The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  Kovac himself had sat up late at night staring at the computer screen, at those photographs and sketches, trying to put a name to a victim. He had compared their sketch of New Year’s Doe (Jane Doe 01-11) to the missing persons photo of Rose Reiser again and again without being able to conclusively say the two were the same girl. His victim’s nose had been smashed to a pulp. The sketch artist had given her a generic nose. Rose Reiser’s nose in her photograph was short and turned up at the end.

  “The witness says her face was messed up like that when she came out of the trunk,” Liska said. “Like half her face had melted, he said.”

  Möller gazed down at the dead girl, frowning. “Acid.”

  “What kind of acid?” Kovac asked.

  “The lab will have to tell you that. Could be one of several. Hydrochloric, ferric, sulfuric, phosphoric. Not hydrofluoric. Hydrofluoric doesn’t damage the skin so much. It’s better for dissolving bone. It likes calcium. If you want to get rid of a skeleton, hydrofluoric acid is your best choice.”

  “Why does it creep me out that you know that?” Liska asked.

  Möller looked right at her with amusement in his eyes. Behind his mask he was undoubtedly smiling like a cat.

  “For the purpose of damaging flesh, I would choose sulfuric acid,” he went on. “It’s easily had.”

  “That’s battery acid, right?” Kovac asked.

  “Or a component of drain cleaner, or rust remover, or liquid fertilizer. It has a long list of uses,” Möller said. “It can be purchased at the hardware store in a strong concentration—and this would have been quite concentrated to cause this kind of deep-tissue damage.

  “At strength not only does it hydrolyze proteins and lipids, causing the primary chemical burn, it also causes a secondary thermal burn by dehydrating carbohydrates,” he said. “And, if combined with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, one creates a substance called a piranha solution, which will dissolve nearly anything, including carbon on glassware.”

  “Piranha solution?” Kovac said. “Sounds like something out of an old James Bond movie.”

  “Indeed.”

  Using his fingers with delicate care, Möller examined what was left of the victim’s lips and mouth. One side of the tongue—which had the appearance of raw hamburger—was visible through the hole the acid had burned through the cheek.

  “Burns in the mouth . . . ,” he said, gently prying the jaws open, “on the tongue—the tongue appears to have been bitten quite badly.”

  Kovac said nothing but ground his back teeth together. He had once worked the homicide of a hooker whose pimp had poured Drano down her throat. It had been a horrific death. The caustic chemical had seared her esophagus all the way to her stomach, and all the way back up as the woman’s body tried to reject it.

  Liska asked the question they were all thinking. “Was she alive when that happened?”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Möller said.

  He continued his visual examination, counting the stab wounds to the chest and throat. He made note of the length and depth of each wound. Seventeen in all.

  “This knife was smaller than with the other girl I autopsied,” he commented. “This looks more like a paring knife or a pocketknife. The wounds are not as wide nor as deep.”

  The knife wounds to all three of the previous cases attributed to Doc Holiday—Rose Reiser, Independence Doe, and Labor Day Doe—had been deep and vicious, made with intent.

  Möller pointed out several lesser marks on the victim’s chest. “Hesitation marks, perhaps? Or perhaps the assailant was not so physically powerful after the initial attack.”

  “Hesitation or torture?” Kovac asked. “The killer didn’t hesitate to pour acid on her face. Why be shy to stab her?”

  “That, my friend, is for you to discover, yes? If I were to guess—and of course, it is not my place to do so—I would guess the acid came after the stabbing,” Möller said. “If the intent was to hinder identification, yes? The worst deed was already done.”

  “Stabbing is hands-on,” Liska said. “It doesn’t get much more personal and real than physically shoving a knife through another person’s flesh.”

  Möller raised an eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought, have you?”

  “More than you’d care to know. As for the acid . . . It’s not so hard to open a bottle and pour out the contents.”

  “Onto someone’s face?”

