Postmortem(92)

While coffee was dripping, I stepped into Margaret’s office. The computer in answer mode was still daring the perpetrator to try again. He hadn’t.

It didn’t make sense. Did he know we had discovered the break-in after he tried to pull up Lori Petersen’s case last week? Did he get spooked? Did he suspect nothing new was being entered?

Or was there some other reason? I stared at the dark screen. Who are you? I wondered. What do you want from me?

The ringing started again down the hall. Three rings and abrupt silence as the state operator intervened.

“He’s very cunning, very deliberate . . .”

Fortosis didn’t need to tell me that.

“We’re not dealing with some mental misfit . . .”

I wasn’t expecting him to be anything like us. But he could be.

Maybe he was.

“. . . able to function well enough in society to maintain an acceptable public persona . . .”

He might be competent enough to work in any profession. He might use a computer on his job or he might have one at home.

He would want to get inside my mind. He would want to get inside my mind as much as I wanted to get inside his. I was the only real link between him and his victims. I was the only living witness. When I examined the contusions, the fractured bones, and the deep tissue cuts, I alone realized the force, the savageness required to inflict the injuries. Ribs are flexible in young, healthy people. He broke Lori’s ribs by smashing his knees down on top of her rib cage with all of his weight. She was on her back then. He did this after he jerked the telephone cord out of the wall.

The fractures to her fingers were twist fractures, the bones violently wrenched out of joint. He gagged and tied her, then broke her fingers one by one. He had no reason except to cause her excruciating pain and give her a taste of what was to come.

All the while, she was panicking for air. Panicking as the constricted blood flow ruptured vessels like small balloons and made her head feel as if it were going to explode. Then he forced himself inside her, into virtually every orifice.

The more she struggled, the more the electrical cord tightened around her neck until she blacked out for the last time and died.

I had reconstructed all of it. I had reconstructed what he did to all of them.

He was wondering what I knew. He was arrogant. He was paranoid.

Everything was in the computer, everything he did to Patty, to Brenda, to Cecile . . . The description of every injury, every shred of evidence we’d found, every laboratory test I’d instigated.

Was he reading the words I dictated? Was he reading my mind?

My low-heeled shoes clicked sharply along the empty hallway as I ran back to my office. In a burst of frantic energy, I emptied the contents of my billfold until I found the business card, off-white with the Times masthead in raised black Gothic print across the center. On the back was the ballpoint scribbling of an unsteady hand.

I dialed Abby Turnbull’s pager number.

I scheduled the meeting for the afternoon because when I spoke to Abby her sister’s body had not yet been released. I didn’t want Abby inside the building until Henna was gone and in the care of the funeral home.

Abby was on time. Rose quietly showed her to my office and I just as quietly shut both doors.

She looked terrible. Her face was more deeply lined, her color almost gray. Her hair was loose and bushy over her shoulders, and she was dressed in a wrinkled white cotton blouse and khaki skirt. When she lit a cigarette, I noticed she was shaking. Somewhere deep within the emptiness of her eyes was a glint of grief, of rage.

I began by telling her what I told the loved ones of any of the victims whose cases I worked.

“The cause of your sister’s death, Abby, was strangulation due to the ligature around her neck.”

“How long?” She blew out a tremulous stream of smoke. “How long did she live after . . . after he got to her?”

“I can’t tell you exactly. But the physical findings lead me to suspect her death was quick.”

Not quick enough, I did not say. I found fibers inside Henna’s mouth. She had been gagged. The monster wanted her alive for a while and he wanted her quiet. Based on the amount of blood loss, I’d classified her cutting injuries as perimortem, meaning I could say with certainty only that they were afflicted around the time of death. She bled very little into surrounding tissues after the assault with the knife. She may already have been dead. She may have been unconscious.

More likely it was worse than that. I suspected the cord from the venetian blinds was jerked tight around her neck when she straightened her legs in a violent reflex to pain.

“She had petechial hemorrhages in the conjunctivae, and facial and neck skin,” I said to Abby. “In other words, rupture of the small, superficial vessels of the eyes and face. This is caused by pressure, by cervical occlusion of the jugular veins due to the ligature around her neck.”