“They told you that?” Gregor was surprised.
“Not in so many words. But they told me anyway. In the way they talked about her. If I repeated the words, they’d sound like nice things. But they weren’t. You know what I mean?”
“Absolutely.”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Mark said. “Jimmy was right. I was right. Those are the police cars.”
The sirens were still blasting, and there were a lot of them: the town police car, a state police car, an ambulance. The vehicles all came careening into the driveway at once.
2
It took Kyle Borden and the state trooper who had shown up to help him exactly thirty seconds to decide they were out of their depth and call for reinforcements. It took the ambulance men less than that to decide they were going to have nothing to do with the body—or the pieces of the body—on the ground in the hedges beside Elizabeth Toliver’s garage. Kyle did the intelligent thing and went back to the car to get sick on the floor of the front passenger seat. The state trooper began to pace back and forth along the edge of the lawn, as if the most likely danger was that somebody would drive right up from the street to snatch the body and spirit it away. Gregor went up to the car where Luis was now sitting behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, and asked the man for a flashlight.
Luis rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. He handed it to Gregor and went back to staring out the window.
Gregor flicked the flashlight on and off. The light hiccuped in the darkness. He walked back to the side of the garage and turned it on full blast. Now that he had a chance to really study the scene, instead of just react, he could see that there was more to what had happened to the body than he had originally thought. The cut in the belly was very much like the cut in the belly of the dog the night before, at least as the dog’s injuries had been described in Kyle Borden’s report and as Gregor himself had been able to see them. There was a slit either up or down the stomach in a single vertical line, or a line that would have been vertical if the victim had been standing. The slit was deep and savage enough to let everything behind it spill out, but it was not the only slit. Gregor let the light from the flashlight roll up the body and stopped at the neck. There was, quite definitely, another slit there, although it was not as easy to see as the one in the belly, and not as dramatic. The line was unmistakable, though, and in at least one place at the front, it gaped. Above it, the face was a jagged white mask, topped with thick dark hair that looked fake. There was no sign of graying at the roots. Either Christine Inglerod was a very lucky woman, or a very careful one.
Gregor snapped off the flashlight and walked back across the lawn to Kyle’s police car. Kyle was standing just outside of it, leaning against the side, while the trooper paced by him. The door to the front passenger seat was open. The night was very warm, but very humid.
When Gregor got to the driveway, he stopped, and both Kyle and the trooper moved toward him.
“Well?” Kyle said.
Gregor shrugged. “You need a forensics lab, a good one. This is going to be a little complicated.”
“Wonderful,” Kyle said. “This isn’t Philadelphia, you know. It isn’t even Pittsburgh. The state police will help us out—”
“We’ve got excellent forensic capabilities,” the state trooper said stiffly.
“—but the fact of the matter is that when it comes to crime technology, this is hicksville.” Kyle sighed.
“In all probability,” Gregor said carefully, “she moved after she was cut. She moved herself, I mean.”
“She was alive?” Kyle blanched.
The state trooper moved uneasily from one foot to another.
“You need a good forensics lab,” Gregor repeated, ignoring Kyle Borden’s protestations about “hicksville,” “but my guess is, yes, she was alive after she was cut for at least a few minutes. It looked like she tried to drag herself across the ground. That’s when the intestines probably spilled out. They’re too widely distributed to be the result of gravity alone. She may have tried to call out, too, but it wouldn’t have done her much good.”
“Why not?” the state trooper said.
“Because she was also cut across the throat,” Gregor told him. “Straight across. I think the phrase in the pulp fiction of my childhood was ‘from ear to ear.’”
“Christ,” the state trooper said. “What was that?”
“He’s trying to say she had her throat slit like Michael Houseman did. Michael Houseman was—”
“I know,” the state trooper said. “Kid got killed in a park up here, thirty, forty years ago.”