  She shrugged. “If you’re pissed enough or sick enough to stab somebody seventeen times, why not? It’s a hell of a lot easier than dismemberment.”

  “That’s true,” Kovac conceded. “All the satisfaction of depersonalizing the victim, and none of the hard labor.”

  Möller’s young assistant piped up. “The three of you are freaking me out.”

  “You must be new,” Liska said. “Wait until we’re in here eating egg salad sandwiches while Doc scrapes the maggots off a severed head.”

  The assistant tried very hard not to react. The first rule of dealing with cops, Kovac thought: Show no fear.

  Möller continued his examination of the body. The damage done to their unknown young woman was devastating—the broken bones, the shattered skull, the stab wounds, the acid burns. Kovac wanted to know which had been inflicted by the assailant and which had been a result of falling from the trunk of the car and being struck by the Hummer limo. Some of those answers were obvious; others were not.

  Doc Holiday’s victims had been severely beaten—a lot of blunt-force trauma to the head with a hammer or something similar. With this victim having struck her head with some force as she fell to the road, it would be all but impossible to tell if any of the skull or facial fractures had been inflicted manually.

  Möller pointed out matching bruising on both arms, both above the elbows and around the wrists. Finger marks, not ligature marks. She had been grabbed hard and held on to, possibly held down.

  Doc Holiday’s victims had shown similar bruising, but ligature marks as well. His previous torture repertoire had included cigarette burns. This girl had no cigarette burns. There was no obvious evidence of forcible sexual penetration and no semen present, yet the fact that she had been naked from the waist down strongly suggested a sexual component to the crime.

  Möller and his assistant turned the body over with great care, mindful of the alignment of broken bones and the delicacy of torn flesh, handling the head like a basket of eggs. The most significant finding on this side of the victim was a small tattoo on the left shoulder, a couple of Chinese characters that meant nothing to anyone present. Liska took a photograph of the mark with her iPhone.

  After the initial visual examination, Möller chose to go to the skull, to carefully dismantle the puzzle pieces of shattered bone in order to extract what was left of the brain to be weighed and examined. He then moved on to the torso and, with an artist’s hand, drew the scalpel down the body, creating the Y incision: shoulders to sternum, sternum to groin.

  Kovac tried unsuccessfully to tune out the sound of the garden loppers snapping the ribs from the breastbone, and the mechanical cranking of the rib spreader opening the chest cavity. After the literally hundreds of autopsies he had observed during his career, those sounds still got to him worse than anything else, except perhaps the smell of a burn victim or a floater. Something about cracking a chest made him see himself on the gurney and start rethinking that occasional cigarette.

  Möller lifted out the internal organs one by one, weighed each, inspected each for signs of organic disease and physical injury. The information was logged and recorded.

  The assailant’s knife had remarkably missed the vital organs and major blood vessels. There had been significant bleeding into the body cavity, but the damage was not so much that she would have died quickly from it.

  “So she could have been alive when she came out of that trunk,” Liska said.

  “It’s not likely, but she probably wasn’t dead due to the stab wounds,” Möller qualified.

/>   “If she didn’t bleed out,” Kovac said, “what killed her?”

  Möller ignored the question. Homicide detectives were to medical examiners what four-year-old children were to overworked mothers.

  He opened the victim’s esophagus to find chemical burns. He lifted the lungs from her chest and placed them in the hanging scale, shaking his head.

  “The lungs are heavy and wet,” he said. “Inhalation of acid fumes damages the mucous membranes and causes pulmonary edema—a buildup of fluid.”

  “She was alive when the bastard poured the acid on her,” Kovac said, anger burning through him just as the acid must have burned through this poor girl’s flesh.

  “Worse than that,” Möller said as he continued his work. “She aspirated the acid itself. There is lung tissue here which has basically been digested.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kovac muttered.

