Precious Blood (12 page)

She had almost not bought the
Match
—she could have lived without another tribute to Johnny Hallyday—but there was a good-size piece with lots of photos about Princess Stephanie of Monaco. More than one person had told her she looked a little like Princess Stephanie, and sometimes, after a couple of glasses of chardonnay, she thought so, too. A little.

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She pulled out a can of cat food for Milo, then cursed as she remembered she had to work on her paper on Ionesco—it was taking her forever. She really didn’t “get” him—absurd is funny, sure, but she didn’t think his writing was such a big deal. She was a French major because she loved
France
, not because she really cared about modern French literature.

The buzzer surprised her. Almost 7:00 p.m. She was wary—sometimes addicts showed up at the clinic after hours, and a couple of times she’d had to call the police.

She pressed down the intercom button and said hello.

“Hi. This is Detective Willoughby of the Ninth Precinct detective squad. We’re looking for a Barbara Wexler.”

Surprised and worried, Barbara answered, “This is she.”

“We’re making inquiries into the death of the Hutchins student, and we’re hoping you might be able to help us. I’m sorry to bother you so late.”

She could hear his walkie-talkie crackling as he talked.

“Detective, I don’t think I know her. I wasn’t in any of her classes.”

“No, ma’am, we know. But there’s an issue about the pattern of facilities usage, specifically the Stevens Center gym on Thirteenth. We know you go there regularly, and we have a couple of questions. I promise it will only take a minute.”

She hesitated; then she heard his radio again, and told herself to stop being silly.

“Of course, Detective. I’d be happy to help in any way I can.”

She went to wait by the door. She smoothed her hair in the mirror—maybe he was cute. Maybe he was cute and
single
!

She smiled; she could be such a damn
girl
.

She heard his steps coming up toward her on the stairs, and had to suppress a giggle of excitement.

The embalming room was larger than Jenner had expected.

There were two stainless steel embalming tables, one of
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them piled with packaged shrouds and stacked white batting. Metal and glass cabinets ran along the pale green walls, signed inventory sheets taped neatly to their sides. There was a series of steel sinks behind the tables, and a large desk sat at the far end of the room.

The smell of formalin was fairly strong, but the ventilation system kept it from becoming overpowering. Dowling stood in the doorway, hesitant.

“Jesus, Bobby! Stop being such a pussy! She’s already embalmed.”

“Doc, I don’t know what’s worse, the smell of formaldehyde or the smell of decomp—”

Divell emerged from the corridor behind Dowling, pushing a gurney covered in plastic sheeting. The cop squeezed against the wall to let him pass.

Divell positioned the gurney between the two tables and then removed the shroud from the body. Jenner saw that the head had been skillfully reattached, the seams barely puck-ered by the twine suturing.

Divell sprayed a little water onto the embalming table where Jenner would work, a flat sheet of metal perforated with large drainage holes. He then leaned over and grabbed the girl’s arm as Jenner lifted the head of the gurney, allowing Divell to slide the body onto the table.

The girl’s condition was fair. The vascular access incision under the right collarbone was tightly sutured, there were barely visible cotton plugs in the nostrils, and, lifting up her lip, Jenner found a gingival suture lashing the mouth closed.

The hair and eye makeup had yet to be done, but Divell’s team had used a colored embalming fluid, foundation, and lipstick, and her face looked almost natural. The funeral director had done a good job, and Jenner said so.

The autopsy incision, too, looked as if it had been nicely sealed, but the chest was covered by a waterproof Inco Pad taped down along the edges, tacked with sutures at the corners.

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Divell said in his deep voice, “Doctor, I see you’re inspecting the materials and methods we chose to use for closure of the chest area. The injuries were somewhat unprecedented, and it became apparent that a complete cutaneous seal was impossible. We managed as best we could.”

Jenner nodded, and Divell gestured to the head of the table.

