Black Notice

24

Marino met me at the store's front door. When we stepped inside, the first person we saw was Anderson. She stood in front of the counter, wrapping the empty cash drawer in brown paper as crime-scene technician Al Eggleston dusted the cash register for prints. Anderson looked surprised and unhappy when she saw us.

"What are you doing here?" she confronted Marino.

"Came in to buy a six-pack. How you doin', Eggleston?"

"Same-o, same-o, Pete."

"We're not ready for you yet," Anderson said to me.

I ignored her and wondered how much damage she'd already done to the scene. Thank God, Eggleston was doing the important work. I immediately noticed the overturned chair behind the counter.

"Was the chair like that when the police got here?" I asked Eggleston.

"Far as I know."

Anderson abruptly went out of the store, probably to find Bray.

"Uh-oh," Marino said. "Tattletale."

"You ain't kidding."

On the wall behind the counter were arcs of blood from an arterial hemorrhage.

"Glad you're here, Pete, but you're poking a snake with a stick."

The sweeping trail led around the counter and through the aisle farthest from the store's front door.

"Marino, come here," I said.

"Hey, Eggleston, see if you can find the guy's DNA somewhere. Put it in a little bottle and maybe we can grow his clone in the lab," Marino said as he walked over to me. "Then we'll know who the hell he is."

"You're a rocket scientist, Pete."

I pointed out the arcs of blood made by the rise and fall of the systolic rhythm of Kim Luong's heart as she had bled to death through her carotid. The blood was low to the floor and stretched over some twenty feet of shelves stocked with paper towels, toilet paper and other household needs.

"Jesus Christ," Marino said as the significance hit him. "He's dragging her while she's spurting blood everywhere?"

"Yes."

"How long would she have survived, bleeding like that?"

"Minutes," I said. "Ten at the most."

She had left no other bloody wake except the faint fringed and narrow parallel impressions made by her hair and fingers as they dragged through her blood. I envisioned him pulling her feet first, her arms opening like wings filled with air, her hair trailing like feathers.

"He had her by the ankles," I said. "She has long hair."

Anderson had stepped back inside and was watching us, and I hated it when I had to guard every word I said around the police. But it happened. Over the years, I had worked with cops who were terrible leaks and I had no choice but to treat them like the enemy.

"She sure as hell didn't die right away," Marino added.

"A hole in your carotid isn't immediately disabling," I told him. "You can have your throat cut and still call nineone-one. She shouldn't have been immediately immobilized, but clearly she was."

The systolic sweeps got lower and fainter the further down the aisle we went, and I noted that small blood spatters were dry while larger amounts of blood were congealing. We followed streaks and smears past coolers full of beer, then through the doorway leading into the storeroom where crime-scene technician Gary Ham was on his knees while another officer took photographs, their backs to me, blocking my view.

When I stepped around them, I was stunned. Kim Luong's blue jeans and panties had been pulled down to her knees, a chemical thermometer inserted into her rectum. Ham looked up at me and he froze like someone caught stealing. We had worked together for years.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I said to him in a hard tone he had never heard from me.

"Getting her temp, Doc;" Ham said.

"Did you swab lair before inserting the thermometer? In the event she was sodomized?" I demanded in the same angry voice as Marino made his way around me and stared at the body.

Ham hesitated "No, ma'am, I didn't:"

"Way to fucking go," Marino said to him.

Ham was in his late thirties, a tall, nice-looking man with dark hair and big brown eyes and long lashes. It wasn't uncommon for a little experience to begin seducing someone like him into believing he could do the forensic scientist's and medical examiner's work. But Ham had always stayed in bounds. He had always been respectful.

"And just how do I interpret the presence of any injury, now that you've introduced a hard object into one of her orifices?" I said to him.

He swallowed hard.

"If I find a contusion inside her rectum, can I swear in court that the thermometer didn't do it? And unless you can somehow vouch for the sterility of your equipment, any DNA recovered will be in question, too," I said.

