Sara was about to beg off when Faith made a noise that caused them all to look her way. She waved her hand in front of her face, and Sara guessed that it was nothing more nefarious than her presence in the morgue that was causing Faith Mitchell’s skin to go ashen.
Pete ignored the reaction, telling Will and Faith, “Found plenty of sperm and fluids on the skin before we scrubbed her down. I’ll bag them with the rape kit and send them off.”
Will scratched his arm under his jacket sleeve. “I doubt our guy’s been caught before, but we’ll see what the computer kicks back.”
For the sake of procedure, Pete turned on the Dictaphone, giving the time and date, then saying, “This is the body of Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel, a malnourished female, reportedly thirty-eight years of age. She was found in a wooded area near Route 316 in Conyers, which is located in the Georgia county of Rockdale, in the early hours of Saturday, April eighth. The victim was hanging from a tree, upside down, her right foot caught in the branches. There is an obvious broken neck and signs of severe torture. Performing the procedure is Pete Hanson. Attending are Special Agents Will Trent and Faith Mitchell, and the inimitable Dr. Sara Linton.”
He pulled back the sheet and Faith gasped. Sara realized that this was the first time she had seen the abductor’s handiwork. In the harsh light of the morgue, every injustice was on display: the dark bruises and welts, the rips in the skin, the black electrical burns that looked like powder but could never be wiped off. The body had been washed prior to examination, the blood scrubbed away, so that the waxy white of the skin stood in stark contrast to the injuries. Shallow slices crisscrossed the victim’s flesh, each cut deep enough to bleed but not bring about mortality. Sara guessed the cuts had been made by a razor blade or a very sharp, very thin knife.
“I need to—” Faith didn’t finish the sentence. She just turned on her heel and left. Will watched her go, shrugging an apology to Pete.
“Not her favorite part of the job,” Pete noted. “She’s a bit thin. The victim, that is.”
He was right. Jacquelyn Zabel’s bones were pronounced under her skin.
Pete asked Will, “How long was she held?”
He shrugged. “We’re hoping you can tell us.”
“Could be from dehydration,” Pete mumbled, pressing his fingers against the woman’s shoulder. He asked Sara, “What do you think?”
“The other victim, Anna, was in the same physical condition. He could have been giving them diuretics, withholding food and water. Starvation isn’t an unusual form of torture.”
“He certainly tried every other kind.” Pete sighed, puzzled. “The blood should tell us more.”
The examination continued. Snoopy laid down a ruler by the cuts and took photographs as Pete drew hatches on the sketch for the autopsy report, trying to approximate the damage. Finally, he put down the pen, peeling back the eyelids to check the color.
“Interesting,” he murmured, indicating Sara should look for herself. Absent a moist environment, the organs of a decomposing body would shrink, the flesh contracting away from any wounds. Sara found several holes in the sclera as she examined the eyes, tiny red dots that opened in perfect round circles.
“Needles or straight pins,” Pete guessed. “He pierced each eyeball at least a dozen times.”
Sara checked the woman’s eyelids, saw the holes went clean through. “Anna’s pupils were fixed and dilated,” she told him, taking a pair of gloves off the tray, slipping them on as she looked into the woman’s bloody ears. Snoopy had cleaned away the clots, but the canals were still coated in dried blood. “Do you have a—”
Snoopy handed her an otoscope. Sara pressed the tip into Zabel’s ear, finding the sort of damage she had seen only in child abuse cases. “The drum has been punctured.” She turned the head to check the other ear, hearing the broken vertebrae in the neck crunch from the movement. “This one, too.” She handed the scope to Pete so he could see.
“Screwdriver?” he asked.
“Scissors,” she suggested. “See the way the skin at the opening of the canal has been shaved off?”
“The pattern slants upwards, deeper at the top.”
“Right, because the scissors narrow at the point.”
Pete nodded, making more notes. “Deaf and blind.”
