Stone Maidens (17 page)

His head bounced hard against the hub of the steering wheel as coughing shook his frame. “Yessum.”

Prusik paid him and hoisted out her bags. The front door was ajar. “Dr. Henegar?”

Labrador retrievers came crashing around the corner, nails slipping and sliding on linoleum flooring. Seeing the eager animals, Prusik’s spirits lifted. She put her bags down on the floor and petted them, talking sweetly. The dogs licked her cheeks.

“Don’t let those brutes bully you. Dr. Prusik, am I right?”

Henegar hooked a finger under each dog’s collar and shuttled them into what looked like a kitchen.

“It’s Special Agent Prusik,” she said. “I’m a forensic anthropologist, not an MD.”

They shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” she said while giving the place a cursory once-over. It was outfitted more like a rustic hunting camp than an up-to-code morgue. The hallway was stacked with cardboard boxes. A fishnet and a pole hung on the wall next to some rods and reels.

Henegar slapped his forehead. “Please excuse me for not making it to the airport. I thought someone at the sheriff’s office would be arranging the pickup.”

“It’s quite all right, Doctor. Can we proceed to your path lab?” Prusik’s brow lifted. “If it’s OK with you, I’d like to get started.” The forensic bag strap was gnawing at her shoulder.

“Yes, of course.” The doctor pushed through the swing door and cleared a stack of
Field & Stream
magazines off a chair. “Let me make some elbow room so you can work.”

“Where’s the body?” she said, sounding alarmed.

He stopped midmotion with an armful of the glossy periodicals. “Oh, not to worry, we’ll get her in a jiffy. She’s safe and sound in the portable cooler out back.”

Prusik’s brow line stayed creased. Her mouth hung open a bit.

“It’s under lock and key,” Henegar said. “Safe from tampering—wildlife mostly, the odd raccoon that comes sniffing around. Not to worry. Billy and Josie woof them off.”

Shaking her head, Prusik put down her bags. “Is this a board-certified facility, Doctor?”

Henegar dropped an empty coffee tin riddled with holes onto the counter next to the examining table. “Yes. The tabletop is clean and the body is as we found it in situ.”

“Well, that’s encouraging news.” She caught sight of a trout creel in the corner. She removed her suit jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. “I hear your sincerity, Doctor, but state-of-the-art forensics requires something more than simply
wanting
to find a killer. It requires”—she let her gaze sweep the room—“something more than
this
.”

“Agreed.” Henegar nodded, his eyes closed. “Shall we bring her in?”

A small door led to a back porch where a blue tarp covered a steel-encased locker large enough to hold one body.

“What procedures did you use to decontaminate this?” Prusik asked.

“Strictly by the book, Special Agent. New bag liner every time. I changed the inner one, too. This body has on it whatever it had at the site and nothing else.”

“But you’ve already done a preliminary exam of her, right, Doctor?” Her voice had a slight accusative quality.

“Yes, following forensic procedure, chapter and verse. Gowned and gloved all the way.” He keyed open the lock and flipped the heavy-gauge latch. The retrievers began howling in the kitchen.

“I take it Billy and Josie didn’t happen to wander in during your exam of the body?” she said.

He rolled out the tray that held the black Tyvek bag. “Absolutely not.” Prusik held one end while Henegar hoisted the other. “Sorry, ma’am. I was expecting Sheriff McFaron to be here for this part.” They lifted together.

Prusik eyed him suspiciously again. “So the sheriff helped you do the prelim? Removing the body from the crime scene?”

“He was at the crime scene, yes. A coon hunter found the body. Him and his dog.” Henegar’s cheeks and forehead flushed. “Methuselah was out of town—the bloodhound we use to track missing people.”

“Did anyone touch the body without wearing sterile gloves, Doctor?”

“According to McFaron, the coon hunter was careful. Only marked the tree beside the corpse with some tape. The sheriff and I both gloved up extricating her, of course.” Henegar walked backward into the examining room, holding the door open with his foot. They slid the tray onto the examining table.

Prusik got straight to work, pulling on a pair of powdered latex rubber gloves, being sure to draw the wrist ends over her lab coat sleeves. She studied the photos Henegar had sent to the lab, then unzipped the body bag. No flies zoomed into her face this time.