“You have observed that Ms. Smith’s head, previously severed from her body, has been fully reattached. The cranium has been stabilized on the neck through the use of a length of wooden dowel. Obviously, the neck incision will have to be concealed by careful clothing choice. But I feel that we have done the best job possible under the circumstances.”

Jenner nodded appreciatively and murmured, “Indeed.”

“Doctor, I’d like to ask you to preserve our workmanship as best you can, to whatever extent will not conflict with your professional responsibilities.”

“I’ll certainly do my best, Mr. Divell.”

“I believe you, sir. The gowns, protective gloves, and disposable scalpels are to your left.”

With that, Divell left the room; he didn’t actually bow, but he gave the impression.

Ana gave the corkscrew another twist, which wedged the cork solidly against the neck of the bottle. Shit. Jun, her guardian for the night, was watching a video in the TV room with Kimi; she should have asked him to do it.

She pulled it out, but she’d shredded the cork. She screwed it in again as straight as she could, then tried wiggling it, but that just sent showers of shavings into the wine. Oh well.

She’d just use the tea strainer when she poured.

She took the bottle, the strainer, and the glass, and went into Jenner’s bedroom. She turned on his stereo; the CD was something soft and repetitive, and it sounded good in the quiet of his bedroom. She sieved herself a glass of wine, then
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went to the window. She sipped, looking out over the brick tenements north of Little Italy. Beyond NoLIta, the East River. And beyond that, Brooklyn. And beyond that, the rest of the world that wasn’t New York City.

She lay down on Jenner’s bed. She felt small on it, small and alone.

She wished he were there. She should talk to him. He was obviously pretty fucked up; maybe if she could get him to talk, he’d feel better. He’d feel better, and maybe be glad she was there.

She drained the glass, set the strainer on it, and poured another; she was feeling warm now, a little tipsy. She’d just about finished Jenner’s whisky, so she’d switched to wine.

And now she was getting drunk.

On wine—how fucking
grown up
!

She’d grown up in Orlando—Silver Lake, the nicest part, but still Orlando. Orlando was a party town, where everyone had a drug of choice, from the little kids tweaking on Coke and Skittles before their feet even hit the tarmac at Disney to lawyers doing rails of blow in expensive restaurant bathrooms. And she was one of them, too, a party girl. And proud of it.

She swirled the wine in the glass, watched the liquid slosh around. When she first started drinking, vodka was her drink. She used to sneak out at night to meet her friend Carmen, who’d wait for her at the end of the gravel drive, hidden behind the big magnolias in her Jetta convertible.

They’d go to warehouse parties and dance all night to DJ

Icy and Sandra Collins. Sometimes, for a laugh, they’d go to crappy clubs where the DJs played trashy Euro-trance; they’d let the businessmen buy them drinks, and then they’d dance with each other in white foam five feet deep, out of their minds on Ecstasy, laughing at the men who gaped at them as their wet clothes turned transparent.

And now . . . she was drunk on
wine
! She felt like she
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should be wearing pearls and a twinset. She smirked. One more glass.

She read the label out loud as best she could: “Puligny-Montrachet.” She sipped, and even tipsy knew it was good; she’d remember it, maybe impress someone. She turned the bottle to read the back label.

“Whoa . . . forty dollars . . .”

Fuck. She didn’t know it was that expensive; she hoped he wouldn’t be pissed at her. She gulped it down, then lay back.

The cat jumped up and rubbed against her, purring as she pressed his little head to her side. He climbed on her chest and nuzzled her chin until she giggled and pushed him away; later she relented, letting him curl up against her arm and tip his head on her shoulder.

She was starting to feel pretty wasted now. Drowsy.

The cat was asleep.

She would finish the bottle, then hide it so he didn’t see.

Dowling had edged closer. Barely—he stood in the doorway, bracing for the worst. Within a few minutes, Jenner had almost forgotten the cop was there.

The original prosector’s external description was ade-quate—hair and eye color, ears pierced four times on the right, twice on the left, small butterfly tattoo over the left pelvic brim.

Jenner was eager to see the wounds.