Sara made the obvious leap, opening the woman’s mouth. The tongue was intact. She pressed her fingers against the outside of the trachea, then used the laryngoscope Snoopy handed her to look down the throat. “The esophagus is raw. Smell that?”
Pete leaned down. “Bleach? Acid?”
“Drain cleaner.”
“I had forgotten your father is a plumber.” He pointed to a dark staining around the woman’s mouth. “See this?”
Blood always pooled to the lowest point of a dead body, leaving a stain on the skin called lividity. The face was a deep, dark purple from hanging upside down. It was hard to isolate the rash around her lips, but once Pete pointed it out, Sara could see where liquid had been poured into the mouth and dripped down the sides of the face as the victim gagged.
Pete palpated the neck. “Lots of damage here. It definitely looks like he had her drink some kind of astringent. We’ll see if it made it to her stomach when we cut her open.”
Sara startled when Will spoke; she had forgotten he was there. “It looked like she broke her neck in the fall. That she slipped.”
Sara remembered their earlier conversation, his certainty that Jacquelyn Zabel had been hanging in the tree while he looked for her on the ground. He had told her the woman’s blood was still warm. She asked, “Were you the one who took her down?”
Will shook his head. “They had to photograph her.”
“You checked her carotid for a pulse?” Sara asked.
He nodded. “The blood was dripping from her fingers. It was hot.”
Sara checked the woman’s hands, saw the fingernails had been broken, some ripped straight out of the nail beds. Per routine, photographs had been taken of the body before Snoopy had cleaned it. Pete knew what Sara was thinking. He indicated the computer monitor. “Snoopy, do you mind pulling up the pre-wash photos?”
The man did as he was asked, Pete and Sara standing over either shoulder. Everything was on the database, from the initial crime-scene photos to the more recent ones taken at the morgue. Snoopy had to click through them all, and Sara saw the original scene in quick succession, Jacquelyn Zabel hanging from the tree, her neck awkwardly bent to the side. Her foot was so firmly caught in the branches that they probably had to cut the limbs to get her down.
Snoopy finally reached the autopsy series. Blood caked the face, the legs, the torso. “There,” Sara said, pointing to the chest. They both returned to the body, and Sara stopped herself before reaching down. “Sorry,” she apologized. This was Pete’s case.
His ego seemed unharmed. He lifted the breast, exposing another crisscrossed wound. This one was deeper in the center of the X. Pete pulled down the overhead light, trying to get a closer look as he pressed the skin apart. Snoopy handed him a magnifying glass, and Pete leaned in even closer, asking Will, “You found a pocketknife at the scene?”
Will provided, “The only print was the victim’s, a latent on the case of the knife.”
Pete handed Sara the magnifying glass so she could see for herself. He asked Will, “Left or right hand?”
“I—” Will stopped, glancing back toward the door for Faith. “I don’t remember.”
“Was the print a thumb? Index?”
Snoopy had gone to the computer to pull up the information, but Will said, “Partial thumb on the butt of the knife.”
“Three-inch blade?”
“About.”
Pete nodded to himself as he made the notation on his diagram, but Sara wasn’t going to make Will wait for him to finish. “She stabbed herself,” she told him, holding the magnifying glass over the site, motioning him over. “See the way the wound is V-shaped at the bottom and flat on the top?” Wi
ll nodded. “The blade was upside down and moved in an upward trajectory.” Sara made the motion, stabbing herself in the chest. “Her thumb was on the butt of the knife, driving it in deeper. She must have dropped it, then fallen. Look at her ankle.” She indicated the slight marks around the base of the fibula. “The heart had stopped beating when her foot caught. The bones were broken, but there’s no swelling, no sign of trauma. There would be serious bruising if the blood was still circulating when she fell.”
Will shook his head. “She wouldn’t have—”
“The facts bear it out,” Sara interrupted. “The wound was self-inflicted. It would’ve been fast. She didn’t suffer for long.” Sara felt the need to add, “Or much longer than she already had.”
