on the breasts, on the abdomen. Holy symbols cut into the parchment of human skin. Blood encrusted the carvings, and countless rivulets had seeped from shallow incisions and dried in brick-red lines running down the sides of the torso.
Her gaze moved to the right arm, lying at the corpse’s side. She saw the ring of bruises, like a cruel bracelet marking the wrist. She looked up and met Jane’s gaze. For that one moment, all anger between the two women was forgotten, swept aside by the vision of Sarah Parmley’s final moments.
“This was done while she was still alive,” said Maura.
“All these cuts.” Jane swallowed. “It could have taken hours.”
Kibbie said, “When we found her, there was nylon cord around the remaining wrist and both ankles. The knots were nailed to the floor, so she couldn’t move.”
“He didn’t do this to Lori-Ann Tucker,” Maura said.
“That’s the victim in Boston?”
“She was dismembered. But she wasn’t tortured.” Maura circled to the corpse’s left side and stared down at the wrist stump. The incised flesh had dried to a leathery brown, and the soft tissues had contracted to expose the surface of cut bone.
“Maybe he wanted something from this woman,” said Jane. “Maybe there was a reason to torture her.”
“An interrogation?” said Kibbie.
“Or punishment,” said Maura, focusing on the victim’s face. She thought of the words that had been scratched on her own door. On Lori-Ann’s bedroom wall.
“These aren’t just random cuts,” said Jane. “These are crosses. Religious symbols.”
“He drew them on the walls, too,” said Kibbie.
Maura looked up at him. “Was there anything else on the walls? Other symbols?”
“Yeah. Lots of weird stuff. I tell you, it gave me the willies just to step in that front door. Joe Jurevich will show you when you go to the house.” He gazed at the body. “This is all there is to see here, really. Enough to tell you we’re dealing with a very sick puppy.”
Maura closed the body bag, zipping the plastic over sunken eyes, over corneas clouded by death. She would not be performing this autopsy, but she did not need a scalpel and probe to tell her how this victim had died; she