He started with the face, sponging off the foundation makeup, glad that Divell wasn’t there to watch his work being undone. The face and upper neck were generally free of injury, but the lipstick wiped away to reveal discoloration of the lower lip. Jenner rolled the lip downward; on the inner surface, a split in the lip had been sealed with embalmer’s wax, the tissue nearby discolored gray. He remembered Andie Delore’s bruised mouth.

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There was no way to be sure how she got the wound, whether she’d fallen forward onto the floor or if the killer had punched her in the face. A straightforward fall would probably have caused bruising of the outer lip, nose, or cheek as well; it was likely a blow.

He imagined the girl at home, reading or watching TV

when the doorbell rang. The unexpected caller would have surprised her, and yet she opened the door for him—did he use the cop line, or did he just quickly overpower her, punch her in the mouth, force his way in? The setting was remote, unlike with Andie Delore.

Jenner tore open a disposable scalpel package and cut the anchor sutures at the corners of the Inco Pad. He peeled up the horizontal band of surgical tape at the bottom and then lifted the pad upward, stripping it from the chest to expose the wound.

The chest and abdomen were soaking in cavity fluid, the formaldehyde solution used to preserve the inner organs.

When Jenner uncovered the wound, the formaldehyde fumes rose in a vicious blast; the two stood back for a while, nostrils burning, eyes watering, until Dowling found the extractor fan switch.

When the room had cleared, they went back to the body.

It was an extraordinary injury. Two oblique, gaping wounds of the central chest, crossing to create an X shape.

Each limb of the X might have been a separate wound, as the intersection point was extremely ragged; without knowing the inflicting weapon, it would be hard to tell.

He turned to Dowling. “Hey, do me a favor. There’s a magnifying glass in my coat pocket—can you pass it to me?”

Jenner examined the wound more closely; under the hand lens, the edges of the wound looked striped. Jenner leaned back a little to get a wider view, and the striping pattern became more apparent. In the lower right limb of the X, he could make out a row of subtle, parallel, wedge-shaped abrasions along the wound margin.

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“Bobby, I think we’ve got something here.”

The detective stood behind him, peering over his shoulder.

Jenner turned his head. “You’ll have to come here if you really want to see it.”

“Why don’t you just describe it to me, Doc?”

Jenner snorted, then said, “God, Bobby—there are gnats in Africa with bigger balls than you.” He pointed to the wound.

“These are patterned injuries here. They look pretty horrible, but they’re shallow—they don’t enter the chest cavity.

There’s no vital reaction here, either, so they were inflicted after death.”

Dowling nodded. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

“I think they were made by some kind of instrument with moving teeth; inside the X, the teeth are moving, and they create this wide scrape along the side as they cut. Here’s the important part, down here in the lower part. This row of parallel scrapes, about half an inch apart.”

From behind him, Dowling muttered, “Great. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Well, you’re going to have to photograph it, too. Shoot it up close to show the individual elements, but also far enough away to show the pattern. We need to see both the wood and the trees, okay?”

Armed with a purpose, Dowling became more comfortable. He popped open the clasps on the camera case, assembled the camera, and set about documenting the injuries.

“I’m seeing what you mean, Doc. Good eye. Any idea what he used?”

The flash went off again.

“Something between a large electric knife and a small chainsaw. Nothing too powerful, though, or the skin would be more chewed up. An electrical instrument would also explain that misty blood-spatter pattern. I think that he shut off the weapon before he pulled it out of the wound, which created the imprints of the teeth. Even if she were already
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dead, the speed of the tooth motion would likely spray the blood all over.”

“How about a hedge trimmer? Would that do it?”

Jenner handed Dowling a short, L-shaped ruler, developed by the American Board of Forensic Odontologists to document bite-mark and other dental evidence. With the ABFO

ruler in the shot, it would be easier to get a sense of the actual size and shape of the injury from the photo.

“You know, that actually makes more sense than an electric knife. The knives are designed to cut, to leave smooth edges, whereas a hedge trimmer is a much coarser tool.”