Will’s eyes locked with hers, and Sara had to force herself not to look away. The man may not have looked like a cop, but she was certain he thought like one. Whenever an open case stopped moving forward, any policeman worth his salt took the time to beat himself up for making an ill-timed decision, missing an obvious clue. Will Trent would be doing that now—searching for ways to blame himself for the death of Jacquelyn Zabel.
Sara said, “Your time to help her is now. Not back in that forest.”
Pete put down his pen. “She’s right.” He pressed his hands against the chest. “Feels like there’s a lot of blood in here, and she made a damn lucky guess about where to sink the blade. Probably hit the heart immediately. I’d agree that the break in the foot as well as the neck came postmortem.” He slipped off a glove as he walked to the computer and pulled up the crime-scene photos. “Look at how her head seems to be resting against the branches, tilted. That’s not what happens when you snap your neck during a fall. It would be pressed hard against the offending object. When you’re alive, your muscles are taught to prevent such an injury. It’s a violent event, not a gentle twisting. Good call, kiddo.”
Pete beamed at Sara, and she felt herself blush with a student’s pride.
“Why would she kill herself?” Will asked, as if the tortured woman had had everything to live for.
Pete supplied, “She was probably blind, most certainly deaf. I’m surprised she was able to make it up the tree. She wouldn’t have heard the searchers, would have no idea that you were looking for her.”
“But she—”
“The infrared on the helicopters didn’t pick up her signature,” Pete interrupted. “But for you being out there, just happening to look up, I imagine the only way you would have found her body is tracking down a DRT call come deer season.”
Dead Right There, he meant. All police agencies had their slang, some of it more colorful than others. Hunters were notorious for calling in bodies they’d found DRT.
Pete turned to Sara. “Do you mind?” he asked, nodding toward the bag for the rape kit. Snoopy was an excellent assistant, but Sara got the message: She was back to being an observer. She peeled off her gloves and opened the kit, laying out the swabs and vials. Pete picked up the speculum, pressing open the legs so he could insert it into the vagina.
As with some violent rapes that resulted in homicide, the vaginal walls had stayed clenched postmortem, and the plastic speculum broke as Pete tried to pry it open. Snoopy handed him a metal speculum, and Pete tried again, his hands shaking as he forced open the clamp. It was rough to watch, and Sara was glad that Faith was not there as the wrenching sound of metal parting flesh filled the room. Sara handed Pete a swab, and he inserted the cotton-tipped stick, only to meet resistance.
Pete bent over, trying to find the obstruction. “Dear Lord,” he mumbled, his hand scattering the tray of tools as he snatched up a pair of thin-nosed forceps. His voice was absent any charm as he told Sara, “Glove up—help me with this.”
Sara snapped on the gloves, wrapping her hands around the speculum as he reached in with the forceps, which were nothing more than a long pair of tweezers. The tips grabbed something, and he pulled back his arm. A long, single piece of white plastic came out, like a silk cloth from a magician’s sleeve. Pete kept pulling, layering the plastic into a large bowl. Section after section came, each streaked in dark, black blood, each connected to the next in a perforated line.
“Trash bags,” Will said.
Sara could not breathe. “Anna,” she said. “We need to check Anna.”
CHAPTER TEN
—
Will’s office on the third floor of City Hall East was little more than a storage closet with a window that looked down onto a pair of abandoned railroad tracks and a Kroger grocery store parking lot that seemed to be the meeting place for many suspicious-looking people in very expensive cars. The back of Will’s chair was pressed so tightly against the wall that it gouged the sheetrock every time he turned. Not that he needed to turn. He could see the entire office without moving his head. Even getting into the chair was difficult because Will had to squeeze between his desk and the window in order to reach it—a maneuver that made him glad he wasn’t planning on having children.