Ham's face was red.

"Do you have any idea how many artifacts you've just introduced to this crime scene, Officer Ham?" I asked him.

"I've been very careful."

"Please move out of the way. Now."

I opened my case and angrily pulled on gloves, stretching my fingers and snapping latex all in one motion. I handed Marino a flashlight and studied my surroundings before I did another thing. The storeroom was dimly lit; hundreds of six-packs of sodas and beer as far as twenty feet away were spattered with blood. Inches- from the body were Tampax and paper towels, the bottom of the cartons soggy with blood. So far, there was no sign the killer had been interested in anything back here except his victim.

I squatted and studied the body, taking in every shade and texture of flesh and blood, every stroke of the killer's hellish art. I did not touch anything at first.

"God, he really beat the hell out of her, didn't he," said the cop who was taking photographs.

It was as if a wild animal had dragged her dying body off to its lair and mauled it. Her sweater and bra had been ripped open, her shoes and socks removed and tossed nearby. She was a fleshy woman with matronly hips and breasts, and the only way I had a clue about what she had looked like was the driver's license I was shown. Kim Luong had been pretty with a shy. smile and shiny long black hair.

"Were her pants on when she was found?" I asked Ham.

"Yes, ma'am."

"What about shoes and socks?"

"They were off. Exactly like you see them. We didn't touch them."

I didn't have to pick up her shoes and socks to see they were very bloody.

"Why would he take off her shoes and socks but not her pants?" one of the cops asked.

"Yeah. Why would someone do something weird like that?"

I took a look. There was dried blood on the bottom of her feet, too.

"I'll have to get her under a better light when we get her to the morgue," I said.

The gunshot wound in the front of her neck was plain to see. It was an entrance wound, and I turned her head just enough to see the exit in the back, angled to the left. It was this bullet that had hit her carotid artery.

"Did you recover a bullet?" I asked Ham:

"Dug one out of the wall behind the counter," he said, barely able to look at me. "No shell so far, if there is one."

There wouldn't be if she was shot with a revolver. Pistols ejected their cartridge cases, which was about the only helpful thing they did when they were used for violence.

"Where in the Wall?" I asked.

"If you're facing the counter, it would be to the left of where the chair would have been if she was sitting at the cash register."

"The exit wound is also off to the left," I said. "If they were face to face when she was shot, you may be looking for a left-handed shooter."

Kim Luong's face was severely lacerated and crushed, the skin split and torn from blows that had been made by some sort of tool or tools that had a pattern of round and linear wounds. It appeared she also had been beaten with his fists. When I palpatйd for fractures, bits of bone crunched beneath my fingertips. Her teeth were broken and pushed in.

"Hold it here," I directed Marino.

He moved the flashlight as I directed and I gently turned her head to the right and to the left, palpating her scalp through her hair and checking the back and sides of her neck. She was covered with more knuckle bruises, and more of the round and linear injuries, and also striated abrasions here and there.

"Except for pulling down her pants to get her body temp," I said to Ham, because I had to be sure, "she was just like this?"

"Other than her jeans being zipped up and buttoned, yes, ma'am," he replied. "Her sweater and bra were just exactly like that." He pointed. "Ripped right down the middle."

"With his bare hands." Marino squatted beside me. "Damn, he's strong. Doe, she would have pretty much been dead by the time he got her back here, right?"

"Not quite. She still has tissue response to her injuries. Some bruising."

"But for all practical purposes, he's beating the shit out of a dead body," Marino said. "I mean, she sure as hell wasn't sitting up and arguing with him. She wasn't struggling. You can look around and see that. Nothing knocked over or shoved around. No bloody footprints going all over the place."

"He knew her," Anderson's voice was behind me. "It had to be someone she knew. Otherwise he probably would have just shot her and taken the money and run:'

Marino was still down beside me, elbows resting on his big knees, flashlight dangling from one hand. He looked up at Anderson as if she had the intelligence of a banana.