Julie Heath’s unclothed body lay on the metal table under a bank of artificial lights. Her hair was a tangle of leaves and twigs. Heavy finger markings were distinctly visible around the girl’s swollen throat. The neck was nastily broken, causing her head to lean unnaturally toward one shoulder. One of her forearms was streaked with coagulated blood where a branch or thornbush had scraped her.

“You found her buried?”

“Yes, under a pretty deep pile of leaves.” Henegar’s salt-and-pepper beard puffed out behind his face mask.

Which could explain the lack of flies, larvae, or any eggs having been deposited, Prusik noted, speaking softly into a handheld recorder. She also jotted details in a forensic examiner’s loose-leaf book that was open on the counter behind her. She marked the placement of contusions on a diagrammatic sketch of a human form.

Prusik stepped to the stainless-steel table and then quickly jerked back her head, stricken by the strong odor of the decomposing flesh.

“You might want to smear some of that salve in the jar on the table under your nose,” the doctor said.

Prusik fingered a wad of the goo over her upper lip. A numbing shot of peppermint shot up her nostrils. “Two cervical vertebrae are severely broken, partially crushed from the strength of the killer’s grip,” she said into the cassette recorder.

“The hands on this guy are pretty strong,” the doctor said. “We’re talking a man without question, right?”

Prusik nodded and continued with her initial assessment. With the doctor’s help she gently rolled the dead girl’s body over enough to reveal the grainy purple flesh where blood had saturated the surface skin—the same color as an encrusted gash along the side of her abdomen.

“See along both sides of her spine.” The doctor pointed. “Lividity had already set in before he did the rest. See how the blood’s coagulated along her back?”

The killer likely moved the body after strangling her. Possibly something interrupted him shortly after the strangulation, she thought. “Did you happen to notice any deposits, residues, or foreign bodies on the victim’s clothing?”

“I did find some particles on her skirt,” Henegar said. “Not a hair on her except her own. No obvious signs of semen, either. There was no sexual molestation that I could tell. Her fingernails are clean—she didn’t scratch the assailant.”

“What sort of particles?”

“Don’t know for sure. A gritty substance—oil based, maybe,” the doctor said. “Could be paint of some kind.”

Prusik nodded briefly.

“Take a look at her left side, ma’am.” The doctor pointed with a gloved finger. “Just below the rib cage.”

Prusik carefully lifted the girl’s left arm, exposing the torso to the fullest extent. At first all she could see under the bank of milky-white fluorescent tubes was greatly discolored skin, like an extended tattoo. Then she saw what she had hoped not to. This was the work of their man, all right. The girl’s entire left side had been slit open.

Prusik’s right hand was drawn like a magnet to the purple-black skin flap that extended from the victim’s lower left rib distally to the pelvic girdle. She inserted her gloved hand into the slick abdominal cavity. A few beads of sweat crept down the crown of her head and raced across the top edge of her large, plastic-framed protective glasses. She reached past the peritoneum into the pericardium and pulmonary cavities—the chambers normally containing the heart and lungs—which were empty except for a few errant oak leaves.

“She’s plum empty. Scoured cleaner than the funeral director down at Marsh’s parlor does.” Doc Henegar’s face mask puffed in and out as he spoke.

“Thank you for that comparison, Doctor.” She thrust her arm in all the way to the elbow. Her forefinger touched the base of the dead girl’s shattered airway. Prusik breathed a little easier, relieved at not finding anything obstructing it.

She asked Dr. Henegar if he would mind wiping her forehead, then went back to the recorder, describing the crushed trachea from inside out. Threading her gloved index finger farther up into the tighter passageway of the esophagus, Prusik came into contact with something hard. With the top of her fingernail she pried, breaking it in two. The pieces tumbled into the pulmonary cavity.

She withdrew her gloved hand, which clutched the hard objects. Turning her back from the table and Dr. Henegar, she fingered the stone halves together. They joined perfectly.

“Will you excuse me, Doctor? I need some air.”