He leaned on his elbow as he watched his computer boot up, the screen flickering, the little icons flashing into place. Will opened his email first, tucking a pair of headphones into his ears so he could hear them through the SpeakText program he’d installed a few years ago. After deleting a couple of sexual enhancement offers and a plea from a deposed Nigerian president, he found a note from Amanda and a policy-change notice on the state health insurance plan that he sent to his private email so he could muddle through his loss of covered items from the comfort of his own home.
Amanda’s email needed no such study. She always wrote in all caps and she seldom bothered with proper sentence construction. UPDATE ME was plastered across the screen in a thick, bold font.
What could he tell her? That their victim had eleven kitchen garbage bags shoved up inside her? That Anna, the victim who had survived, had the same number inside of her? That twelve hours had passed and they were no closer to finding out who had taken the women, let alone what pattern connected the two victims?
Blind, possibly deaf, possibly mute. Will had been in the cave where the women were kept. He could not imagine the horrors they experienced. Seeing the torturer’s instruments had been bad enough, but he imagined not seeing them would be worse. At least the burden of Jackie Zabel’s death was off his shoulders, though knowing that the woman had chosen death when help was so nearby brought him no comfort.
Will could still hear the compassionate tone Sara Linton had used as she’d explained how Zabel had taken her life. He could not remember the last time a woman had talked to him that way—tried to throw him a life vest instead of yelling at him to swim harder the way Faith did or, worse, grabbing onto his legs and pulling him farther down the way Angie always tried.
Will slumped back in his chair, knowing he should put Sara out of his mind. There was a case in front of him that needed his undivided attention, and Will made himself focus on the women he could actually have an impact on.
Both Anna and Jackie had probably escaped from the cave at the same time, Jackie unable to hear or see, Anna most probably blind. There would have been no way for the two damaged women to communicate with each other except through touch. Had they held hands, stumbling together blindly as they’d tried to find their way out of the forest? Somehow, they’d been separated, lost from each other. Anna must have known she was on a road, felt the cool asphalt on the soles of her bare feet, heard the roar of an approaching car. Jackie had gone the other way—finding a tree, climbing to what must have felt like safety. Waiting. Every creak of the tree, every movement of the branches, sending panic through her body as she waited for her abductor to find her and take her back to that cold, dark place.
She would have been holding her license, her identity, in one hand and the means of her death in the other. It was an almost incomprehensible choice. Climb down, walk aimlessly to look for help, risking possible capture? Or plunge the blade into her chest? Fight for her life? Or seize control and end it on her own terms?
He opened a large folder on his desk and fanned out the photos of the cave. The torture devices, the marine battery, the unopened cans of soup—Charlie had documented all of it, recording the descriptions on a master list. Will thumbed through the photographs, finding the best view of the cave. Charlie had squatted at the base of the ladder the same way Will had last night. Xenon lights pulled every nook and cranny out of shadow. Will found another photo, this one showing the sexual devices laid out like artifacts at an archaeological dig. He could figure out from first glance how most of them were used, but some were so complicated, so horrific, that his mind could not grasp how they operated.
Will was so lost in thought that his brain took its time registering the fact that his cell phone was ringing. He opened the pieces, saying, “Trent.”
“It’s Lola, baby.”
“Who?”
“Lola. One of Angie’s girls.”
The prostitute from last night. Will tried to keep his tone even, because he was more furious with Angie than the hooker, who was just doing what bottom feeders always did—trying to exploit an angle. Will wasn’t Angie’s angle, though, and he was sick of these girls trying to play him. He said, “Listen, I’m not getting you out of jail. If you’re one of Angie’s girls, then get Angie to help you.”
“I can’t get ahold of her.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t either, so stop calling me for help when I don’t even know her phone number. Understand?” He didn’t give her time to respond. He ended the call and gently put his cell phone on his desk. The tape was starting to peel, the string coming lose. He had asked Angie to help him with the phone before she left, but, like a lot of things regarding Will, it hadn’t been a priority.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 97
