Believe No One (26 page)

As she spoke, Fennimore mind-mapped, doodling branches and sub-branches, single words and line drawings, creating something that was half sketch, half summary notes.

‘I found a puncture mark on the medial aspect of her left thigh,' the ME said. ‘We know that Sharla Jane was a recovering meth addict, but for the Brits around the table, methamphetamine is most often smoked or snorted; it's only very rarely injected. I did find historical evidence of her meth addiction – skin damage and meth mouth – but nothing to say she had relapsed. And no indication of other drug use, except that one mark. I palpated it, found a lump. Now, it'll take a while for the tox to come through—'

‘We need to know for sure sooner rather than later, Doctor,' Dunlap said. ‘If she was back on the meth, it complicates the whole picture.'

‘Patience, Detective,' Quint said. ‘When you deal with the dead, often you don't
need
instant results. A full laboratory tox screen
will
take a while, even with the help of our friends at Team Adam. However, it did seem likely you would want to know fast and, with the right dip strips and a sample of urine, you can get instant results – they use them all the time in rehab units, Federal facilities and the like.'

Sheriff Launer bugged his eyes, spread his hands as if to say,
Can we get to it?

She shrugged. ‘Sharla Jane Patterson was clean. She had not recently used cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, benzodiazepines or opiates. But that did not
un
complicate the picture one bit, Detective Dunlap. There was no obvious cause of death – no cuts, blunt force trauma, gunshot wounds, no ligature marks or bruises around the neck to suggest strangulation, no bruising to her chest, or internal organ damage, no bruising to her face around the mouth or nose that would suggest smothering. And yet, she did have petechiae – those are the pinpoint dots which are typical of asphyxiation. Sharla Jane had them on the oral palate, the inner aspects of upper and lower eyelids and behind both ears.' She paused. ‘You do not typically get petechiae behind the ears.'

Behind the ears.
Fennimore added a cartoon sketch of the back of a head, and punctuated the area behind the ears with dots.

‘And there was damage to the back of her throat,' Quint went on. ‘Scratches on the soft palate.'

‘He choked her – stuck something down her throat?' Valance, the young detective, said.

‘Certainly he put something down her throat. But I don't believe he intended to choke her.' She held up a length of clear plastic tubing. ‘This is an oropharyngeal airway. You see it a lot in Emergency Rooms.'

‘He resuscitated her?'

‘Maybe. Med students can be very ham-fisted. I know,' she said, with a rueful smile, ‘I
was
one. It doesn't look good if your patients choke on their own blood because a student who couldn't find his ass with both hands and a rear-view mirror rammed a piece of plastic into their vocal cords. So, the manufacturers make these things
real
soft.' She pinched the tube between thumb and forefinger to prove it. ‘This guy had to be unusually clumsy, or he tried to insert the wrong size airway.'

‘So he
tried
to resuscitate her?' Valance said, confusion writ large on his open face.

‘
Maybe,
' she said again. ‘If he did chest compressions, you would expect to see broken ribs, or at least some bruising in the chest. But there were no bruises, no breaks.'

‘You said she had bruises on her chest and the left side,' Valance reminded her.

‘I said
marks.
But we do get those marks a lot on patients who were shocked after cardiac arrest.'

‘So,' Valance tried one more time, ‘she was bagged and defibbed?'

‘
Possibly,
' the ME said.

Launer had heard enough. ‘Doctor, we need answers, and all you got is maybes.'

‘You got me mixed up with a TV pathologist, Sheriff,' she said. ‘I'm paid to work out the “how” of her death – it's up to you to find out the whys and wherefores.'

Offended, Sheriff Launer went on the attack. ‘Well, would it be too much trouble to give me a cause and manner of death – I mean, you made a lot of the fact she had no significant injuries, so I assume she suffocated?'

‘I don't believe she did suffocate,' Quint said. ‘I believe cause of death was exsanguination.'

Launer gave an exasperated snort.

Fennimore focused on his doodle, adding a dotted line between ‘asphyxia' and ‘exsanguination'. Thinking,
Petechiae behind the ears.