  He jammed his hands at his waist and walked away from the table, his own lungs hurting as he tried a few deep breaths. He had learned long ago never to mentally put himself in the victim’s place. Therein lay the road to alcoholism. But it was difficult not to imagine the horror this girl had suffered in her final moments—held down, stabbed, acid raining down on her. It was difficult not to imagine her screams as her flesh burned and her panic as she gasped for a breath and sucked the caustic chemical into her airway.

  Without a word to anyone, he walked out of the autopsy suite into the hall and just stood there.

  He was by all descriptions, including his own, tough, hardened by long years looking at dead bodies and the wretched things people did to other people. He just needed a moment to regroup, to clear the anger from his head, to take the information of this autopsy and compartmentalize it into the relevant fact file in his brain.

  He heard the door open behind him. Liska walked around in front of him and leaned back against the wall with her arms crossed. She didn’t say anything. They both just stood there, breathing in and out, neither of them feeling the need to fill the silence.

  Finally, Kovac heaved a sigh and said, “She probably wasn’t conscious by the time the killer poured the acid on her. The stab wounds . . . She’d lost a lot of blood.”

  “Probably. I hope so.”

  “We’ve got the skin and blood under her fingernails. We’ll get a DNA profile.”

  “Maybe he’ll be in a database,” Liska said.

  “Yeah, maybe. We’ll hope so,” he said, deciding to at least pretend to grab on to that small hope.

  At this point, small hope was as much hope as they had.

  7

  Liska begged off going for a postautopsy drink in favor of going home to her domestic drama. Kovac begged off going home to avoid the fact that he had no domestic life.

  The Minneapolis Police Department lived in city hall, a massive Gothic-looking stone monstrosity of a building the color of liver crowned in steep verdigris-green roofs. Built around the turn of the twentieth century, with turrets and a clock tower and a five-story rotunda, it had originally been the county courthouse building. The courts now did business in the flashy, modern Hennepin County government complex on the other side of Fifth Street. The police department and Minneapolis city offices remained in the old municipal building.

  Kovac parked in a slot reserved for a deputy chief, knowing there was no danger of any deputy chief interrupting his New Year’s Day to come to the office. The halls were empty, his footfalls echoing as he made his way toward the Criminal Investigative Division offices.

  Maintenance had yet to solve the mystery of the rogue heating system. He started peeling off clothing as soon as he was in the door—gloves, coat, scarf, hat. He threw the pile on Liska’s chair in the cubicle.

  “Judas, it’s like the gateway to hell in here!” he declared to no one in particular.

  A couple of the younger detectives had drawn the short straws to come in on the holiday. They sat three cubicles down watching the Rose Bowl on an iPad. There was no boss present to worry about busting their asses—which was why Kovac didn’t hesitate to reach into his bottom desk drawer for the bottle of Glenmorangie he had stashed there. He poured a couple of glugs into a black coffee mug with white printing: HOMICIDE: IT’S WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST.

  The liquor went down like molten gold, smooth and warm, to pool in his belly and begin unraveling his frayed nerves from the inside out. Only in relaxing did he realize the degree of tension his body had been holding on to. He felt like a coiled spring, slowly relaxing. He took what felt like his first deep breath in three hours and exhaled slowly as his gaze wandered the work space he shared with Liska.

  The small gray cubby was chock-full of books and binders and messy file folders. Post-it notes were stuck to every surface—reminders to call for lab results, to contact witnesses, to check with prosecutors for court schedules. Cop cartoons that had been printed off the Internet were taped to cabinet doors and pinned to the walls.

  He and Liska had been trading gag gifts for years. Her favorite from him—the pen with the fake eyeball on top—stuck up prominently from the coffee mug bristling with pens beside her phone. His personal favorite—a very realistic-looking rubber severed human finger—was reaching into the nose hole of human skull that looked down on him from a shelf above his computer.

  These were the comforts of his home away from home. Stuff that meant nothing to anyone but him. Stuff that connected him to no one in any meaningful way. Liska had pictures of her kids around her computer area. Kovac had an anonymous human skull with a rubber finger in its nose.

