by P. D. Martin
We reach the police crime-scene tape, with a barrier of uniformed cops encircling the area, and the media right up front, with their cameras firing. One camera swings toward us and its reporter shoves the microphone in Darren’s direction.
“Detective Carter, what are we looking at here?” Part of a crime reporter’s job is to know the senior investigators on sight, so I’m not surprised that this one knows Darren.
Darren maintains his silence.
The nearest cop takes one look at Darren’s badge and moves aside for him.
“Detective Carter…” yells the reporter in vain.
AmericanPsycho: Switch on NBC now. They’re running a story about the University of Arizona.
NeverCaught: Cool.
BlackWidow: I don’t care much about following the media reports on my vics.
NeverCaught: Are you ****ing crazy? That’s half the fun. Okay, I’ve got it on. Gee, that reporter’s hot.
AmericanPsycho: I love it when they look all serious like that.
NeverCaught: Yeah, they must practice that look in the mirror. Is that the lead cop?
AmericanPsycho: Yes. The reporter said he’s from Tucson Homicide.
NeverCaught: Who’s the blonde with him?
AmericanPsycho: Don’t know. But I’ll find out.
We walk across an open expanse of grass. About fifty feet ahead, the forensic activity is at its height, with several people hovering around some shrubs and others bent over. A woman in her late twenties is in the mix, and I assume she’s Darren’s partner, Jessica Stone. They’ve been partners for less than a year and I didn’t meet her during the DC Slasher case.
The woman glances our way. “Sorry, Carter. Bolson’s on another call-out.”
“Bolson’s always on another call.” Darren looks at his partner. “Stone, Anderson.” He looks at me. “Anderson, Stone.” And so our formal introduction is complete.
Detective Jessica Stone is short but muscular, around five-three and about one hundred and ten pounds. She has auburn hair that she wears layered around her face, highlighting stunning green eyes. Her face is lightly freckled, mostly on her cheekbones, and her lips are full but her mouth is narrow.
Finally I cast my eyes to the body. The vic lies on his back, his arms tucked underneath him. On his hairless chest and extending down to the first two bulges of his six-pack is a bright-red love heart, about four inches square. It looks like it’s been drawn with a marker or body paint.
I feel a slight dizziness and then it hits me, hard and fast like before.
A good-looking African-American man is lying on a bed, naked, handcuffed to the headboard. His body is slicked with sweat and he’s smiling up at me.
As the vision fades I make a grab for something, but I wind up hitting the ground with a thud.
Darren’s hand is quickly on my arm, helping me up. “You okay?”
I force my eyes open, force them to focus on Darren. “I’m fine.” I look around and everyone’s staring at me, not the dead guy. This is probably one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a law-enforcement professional. Now it looks like the sight of a dead guy makes me weak at the knees. I’d almost prefer to tell them the truth than have them think I’m soft. But the truth isn’t an option. The vision took me by surprise and I couldn’t steady myself.
“Sorry, I must have tripped on something.” I look back for the imaginary culprit and then shrug.
Everyone except Darren returns their attention to the body. He moves me away from the main group. “Did you…did you see something?”
“Yes.” I bite my lip, puzzled, but Darren takes the confirmation that it was a vision in his stride.
“Was it him?” He looks at me, but motions his head to the body.
Even though I know it was the vic, I look down at him again. “Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“He was handcuffed to a bed, covered in sweat.” I recall the image. “I think he might have been having sex.”
Darren makes a short humming noise.
“Let’s go take a closer look,” I say.
We move back to the main drag and sidle in next to Stone.
“The love heart is very ritualistic, very specific,” I say. “Seen anything like this before?”
Darren shakes his head. “What have we got, Stone?”
She looks up and a longer strand of hair falls into her face, dancing in her eyes before she shoves it back and reclips a small barrette that captures the stray hairs. “Not much. Unidentified African-American male.”
“Who found him?” Darren looks back at the perimeter.
“Jack Bode. He’s one of the campus cops.” Stone points out an older man sitting on a bench with his head in his hands.
Darren scribbles the information into a notebook. “Did he touch him?”
“No. He called it in and stayed with the body to make sure the scene was left intact.”
“Good.” Darren glances back at the crowd. “Any other witnesses?”
“Not yet.”
“Cameras?”
Stone shakes her head. “The only camera that covers this area was smashed a few days ago. The replacement’s due to be put up tomorrow.”
We look at the body again, watching as the medical examiner moves down to the victim’s feet and secures clear plastic bags around each foot to preserve any evidence.
Darren puts Stone in charge of organizing a search team for the immediate area. At crime-scene locations investigators look for things like footprints, a murder weapon, trace evidence, or anything that seems out of place. Stone and most of the others move off, leaving only a few of us hanging around the body, like insects drawn to a light.
“Okay, let’s move him,” the ME says.
The ME’s assistant lays down a large white sheet of plastic about ten feet to the left of the body—an area that would have already been extensively photographed and inspected for evidence. He moves back to the body, crouching at the feet.