‘She bled out,' Dr Quint went on, ‘yet she had no lacerations that might account for it, and no internal bleeding. It
was
a puzzle. And here's another: getting a sample of blood out of a cadaver is never easy, but you
can
find it, if you know where to look. My preference is the femoral vein because it's easy to find and relatively near the surface – why make life hard, right? The right femoral vein was collapsed. Which is not
that
unusual, but generally – and don't tell anyone I admitted to this, because the toxicologists
do not
like it – you can “milk” the blood up the leg till you have enough to stick in a hypodermic and extract a sample. I tried. Didn't work. So I switched to the subclavian vein – that's a big-assed vein, carries blood from your head back to your heart. Runs under your clavicle, about here.' She indicated on her own nicely defined collarbones. ‘No blood. Pulmonary artery – zip. I had to insert a hypodermic into the heart to get a volume the lab could work with.'

As the team frowned over the post-mortem photographs, she reminded them of the ‘lump' she palpated on the inside of Sharla Jane's left thigh.

‘It was a broken-off section of a hypodermic needle in the femoral vein. Sixteen-gauge – that's big – it's the type attached to a shunt for blood donation. So: Sharla Jane was pale, showed negligible signs of lividity, had no blood in the major blood vessels.' She paused, waiting for the facts to sink in. ‘I believe he sucked the blood right out of her and watched her die.'

Fennimore looked at his diagram, at the dotted line joining asphyxia and exsanguinations, and when the murmurs died down, he said, ‘It doesn't explain the petechiae.'

Quint looked at him like he had rained on her parade.

‘Maybe he locked her in the trunk of his car and she suffered oxygen deprivation,' Simms said.

Fennimore shook his head. ‘Petechiae behind the ears …' He looked at the jug-eared cartoon, dotted with cartoon petechiae. He saw a flash of pale blue Aberdonian light, the seaweed reek of the docks. His mind's eye lit upon a set of plastic tote boxes stacked to the left of his desk in his office at the university. Old reports – reviews of coroners' verdicts.

He had it.

‘The petechiae behind her ears suggests traumatic asphyxia,' he said.

‘I considered that,' Dr Quint said. ‘But there was no significant trauma, no bloating, no discoloration of the face—'

‘I reviewed a case, a couple of years back,' he interrupted. ‘A lorry driver stopped at a delivery gate, went to open it. The brakes were faulty, and the lorry crept forward, pinning him. He died in minutes. There were no scene photos because the firm's security team found him five minutes after the accident and took him inside. The insurance company contested the widow's claim because there was no internal organ damage, no external signs and very little skin injury. Fortunately, one of the mortuary techs had the foresight to take pictures when the body was first brought in. The driver's face was blue and bloated on arrival, but by the time the post-mortem took place, the signs had vanished.'

The ME nodded, slowly, accepting the possibility. ‘You know, this adds a whole new level of sadistic to the resuss attempts.'

Launer broke in on their musings: ‘Are you two going to keep on talking in code, or are you going to let us all in on the secret?'

Dr Quint looked at Fennimore. ‘Professor?' It was an invitation, professional courtesy: since Fennimore had spotted the significance, he got to deliver his theory to the team.

‘It's easy to see petechiae on the eyeballs or under the eyelids,' he said, ‘because the skin is thin and well supplied with capillaries. It's much more difficult where the skin is thicker – and petechiae behind the ears takes something exceptional, something like traumatic asphyxia. You call it crush asphyxia. You're even
more
likely to see it where you have repeated trauma, because of the cumulative effect.'

‘You mean he did this again and again?' Valance, alone amongst the detectives, looked shocked.

‘It's not uncommon,' Dr Detmeyer said.

Varley gave a small nod of agreement. ‘The ultimate form of control.'

Fennimore's mind flew to Rachel, his wife; to Suzie, his daughter. Time slipped and, heart pounding, he experienced the rising panic he'd felt those first weeks after they disappeared.

‘Which means the killer asphyxiated her, resuscitated her, then bled her to death,' Dr Quint added.