"I didn't know you was a profiler, too;" he said. "You take some classes or something?"

"Marino, if you can shine it right there," I said. "It's hard to see:' - The light illuminated a blood pattern on the body that I hadn't noticed at first because I was too preoccupied with injuries. Virtually every inch of exposed flesh was smeared with bloody swirls and strokes, as if she had been fingerpainted. The blood was drying and beginning to crack. And there were hairs, the same long, pale hairs stuck to her blood.I pointed this out to Marino. He bent closer.

"Quiet," I warned him as I felt his reaction and knew what I was showing him.

"Here comes the boss," Eggleston announced as he stepped carefully through the doorway.

The room was crowded and airless. It looked as if a thrashing storm had rained blood upon it.

"We're going to string all this," Ham said to me.

"Recovered a cartridge case," Eggleston happily passed on to Marino.

"If you want a break; Marino, I'll hold the flashlight for her." Ham was trying to make up for his unpardonable sin.

"I think it's fairly obvious she was lying right here, immobile, when he beat her," I said, because I didn't think stringing was necessary in this case.

"Stringing will tell us for sure," he promised.

It was an old French technique in which one end of a string was taped at a bloodstain, and the other at the geometrically computed origin of the blood. This was done multiple times, resulting in a three-dimensional string model that showed how many blows were struck and where the victim was when they were.

"There's too many people in here," I loudly said.

Sweat was rolling down Marino's face. I could feel his body heat and smell his breath as he worked close to me.

"Get this to Interpol right away," I told him in a voice no one else could hear.

"No kidding."

"Speer three-eighty. Ever heard of it?" Eggleston said to Marino.

"Yeah. High-performance shit. Gold Dot," Marino replied. "That don't fit, at all."

I got out my chemical thermometer and set it on top of a box of paper plates to get the ambient temperature.

"I can already tell you what it is, Doc," Ham said. "Seventy-five-point-nine back here. It's warm."

Marino was moving the flashlight as my hands and eyes moved over the body.

"Normal people don't get Speer ammo," he was saying. "You're talking ten, eleven bucks for б box of twenty. Not to mention, your gun can't be a piece of shit or the damn thing will blow apart in your hand."

"The gun probably came off the street, then." Anderson was suddenly next to me. "Drugs."

"Case solved;" Marino replied. "Gee, thanks, Anderson. Hey, guys, we can all go home."

I could smell the sweet, cloying odor of Kim Luong's blood as it coagulated, the serum separating from the hemoglobin, cells breaking down. I withdrew the chemical thermometer Ham had inserted inside her. Her core temperature was 88.6 degrees. I looked up. There were three people in this room, not including Marino and me. My anger and frustration continued to build.

"We found her pocketbook and coat," Anderson went on. "Sixteen dollars in her billfold, so it doesn't look like he went in there. And oh, there was a paper bag nearby with a plastic container and fork. Looks like she brought dinner with her and warmed it up in the microwave."

"How do you know she warmed it up?"Marino asked.

Anderson was caught.

"Putting two and two together don't always make twenty-two," he added.

Livor mortis was in its early stages. Her jaw was set, and the small muscles of her neck and hands were, too.

"She's too stiff for only being dead a couple hours," I said.

"What causes it anyway?" Eggleston asked.

"Me, too. I've always wondered that."

"I had one in Bon Air one time..:' "What were you doing in Bon Air?" asked the officer taking photographs.

"It's a long story. But this guy has a heart attack during sex. The girlfriend just thinks he's gone to sleep, right? Wakes up the next morning and he's deader than dirt. She doesn't want it to look like he died in bed so she tries to put him in a chair. He was leaning' against it like an ironing board."

"I'm serious, Doc. What causes it?" Ham asked.

"I've always been curious about that, too." Diane Bray's voice came from the doorway.

She was standing there, her eyes fastened to me like steel rivets.

