Hush (14 page)

None of it bothered her. She couldn't
remember a time when it had ever bothered her, not even when she
was little and would find a dead animal on the Oklahoma highway
that ran just a hundred yards from her home. She used to peel back
the hide to see the muscles, the intestines, poking around with an
inquisitive finger. The anatomy of anything fascinated her. All her
life she'd tried to understand other people's revulsion toward
anything dead, but couldn't. For her, looking inside a human body
was no different than pulling a flower apart to see how it was put
together.

Her parents had never understood her
compulsion, and to this day her mother still asked why she didn't
practice as a real doctor so that she could use her skills to save
people, not cut them up when they were already dead. A hard thing
for any parent to get, Bernie supposed.

Starting at one shoulder, just below the
clavicle, she began the incision, following a line to the
breastbone. The invasion was deep, penetrating skin, fatty tissue,
and muscle in one motion. An identical incision was made on the
other side. At the meeting place of the sternum, an incision was
made down the entire torso, going around the navel and ending at
the pubic bone. With shears, she then clipped through the rib
cartilage until she was able to remove the rib cage and set it
aside, exposing the thoracic organs.

She took samples of skin and tissue, dropping
them into containers of formaldehyde. After she was finished
collecting samples, she poured water over the remaining organs from
a steel pitcher.

"Suction."

The assistant unwrapped a plastic wand,
attached it to the hose on the suction machine, then turned the
dial to medium. He prodded with the clear plastic tip, suctioning
around the heart. Pink, blood-tinged fluid trailed up the tube to
be deposited in a quart container.

"Heart intact. Lacerations to the liver and
spleen."

Dr. Bernard poked around at various veins and
arteries that lay collapsed and as flat as tapeworms. "She bled out
completely. Did you notice how there was hardly any lividity? No
blood left in her body to settle."

"She bled to death?" Max asked.

"Yep."

"Could she have been saved?" the woman, Ivy,
whispered, her voice trembling slightly.

She'd be going down soon, Bernie thought
without disdain or criticism. It was simply something that
happened. The nature of the beast, just as killing this woman had
been an act the killer couldn't control.

"You mean could she have been saved if she'd
been found in time?"

"Yes."

"Well, with the damaged liver and spleen, all
the wounds, it's doubtful." What did she want to hear? Why did it
matter? Bernie never questioned occurrences that had already
happened. It was a pointless waste of time. She didn't read
fiction. She no longer went to movies. Art and music did nothing
for her. She existed in reality, a place she liked to be. She'd
wasted a lot of time filtering movies, TV, through everyone else's
eyes, trying to understand her fellow humans.

Fake. All of it fake. Especially the
portrayal of death. Death was the total absence of spirit—something
that no one could emulate, no matter how good the actor.

"Doubtful," she said, continuing to consider
the question. "But maybe," she answered truthfully. "If he hadn't
crushed her windpipe. He made sure she wouldn't be crawling
anywhere, picking up the telephone, dialing 911." She reached for
the bone saw that hung from a pulley above her head. "This next
procedure was never a favorite of my students." Nine out of ten
passed out the first time they witnessed the dissecting of the
throat.

She would be nice and give Dunlap good
warning. And she had to give her credit for making it to this
point. A lot of people didn't. In fact, she could recall a certain
detective who'd all but passed out on her not that many years ago.
"All ashore who's going ashore."

Sometimes she didn't say anything. Sometimes
she just started cutting. But she didn't feel like being mean
today, so she issued the warning. And Dunlap was already looking a
little washed out. Bernie looked at Max, raising one eyebrow. But
then, maybe he wanted her to faint so he could catch her. Maybe
that's what this was all about.

He looked back at her through his face
shield, his stone features never changing.

Maybe not.

Ivy shook her head, saying, "I'm okay," even
though she was afraid she wasn't okay.

She forced herself to watch as the dissection
continued up the trachea, esophagus, and finally the removal of the
tongue. It was the tongue that did it.