She pushed open the back screen door and peeled the gloves off inside out, trapping the stones. She pocketed them in her gown, unbuttoned her shirt collar, and took in a slug of pine air. Another charm stone. Why was the murderer placing tribal charm stones, of all things, in his victims’ throats? With her back turned to the door, she swallowed a new serotonin beta-blocker recently prescribed to her. Just then, from around the front of the house came the sound of a screen door slapping open and shut—Billy and Josie had broken free. They raced up the back porch steps and greeted Prusik, whining and pressing their noses against her legs. She dropped to her knees. Their wet licks felt good.

Henegar stood by the screen. “Give them the boot if they get too pushy.”

Prusik shook her head. “They’re great,” she said, clearing her throat.

She returned to the exam room, stowing the crumpled glove containing the stone evidence in her forensic case. Dr. Henegar shooed the retrievers into the kitchen.

Donning a fresh gown and a new pair of latex gloves, Prusik resumed her examination of the body, praying for the medication to work its magic quickly.

She looked up as Dr. Henegar reappeared. “Anything else I should know?” she asked.

“I suspect you’ll want to inspect where we found the body,” he said. “Patrick State Forest is quite secluded.”

“Yes, that would be good,” she said.

“And there’s something else that I haven’t been able to make sense of.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“In the blood evidence we found nearby, metabolites turned up, too.”

“A blood dyscrasia?”

“No, an excretion from urine.”

“What about the blood itself?”

“Well, it wasn’t Julie’s. And it was mixed with uric acid in too high a concentration to have come from the blood alone.”

“Are you saying someone urinated on the same spot as the blood sample you collected?”

He nodded. “Must have. Joe phoned me right away after he found it, same day Julie disappeared. The blood drops looked only hours old. I didn’t detect anything else unusual at the time.”

“Here, let me see that report.” Prusik ran her finger across the gas chromatograph peaks and valleys representing the chemical composition. Two sets of graphs ran in tandem for the urine and blood. “A trace amount of white blood cells was found in the urine.”

“Indicating the presence of an infection?” Dr. Henegar said.

“Yes, possibly. More significant is whether DNA testing will reveal a match between the white cells and the blood found on the pavement.”

“You’re assuming the blood is the killer’s,” Henegar added. “Since it’s not Julie Heath’s type. That the perp peed on the sidewalk afterward?”

“Or lost control.”
Or lost control
. She had nearly lost control only moments ago, rushing out the back door like that.

Prusik took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Control. She could maintain control. She had become a master of it over the years. “Well, Dr. Henegar. Shall we zip her up and go examine the crime scene?”

Christine followed Dr. Henegar to the front entrance. Scratching paws directed her attention to the kitchen door, where she observed both dogs’ noses wedged between the jamb and a chair that the doctor had placed as a barricade. The pair shoved
their way in, whining, in one last frontal love assault. Christine stooped down and let them lick her face.

“Unruly bunch,” he mock scolded.

“They can be unruly all they want with me.” After two hours spent examining the remains of a young girl’s body so desecrated, the labs’ kisses were a welcome relief.

The sky lowered. The air was clotty damp and did not taste good. David Claremont was agitated and exhausted. It was not good enough anymore just living at home in a room that he could not rest in. He needed to get away. He slid the pickup’s column shifter into drive and pressed hard on the gas. Ten minutes later he turned into the farm bureau’s dirt parking lot.

A car door slammed across the way from him. A petite young woman in tight-fitting blue jeans stepped lithely past a line of bright-red riding mowers. She wore her hair in a bouncy ponytail the way a younger girl does, and the ponytail bobbed as she walked. David followed her toward the main entrance of the ramshackle co-op building.

The young woman went down an aisle and disappeared out the back of the store where open-air bays were stacked with lumber, pipes, livestock fencing, and other farming supplies. A rumble overhead signaled rain, as did the fuzzy halo around the cloud-filtered disk of the sun.

David was forgetting himself, his reason for coming—to purchase four gallons of red barn stain—as he frantically poked his head between the bays looking for her. Something about her pulled him on, almost as if he had no choice in the matter. Halfway down a narrow corridor he spotted her tugging hard on a roll of wire. Relief flooded through him.

Rocking back on her heels, she looked up and smiled. “Say, mister, do you mind giving me a hand? This seems to be stuck.” She had on a small pair of leather work gloves.