“Hit her hard when she was eight or nine and harder when she was eleven or twelve.”
“I don’t remember Sally getting—”
Dan Hippolito finished the sentence for him. “Getting a rib broken?”
“Not twice.” Cardozo frowned, trying to remember. “Once I might have forgotten, but not twice.”
“From what you’ve told me about Sally Manfredo, I doubt this is her. I’ll have to check, but I very much doubt it.”
Cardozo didn’t know whether he felt relief or pain. His niece had vanished six years ago, and every time an unidentified female teenager turned up dead he had that instant of black dread: this time it’s Sally. “Would you check, Dan? Just to keep my mind at ease? I’d appreciate it.”
Dan picked up a bone from the lower leg and for one surrealistic moment Cardozo thought Dan was going to ask him to touch it, feel it, get to know it.
“Now, this is her left ankle and this”—Dan’s finger ran along an uneven inch-long fissure—“is a bad fracture…happened no more than eight weeks before death. Hasn’t healed…she should have stayed off it, but obviously she didn’t. She probably got it set by a doctor, then she started putting weight on it, which is how it developed this seventeen-degree twist that you see here. Safe bet she was taking painkillers.”
“This girl led a rough life.”
“That’s understating the case.” Dan pointed to an area above the break. “There’s a fair amount of skin tissue still adhering to the tibia—and these things here are leather particles.”
Cardozo squinted. There was a layer of dark matter stuck to the bone, and he couldn’t see which particles Dan was talking about. “Leather?”
Dan’s dark eyes met Cardozo’s. He nodded. “Commercially treated and tanned and dyed black. Hard to see without a microscope.”
“What’s leather doing on her shin?”
“It could be someone secured her bare feet with a belt.”
Cardozo frowned. “How soon before death?”
“Put it this way: between that belt and death, no shower intervened.” Now Dan pointed to the rib cage. “Exactly the same thing goes for these patches on the sternum, the clavicle, the seventh rib—her skin’s been preserved.”
Cardozo could see the patches, gray against the intermittent ivory of the bone, but he would never have recognized them as skin. “Preserved how?”
“With wax.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Somebody most likely lit a candle and dripped it on her. Probably while her feet were tied with that belt. Most people wouldn’t hold still for hot candle wax.” Dan’s hand made an arcing gesture toward the arm bones. “If any of the tissue around the radius or ulna had survived, we might have found that her forearms had been secured too.”
Dan walked around to the front of the body tray.
“I’ve cleaned her hair a little—wanted you to see the way this is woven in.” The gloved hand lifted one of the girl’s braids. Something foreign glinted through dully, something that wasn’t dirt or dead cells or decayed vegetation.
Cardozo could make out a series of tiny metal links. “Looks like a jewelry chain.” Or a dime-store key chain that had been pressed into service as jewelry.
Dan nodded. “She didn’t do it herself—someone helped her.” He reached into the pocket of his rubber apron. “I found one other piece of jewelry on her person.” He placed something in the palm of his outstretched glove. It was a tiny, very tarnished metal ring.
Cardozo frowned. “That’s too small even for a pinkie.”
“It’s not a finger ring. It was in her left nipple—preserved in wax. The nipple was pierced four, five years prior to death. The other nipple didn’t get the wax treatment, so we don’t know if she had a pair of rings. I didn’t find any other ring with the bones. The lab may have found something in the hamper.”
Cardozo shook his head. “Not yet.”
“The maggots left a little marrow in the right femur—possibly I can liquefy some blood cells. Don’t get your hopes up, but sometimes even a few cells can tell us what infections she was carrying, what drugs were in her system.”
Cardozo was still for a moment. He was aware of a desolating flow of sadness inside his chest. It was an old sadness—he had been handling it for six years, he would handle it now. He wasn’t going to let sadness keep him from doing his job.
“What’s your feeling, Dan? What’s her story?”
“I hate to extrapolate from the condition this body is in.” Dan’s gloves smoothed down his surgical smock, leaving ashen tracks. “But I get a feeling she was a teen hooker—with a heavy s/m sideline.”
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About the Author
Edward Stewart (1938–1996) grew up in New York City and Cuba. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard, where he edited the famed Lampoon humor magazine. He studied music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and worked as a composer and arranger before launching his career as a writer. His first novel, Orpheus on Top, was published in 1966. He wrote thirteen more novels, including the bestselling Vince Cardozo thrillers Privileged Lives, Jury Double, Mortal Grace, and Deadly Rich.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Edward Stewart
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4804-7062-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Deadly Rich Page 65