Ivy spun around and ran, pulling off her face
shield and dropping it on a medical cart. Into a nearby trash
container went the apron and gloves. Then she was pushing through a
door marked EXIT in red, illuminated letters. Outside the building,
she sucked in a deep breath, but instead of smelling fresh air, she
smelled the sweet-rotten smell of death and formaldehyde. It filled
her sinuses, her lungs, her throat. Bile rose, burning her
esophagus, and dizziness collected behind her eyes.

She could feel the sunlight on her cold,
clammy face. She took a few steps in the direction of Max Irving's
faded blue car with the dented side panel, which was parked in the
shade of a puny tree where birds were chirping, calling
encouragements to her. She moved in the direction of that shade and
those gaily singing birds, distantly wondering why they'd chosen to
live in Chicago when they could live anywhere. If she were one of
them, she'd go to St. Sebastian, where the sun didn't shine so
harshly. A place that didn't smell like death.

She needed that shade. Not the shade of a
cement building, a morgue, but that cool, tree-cast shade. Before
she could reach it, dizziness washed over her again and cold sweat
brought her to her knees, small bits of gravel poking through her
khaki pants.

"Put your head down."

Mentally, she fought him because she didn't
want to collapse in a heap in the middle of the parking lot. But
physically she had no more strength than a rag doll as his hand
pressed against the back of her scalp, forcing her forehead to her
thighs.

Even in her near faint, she understood that
another man, a man who had last physically forced his will upon
her, was now preying upon other innocent women.

She cursed her own weakness.

She hadn't prayed in years, but she pulled
together a semblance of prayer now while darkness danced behind her
eyes and the hot, unforgiving surface of the parking lot bit into
her knees, and a man for whom she felt no affinity pressed her to
the ground.

Those earlier childhood prayers had been sent
skyward at the pleading of her mother, and Ivy had cooperated for
no other reason than to keep from going to hell. She'd quit praying
when she discovered she was already there.

Give me strength, she begged, not of God but
of herself. She was the only person who could get her through this,
the only person she would trust. Which was a scary thought; she had
so many weaknesses, so many doubts.

Coward, she taunted.

She straightened her neck, fighting the hand
that was not only there to help her, but to hold her down, to keep
her from doing what she'd come here to do.

She pushed him away and got to her feet,
staggering to the shade tree, bracing one hip against the car's
fender.

Irving followed, dropping to the ground, his
back against the narrow trunk of the tree. With arms dangling over
bent knees, he said, "I puked my guts out at my first autopsy."

She looked up at him, surprised at that
admission.

Earlier, he'd taken off his jacket and tie
and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt to just below
the elbows.

Ivy rubbed her face and tried to swallow the
acidic taste in her mouth. She wished she had some water. "I threw
up when I had to dissect an earthworm," she told him, now that they
were confessing things.

He laughed and scooped up a piece of gravel,
then gave it a toss. "That's pathetic."

"I know."

She was already regretting her admission,
that tiny peek she'd given him into her past, another life. She
must remember not to talk about herself, not even about
earthworms.

"So what are you doing here, Ivy Dunlap?" he
asked, voicing a path of questioning her carelessly innocent words
had begun. "What road brought you to this point?"

She was saved from reply by the sound of the
delivery door being opened. Dr. Bernard's assistant stuck his head
out. "We're getting ready to start on the baby." It was the first
words the man had spoken.

"Wait here," Irving said, getting to his
feet. "This shouldn't take as long."

"I'm going in."

"Nausea is a cumulative thing. It'll happen
again."

"I won't let it."

He shook his head, but didn't argue.

Five minutes later, they were back in the
autopsy room, dressed in their precautionary gowns and shields.
Once again they stood near the stainless-steel exam table, the
mother's body replaced by that of her infant son. The table seemed
enormous in comparison to the baby's tiny body, a body that looked
heart- breakingly small and alone.