“He’s tall,” the ME says, staring at the vic. “We might need a hand.”
Two of the remaining uniforms join in and they lift the body upward and step awkwardly to one side. Once the body is on the plastic, the photographer takes more shots.
Darren kneels down to get a closer look. “Let’s turn him over.”
They roll him onto his front. His arms are bound together at the back with a pair of handcuffs. The same cuffs from my vision?
The photographer takes several snaps of the victim’s back and the ME’s assistant bags the hands, just like the feet.
The ME examines the purplish marks on the body’s back and but-tocks—lividity. When your heart stops pumping blood, gravity takes over and the blood settles. In this case, lividity indicates the vic died on his back or was moved to his back shortly after death. The victim’s arms, however, do not show any sign of the red splotches. They were not the lowest point of the body after death.
The ME notices the arms too. “Looks like he was cuffed like this at least a few hours after death.” He tries to move the body’s arms. “Rigor’s still in. We’re probably looking at a time of death around eighteen to thirty-six hours ago.”
I nod. Rigor mortis begins in the eyelids a few hours after death and spreads to the face and neck, then the limbs. After about thirty-six hours it starts to dissipate until the body is completely supple once more, about forty-eight to seventy-two hours after death. However, so many factors affect the onset and dissipation of rigor that it can be an unreliable measure of time of death.
“Cause of death?” Darren asks.
“The eyes show some signs of asphyxiation but we’ll know more back at the morgue.”
Darren nods, accepting that, until the autopsy is done, the body can’t do much talking. He stands up and turns to me. “Sorry, Sophie.”
I shrug. “These things happen.”
“We will do some touristy stuff while you’re here. Promise.”
I laugh, knowing the jo
b only too well. “Let’s see how we go.”
“Not much of a vacation for you so far.”
I look up at the blue sky. “The warmer weather and change of scenery is a break.”
Darren’s eyes follow the ME and his assistant as they move past us with the body on a stretcher. “I wouldn’t mind sitting in on the autopsy,” he says.
“The love heart?” I picture the large heart in the middle of the vic’s torso.
“Yup.” Darren puts his notebook back in his pocket. “It bothers me.”
“Me, too.” Marking the victim’s body is not something most killers would trouble themselves with, not unless it had personal significance to them. “It could just be a message to the vic.” That’s one alternative. The other is more ominous—serial killers like to mark their victims, too.
Darren sighs and kicks the ground with his foot. “Damn it! I was really looking forward to a few days off.”
Silence. If it does turn out to be a serial killer, Darren will want to be involved. Like me, he’s particularly drawn to serial cases, where you have a chance to stop the killer and save lives.
He changes the topic. “You feel okay now?”
“Fine. It was just a flash.”
“So it’s back. The psychic stuff.” His blue eyes bore into me.
I’m uncomfortable under his gaze and look away. “One.” I hold my forefinger up for emphasis and meet his eyes again. “I’ve had one vision.” I chew on my lip, wondering why now? Why this body? “Any chance you could get me into that autopsy?”
“Doesn’t sound very touristy to me,” Darren teases.
“I need to find out why this victim is so special. Why I got the vision.” I can be honest with Darren because there’s no Bureau pressure and no repercussions.
5
I put on a mask and place a small dollop of Vicks Vapo Rub underneath my nose—a luxury the forensic pathologist doesn’t have. While I can guard my senses against the horrific odors, they can’t because the sense of smell is essential during the autopsy procedure. For example, in the case of Nitrobenzene poisoning, the organs will usually smell of bitter almonds.
The body has been weighed and measured and taken out of its plastic wrapping. The ME starts with the external examination, searching the front of the body for puncture wounds, bruises or any other marks that could form part of our evidence. He starts with the head. In this case the vic already had a shaved head, but under normal autopsy procedures the head would be shaved and the body thoroughly washed down after an initial examination.
He points to a small gash. “Head wound at the top of the cranium,” he says for us and for the microphone that’s suspended above the autopsy table. He takes a closer look. “The wound is triangular in shape and approximately two inches in diameter. It may have been enough to knock him unconscious.”
Darren nods and looks at the body on the slab. “That’s one way to make sure he doesn’t put up a fight.”
It’s a common tactic used for premeditated murder. With serial killers, it’s usually just to transport the body. They intercept, knock the victim unconscious and then move them to a location of their choice. Then they continue on their terms. Generally they like the victim to be awake when they do the actual killing, so the victim is tied up or restrained in some other way. I flash back to my own abduction and instinctively rub my wrists, still sometimes able to feel the tight ropes burning into my skin. I force myself back into the land of the living…or in this case the dead.
The ME uses tweezers to extract a tiny particle of something from the head wound.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Looks like wood.” He drops it into a test tube and labels it, putting it aside. He methodically makes his way across the rest of the skull, looking for any other marks. When he finds nothing else, he moves to the victim’s face, leaning in close. Next he examines the nasal cavity and then opens the victim’s mouth. He takes a swab from inside the mouth and labels it, placing it in another test tube next to the foreign matter. “The victim’s nasal cavity is normal and a mouth swab has been taken,” he says for the microphone.