The scientist's need to present the complete picture had saved Fennimore in those early days. It saved him now.

‘You missed something,' he said. ‘He blinded her, too.'

Everyone turned to him.

‘The eyes figure prominently in the presentations of this type of predator,' Detmeyer said. ‘Wanting to see and be seen in the final moment.'

‘Or see and
not
be seen,' Varely added. ‘Blinding a victim goes far beyond functional violence – what he might need to do to acquire and subdue a victim. This level of violence is likely to express an inner narrative – what we term “expressive violence”.'

By ‘we', they all understood him to mean
we in the UK.

‘What
we
would call his “signature”,' Detmeyer said. ‘But we were avoiding technical terms, weren't we, Professor?' he added dryly.

The muscles around Varley's eyes flickered and Fennimore thought he looked stung, but after a moment, he inclined his head slightly, accepting Detmeyer's gentle rebuke.

Detmeyer looked around at the assembled team. ‘In plain English, the blinding is the outward expression of the offender's fantasy.'

‘This guy fantasizes about blinding his victims?' Dunlap asked.

‘But he didn't blind the others, he just taped their eyes,' Simms said.

‘The “blinding” in those murders was figurative,' Varley said. ‘Symbolic.'

Detmeyer nodded. ‘With Sharla Jane, he gained the confidence to move his fantasy on to actual blinding.'

Varley agreed, but Simms shook her head.

‘Forgive me, gentlemen, but that sounds a bit thin. He's been abducting and murdering women and children for
years.
Now suddenly he starts
blinding
them?'

‘Evil men change, just as good men do,' Varley said, dismissive.

Dunlap's mobile phone rang and he excused himself, moving to the refreshments table to take the call.

‘You said it yourself, Professor Varley,' Simms said. ‘Blinding must always have been part of his fantasy – it isn't just a modus operandi to be adapted to the circumstances.'

‘Operand
um
,' Varley corrected.

Simms's cheeks flamed and Fennimore said, ‘Why don't you address the psychology, and save the grammar lesson to impress your students?'

A few eyebrows were raised, and Varley bristled visibly.

‘You're suggesting something triggered the change in behaviour, Chief Simms?' Detmeyer seemed to be considering the suggestion seriously.

‘From one victim to the next he went from taping his victims' eyes to blinding them, and from asphyxiating them to draining them of blood,' Simms said. ‘
Something
must have happened.'

‘You're assuming that Sharla Jane
was
the first victim he bled,' Professor Varley said.

‘We don't know that. It could be that the other autopsies simply weren't as thorough as Dr Quint's.'

‘Why thank
you,
Professor Varley,' Quint said, hamming up the Midwest cutsie in the tone. ‘But we got at least three victims with a normal degree of
livor mortis.
Which, if he drained the bodies, you would
not
get.'

Fennimore raised one shoulder. ‘You can't argue with the science. Our man has changed his behaviour. Radically.'

‘I agree,' Detmeyer said in his habitually solemn and undramatic tone. ‘And he's getting careless. Leaving the shoeprint at the trailer—'

‘That's not all he left.' Dunlap had returned to the meeting. ‘I just spoke to Roper. They found a partial right index and a good thumbprint in back of a couple of the rail brackets at Sharla Jane's place.'

Home. Now he can relax, kick back, watch the recording that changed his life. It's like watching a piece of history being made. He feels a sense of awe, and his finger trembles a little as he hits the playback button on the recorder.

On-screen, he is masked, dressed head to foot in black.

Sharla Jane struggles to breathe under 130 pounds of weight. He remembers thinking should he add another plate, bring it up to 150.

The burn of adrenaline from facing down Fergus had cooled by then, and uncertainty fluttered in the pit of his stomach. The cameras were already set up, the weights in place, so he went through the routine, filming her as he eased the weight off till she was fully conscious, lowering it again, following instructions as he'd always done; the tyrant voice of his accomplice not entirely silenced, at least in his head. Much as he resents it, he's used to being told what to do. Anxious he'd make a mistake, nervous of her dying too soon, he had raised the weights after a bare fifteen seconds, before she was all the way out.