Dr. Bernard began the initial cursory exam in
much the same way as before, going over the infant, but this time
with a softer, gentler voice. The reverent mood broke when she
discovered what looked like an injection site on the infant's
scalp.

"Could he have been given an IV at the
hospital?" Irving asked.

"This is more recent than that. Very little
bruising, and what there is hasn't turned."

"What do you think it is?" Ivy asked.

Dr. Bernard looked up at her with impatience.
"I don't waste my time on suppositions," she said harshly, then
softened her words by adding, "which is one reason I would have
made a damn lousy detective."

"If you ask Bernie the color of a car,"
Irving said conversationally, "she'll tell you what color it is on
the side she can see, but you won't get anything more out of her
unless she walks around the whole damn thing."

Dr. Bernard grunted. "We'll get a tox
screen."

"He's making doubly sure the victims don't
survive," Ivy said with conviction. "First there was the mother's
crushed trachea, and now the baby injected with something."

"Changing his MO," Max stated.

"Escalating," Ivy replied. "That's not
uncommon."

"No, he's perfecting his skills."

She looked at him through her mask. "Getting
smarter and more cunning with each victim."

He nodded grimly.

It seemed they could finally agree on
something.

The ringing of the telephone dragged Ivy from
a semi-slumber—the only kind of sleep she'd been getting
lately.

It was Max Irving, calling to tell her that
he'd scheduled a task-force meeting for 10:00 A.M. Would she be
there? he wanted to know.

In the background, she heard music, loud
music. Suddenly it stopped, and a youthful male voice said, "I'm
ready, Dad."

The trajectory of Max's voice changed, his
words directed away from the phone, toward the world he lived in, a
world Ivy was subconsciously trying to piece together in her head.
"I'm on the phone," he said to the owner of the youthful male
voice.

Dad. His son. Max Irving's son.

"I could have slept another fifteen minutes,"
the boy's voice lamented in the background.

Sleep . . . She remembered that kind of
sleep, the kind that came so easily to the young . . .

"You'll live," Max said, humor in his tone.
Then back into the mouthpiece, apparently recalling Ivy on the
other end of the line, "Task-force meeting," he repeated. "You
going?" Why didn't he just say what he thought? She had no patience
for these games. "Don't you mean, Have I had enough after
yesterday?"

"Did I say that?"

"Indirectly. Don't treat me like an
idiot."

"I didn't call you to start a fight." He
sounded annoyed, impatient.

"Who are you talking to?" she heard his son
ask, plainly curious to know who had evoked his father's irritation
so early in the morning.

"Nobody."

"Thanks," Ivy said dryly.

"Damn. I mean—"

"Don't apologize for finally saying what you
think."

"You're reading more into this than is there.
I just called to tell you about the task-force meeting. Will you be
there?"

As Jinx circled her legs, raising his back
with each pass, Ivy assured Irving that she'd be there, then hung
up as Jinx continued his curling motion, the yellow hair on his
back smooth under her palm. She smiled a little. Call her sick,
call her twisted, but she actually enjoyed getting under Irving's
skin.

The orange-handled scissors cut out the
newspaper article, his hands moving with precision as he turned the
clipping first one way, then the other, the scissors making a clean
rasping sound that he liked. Finished, he followed with the
accompanying photo that had been taken of an unidentified woman
leaving the crime scene. He liked the caption, "Dark At The Top Of
The Stairs," and he made a mental note of the reporter's name.

He felt a nagging at the back of his mind.
Even though he could identify the cause of his anxiety, that
knowledge didn't make the nagging go away. Everybody had a name.
Everybody had to have a name— and he didn't know if he could add
the photo to his collection without knowing the name of the
unidentified woman.

He pulled out a scrapbook from under his bed.
This scrapbook was different than the other one. This one contained
all the newspaper articles written about the Madonna Murderer. It
contained photos of the people who had worked on the case.