He examines the neck carefully, and after a few seconds he puts some extra light on the subject. “Looks like we might have a cause of death.” He points to the victim’s neck. “It’s hard to see bruises on dark skin, but I think we’ve got something. I’ll need to look under the skin to be certain.”
We instinctively lean in, while he dissects the skin away from the neck and examines the underlying muscles. “They’re bruises all right.” He points to some bleeding beneath the skin, the cause of a bruise. “Strangulation it is.”
On the victim’s neck muscles are several round patches of blood.
“Manual strangulation, judging by the pattern of bruising,” the ME adds.
I imagine the man alive with someone’s hands wrapped tightly around his neck. All things considered, it doesn’t take long to take a human life. The vic was tall and, judging from his physique, very strong, yet he was strangled to death.
The ME continues down the body. At the love heart, he takes scrapings of the red matter and puts it in a test tube for analysis in the lab. Next are the arms. When he turns over the right arm a small tattoo is visible. About one inch long, it’s of a single rose, stem and all. The rose has been outlined and colored with black, not red. He takes some photos of the tattoo before examining the arms and hands more thoroughly, which are normally the site of defensive wounds.
“Anything?” Darren asks.
The ME shakes his head. “The hands and arms have no defensive wounds.”
“So maybe he was cuffed before death too?” I saw him handcuffed during sex, but that moment in his life could have been just before his death or weeks before.
Darren and I lean in. There are creases in the victim’s wrists, like everyone’s wrists, but across the creases are definite indentations, about half an inch wide.
The ME dissects the skin again, revealing traces of blood in a band across his wrist. “Slight bruising around the wrists indicates he had the handcuffs on prior to death.” The ME is both answering my question and recording his findings on tape. Once the autopsy is complete, he will type up his official report for the file. For me, as a profiler, I usually read the report and rarely get to view an autopsy. But our presence here gives us a heads-up and allows us to ask questions.
“But the positioning of the hands behind the back definitely happened postmortem.” The ME clarifies this fact and we nod our understanding. The victim was posed like that after death.
With the hands visually examined, the ME scrapes the underneath of the victim’s fingernails. “We’ve got something here. Looks like dirt rather than skin, though.” He transfers the grains into a vial and labels it. Next he takes prints of the victim—hopefully we’ll come up with a match. Then again, the University of Arizona may get back to us with a photo-ID match before the forensics even comes through. Presumably our vic was a student there, given that he was found on campus.
We continue down the body, but find nothing else of interest on the victim’s front. We turn the vic over and the body positioning at death is obvious. If he’d been lying on his cuffed hands, like he was when we found him, not only would blood have settled in his arms, but he would’ve also had darker areas on his buttocks where he’d been resting on his arms and hands. Through lividity, you can even get impressions of something the vic was lying on while the blood was settling. But the blotching on our vic is fairly even.
The ME checks for any signs of rape, such as rectal tearing, but the vic’s given the all clear on this front.
He examines the back of the neck, again dissecting the skin away. “The killer’s hands are very small.” He looks up at us. “We could be looking at a woman.”
“Really?” Darren’s professional interest is piqued. There aren’t many female killers, and most of them are victims of domestic violence who finally turn on their long-term tormentors.
&nb
sp; The ME nods and points to the bruising on the back of the vic’s neck. “The distance between the thumb print that we saw on the front of the vic’s neck and the first finger mark here is short.” He holds one hand up and stretches it out. “The distance between my thumb and forefinger is about four to five inches. Agent Anderson, do you mind?” He nods at my gloved hand. I mirror the ME’s outstretched pose and put my hand against his much larger hand. The difference is at least an inch if not two. Looking at our hands, he says, “I’d say the killer is a small man, a woman, or even a teenager.”
“But our vic’s big, heavy,” Darren says. “How would a woman or teenager have dumped his body?”
The ME shrugs. “I’m just reporting what the body tells me.”
We nod. Darren’s question is an area for investigators—for us, not the ME.
Once the external examination is finished, we help turn the vic over so he’s resting on his back once again. The ME takes samples of the victim’s hair—from his eyebrows, face and pubic region—before washing the body and x-raying it in preparation for the internal examination.
The ME cuts a V shape down the midline rather than the standard Y-section. A V-cut allows the front of the neck tobe examined separately to confirm strangulation. I watched lots of autopsies back in Melbourne, but I still find my stomach clenches and bile rises in my throat as the skin and muscles are peeled back to reveal the internal organs.
“Blood first.” The ME takes a needle and draws blood directly from the jugular vein. Next he makes a small incision in the bladder and takes a urine sample with a pipette. He keeps a running commentary as he progresses. Like the blood, this sample is put into a small glass vial, ready for analysis, and will be screened for alcohol, drugs, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, glucose and a range of poisons.
With the blood and urine work completed, the ME moves on to the organs. He slides the stomach away from the other organs and holds it over a metal dish, using surgical scissors to cut the stomach open and empty its contents into the container.
