he kneels.
“Any idea how long she’s been dead?”
“Hard to tell because of the cold.” He lifts her arm. Red grooves mark her wrist. The surrounding flesh is bruised and smeared with blood. “Her hands were bound,” he says.
I look at the scored flesh. She’d struggled violently to get free. “With wire?”
“That would be my guess.”
Her painted fingernails tell me she’s not Amish. I notice two nails on her right hand are broken to the quick. She’d fought back. I make a mental note to get nail scrapings.
“Rigor has set in,” the doc says. “She’s been dead at least eight hours. Judging from the ice crystals on the mucous membranes, probably closer to ten. Once I get her to the hospital, I’ll get a core body temp. Body temp drops a degree to a degree and a half per hour, so a core will narrow down TOD.” He releases her hand.
His finger hovers above the purple flesh of her cheek. “Lividity in the face here.” He looks up at me. His glasses are fogged. His eyes appear huge behind the thick lenses. “Did someone move her?” he asks.
I nod, but I don’t mention who. “What about cause of death?”
Removing a penlight from his inside pocket, the doctor peels back an eyelid and shines it into her eye. “No petechial hemorrhages.”
“So she wasn’t strangled.”
“Right.” Gently, he sets his hand beneath her chin and shifts her head to the left. Her lips part, and I notice two of her front teeth are broken to the gum line. He turns her head to the right and the wound on her throat gapes like a bloody mouth.
“Throat was cut,” the doc says.
“Any idea what kind of weapon made the wound?”
“Something sharp. With no serration. No obvious sign of tearing. Not a slash or it would be longer and more shallow on the edges. Hard to tell in this light.” Gently, he rolls her body to one side.
My eyes skim the corpse. Her left shoulder is covered with bright red abrasions or possibly burns. More of the same appear on her left buttock. Both knees are abraded as well as the tops of her feet. The skin at both ankles is the color of ripe eggplant. The flesh isn’t laid open like her wrists, but her feet had definitely been bound.
My heart drops into my stomach when I notice more blood on her abdomen, just above her navel. Obscured within the dark smear is something I’ve seen before. Something I’ve imagined a thousand times in my nightmares. “What about that?”
“Good God.” The doctor’s voice quivers. “It looks like something carved into her flesh.”
“Hard to make out what it is.” But in that instant I’m certain we both know. Neither of us wants to say it aloud.
The doc leans closer, so that his face is less than a foot from the wound. “Looks like two X’s and three I’s.”
“Or the Roman numeral twenty-three,” I finish.
He looks at me and in his eyes I see the same horror and disbelief I feel clenching my chest. “It’s been sixteen years since I’ve seen anything like it,” he whispers.
Staring at the bloody carving on this young woman’s body, I’m filled with a revulsion so deep I shiver.
After a moment, Doc Coblentz leans back on his heels. Shaking his head, he motions toward the marks on her buttocks, the broken fingernails and teeth. “Someone put her through a lot.”
Outrage and a fear I don’t want to acknowledge sweep through me. “Was she sexually assaulted?”
My heart pounds as he shines the pen light onto her pubis. I see blood on the insides of her thighs and shudder inwardly.
“Looks like it.” He shakes his head. “I’ll know more once I get her to the morgue. Hopefully the son of a bitch left us a DNA sample.”
The fist twisting my gut warns me it isn’t going to be that easy.
Looking down at the body, I wonder what kind of monster could do this to a young woman with so much life ahead. I wonder how many lives will be destroyed by her death. The coffee has gone bitter on my tongue. I’m no longer cold. I’m deeply offended and angered by the brutality of what I see. Worse, I’m afraid.
“Will you bag her hands for me, Doc?”
“Sure.”
“How soon can you do an autopsy?”
Coblentz braces his hands on his knees and shoves himself to his feet. “I’ll shuffle some appointments and do it today.”
We stand in the wind and cold and try in vain not to think about what this woman endured before her death.
“He killed her somewhere else.” I glance at the drag marks. “No sign of a struggle. If he’d cut her throat here, there’d be more blood.”
The doctor nods. “Hemorrhage ceases when the heart stops. She was probably already dead when he dumped her. More than likely the blood here is residual that leaked from that neck wound.”
I think of the people who must have loved her. Parents. Husband. Children. And I am saddened. “This wasn’t a crime of passion.”
“The person who did this took his time.” The doctor’s eyes meet mine. “This was calculated. Organized.”
I know what he’s thinking. I see it in the depths of his eyes. I know because I’m thinking the very same thing.
“Just like before,” the doctor finishes.
CHAPTER 3
Snow swirls in the beams of the headlights as I turn the Explorer onto the long and narrow lane that will take us to the Stutz farm. Next to me, T.J. is reticent. He’s my youngest officer—just twenty-four years old—and more sensitive than he would ever admit. Not that sensitivity in a cop is a bad thing, but I can tell finding the body has shaken him.
“Hell of a way to start the week.” I force a smile.
“Tell me about it.”
I want to draw him out, but I’m not great at small talk. “So, are you okay?”
“Me? I’m good.” He looks embarrassed by my question and troubled by the images I know are still rolling around inside his head.
“Seeing something like that . . .” I give him my best cop-to-cop look. “It can be tough.”
“I’ve seen shit before,” he says defensively. “I was first on the scene when Houseman had that head on and killed that family from Cincinnati.”
I wait, hoping he’ll open up.
He looks out the window, wipes his palms on his uniform slacks. In my peripheral vision I see him glance my way. “You ever see anything like that, Chief?”
He’s asking about the eight years I was a cop in Columbus. “Nothing this bad.”
“He broke her teeth. Raped her. Cut her throat.” He blows out a breath, like a pressure cooker releasing steam.
At thirty, I’m not that much older than T.J., but glancing over at his youthful profile, I feel ancient. “You did okay.”
He stares out the window and I know he doesn’t want me to see his expression. “I screwed up the crime scene.”
“It’s not like you were expecting to walk up on a dead body.”
“Footwear impressions might have been helpful.”
“We still might be able to lift something.” It’s an optimistic offering. “I walked in those drag marks, too. It happens.”
“You think Stutz knows something about the murder?” he asks.