  He checked his phone messages more to escape his own melancholy than anything else. He had a dozen messages, a couple from other cops working the Doc Holiday cases in other states, most from esteemed members of the press wanting to know more about the dead zombie. Fucking newsies.

  Like most cops, he hated the media. Their usefulness was far outstripped by their ability to annoy, to misinform, to fuck up, and to do outright damage to a case. Their stock-in-trade was human tragedy, the more grotesque, the better. A young woman with no name dying was of no interest to them. Murder her, and they would prick up their ears. Chuck her from a moving vehicle, and they would come running. Call her a zombie, and they would wet themselves getting there.

  Their interest in the case would run equal to the life of the shock factor. For that reason he supposed he should have been grateful his victim had been disfigured by having some sick fuck pour acid in her face while she was still breathing. That would hold the public’s interest longer than a mere stabbing or shooting.

  “Aloha! Welcome to paradise!”

  Tippen had dressed in baggy khaki shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt, black socks, and sandals. His bony knees looked as big as doorknobs on his skinny, hairy white legs. He sauntered toward the cubicle wearing Ray-Bans, an umbrella drink in hand.

  “You look like a fucking cartoon,” Kovac said.

  “Absurdity is the humor of the superior mind,” Tippen returned without rancor.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got that covered. The socks are an especially nice touch. What are you doing here?” Kovac asked. “Are the strip clubs closed for the holiday?”

  Tippen leaned a shoulder against the cubicle wall and shoved the sunglasses on top of his head. “You’re not the only one without a life, you know. I came in and commandeered a conference room. I thought maybe if we pretend we have a task force on this, the boss will just go along. We’ll act like it’s been going on for weeks. He’ll be too embarrassed to call us on it.”

  “A pretend task force,” Kovac said. “I like it. Do we get to spend pretend money on it?”

  “And get imaginary overtime pay too.”

  “Is there another kind?”

  “Not in this economy.”

  “Ah, well, what the hell would we do with money anyway?” Kovac asked. “Buy shit we don’t have time to use ’cause we’re always on the job on account of the city can’t afford to hire enough cops?”

  He poured more Scotch
into his coffee mug and cast the pink umbrella in Tippen’s drink a dubious look as they walked toward the conference room. “What the hell are you drinking?”

  “A mai tai. In keeping with our tropical surroundings.”

  “That’s a chick’s drink.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “If I’m gonna get fired for drinking on the job, I’m going down drinking a man’s drink,” Kovac said, raising his mug.

  “Belching and farting all the way.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “You’re a man’s man, my friend. A credit to our gender. I’m proud to know you. How did the autopsy go?”

  Kovac took another sip of the Scotch as he took a seat at the table where Tippen had deposited several cardboard file boxes full of paperwork generated by the Doc Holiday murders. The room was small and windowless and as hot as a freaking sauna.

  “Not so well for the victim,” he said, rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Turns out, she’s dead.”

  “Of what?”

  “Undecided. Möller wants more time to go over the results and get the labs back. We know she probably didn’t die from the stab wounds. She was still alive—technically, at least—when her killer poured acid on her face.”

  “Charming.” Tippen perched a hip on the tabletop, settling in. “So Tinks is right? She could have been alive when she came out of that trunk?”

  “Not likely. If the knife didn’t kill her, she could have died from inhaling the acid. There was lung damage. Can’t breathe if your lungs have melted.”

  “Can’t live if half your brain is knocked out of your skull by a Hummer either.”

  “True enough,” Kovac said. “Or she could have died of shock. Or she could have died from ingesting the acid—it burned the hell out of her esophagus. Or maybe she had her head bashed in with a hammer like Doc Holiday did to how many of his victims? And we’ll never know for sure because she was then run over by a Hummer, which busted her skull like a rotten melon.