"When you die, your body quits, making adenosine triphosphate. That's why you get stiff," I said, not giving her a glance. "Marino, can you hold her like this so I can get a picture?"

He moved closer to me, and his big gloved hands- slid under her left side as I got my camera. I took a photograph of an injury below her left armpit, on the fleshy side of her left breast, as I calculated body temperature versus ambient temperature, and how advanced both livor mortis and rigor mortis were. I could hear footsteps and murmurs and someone coughing. I was sweating behind my surgical mask.

"I need some room," I said.

Nobody moved.

I looked up at Bray and stopped what I was doing.

"I need room," I sharply said to her. "Get these people out of here."

She jerked her head at everyone but me. Cops dropped surgical gloves in a red biological hazard bag as they went out the door.

"You too," Bray ordered Anderson.

Marino acted as if Bray didn't exist. Bray never took her eyes off me.

"I don't ever want to walk in on a scene like this again;' I said to her as I worked. "Your officers, your techs, nobody-and I mean nobody-touches the body or disturbs it in any way before I get there or one of my medical examiners does."

I looked up at her.

"Are we clear on that?" I said She seemed to give what I was saying thoughtful consideration. I loaded film in my thirty-five-millimeter camera. My eyes were getting tired because the light was bad, and I took the flashlight from Marino. I shined it obliquely on the area near the left breast, and then on another area on the right shoulder. Bray stepped in closer, brushing against me to see what I was looking at, and it was odd and startling to smell her perfume mingling with the odor of decomposing blood.

"The crime scene belongs to us, Kay," she said. "I understand you haven't had to work things that way in the past-probably not the entire time you've been here or maybe anywhere. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned:.."

"That's a bunch of bullshit!" Marino hurled rude words in her face.

"Captain, you stay out of this," Bray fired back at him.

"You're the one who needs to stay out of it," he raised his voice.

"Deputy Chief Bray," I said, "the law of Virginia states that the medical examiner shall take charge of the body. The body is my jurisdiction:'

I finished my photographs and met her cold, pale eyes.

"The body is not to be touched, altered or in any way interfered with. Am I clear?" I said again.

I pulled off my gloves and angrily threw them into the red bag.

"You have just cut this lady's heart out evidentially, Deputy Chief Bray."

I closed my scene case and latched it.

"You and the prosecutor are gonna get along real good on this one;" Marino added furiously as he pulled off his gloves, too. "This kind of case is what's called a free lunch:'

He poked a thick finger at the dead woman as if it were Bray who had slaughtered her.

"You just let him get away with it!" he yelled at her. "You and your little power games and big tits! Who'd you fuck to get where you are?"

Bray's face went livid.

"Marino!" I grabbed his arm.

"Let me tell you something."

Marino was out of control, yanking his arm away from me, breathing hard like a wounded bear. `This lady's beat-up face ain't about politics and sound bites, you goddamn-motherfucking-bitch! How'd you like it if it was your sister? Oh hell! What am I saying?" Marino threw his talc-dusted hands up in the air. "You wouldn't know the first fucking thing about caring about anybody!"

"Marino, get the squad in here now," I said.

"Marino's not calling anyone." Bray's tone had the effect of a metal box slamming shut.

"What are you gonna do, fire me?" Marino continued to defy her. "Well, go right ahead. And I'll tell all the reporters from here to fucking Iceland why."

"Firing's too good for you," Bray said. "Better you continue to suffer out of service and without pay. Dear me, this could go on a very, very long time."

She was gone in a flash of red, like a vengeful queen on her way to order armies to march in on us.

"Oh, no!" Marino called after her at the top, of his voice. "You got it all wrong, babe. Guess I forgot to tell you l fucking quit!"

He got on his radio and raised Ham to tell him that the squad needed to get in here as my mind streaked through formulas that weren't computing.

"Guess I showed her, huh, Doe?" Marino said, but I wasn't listening.

The burglar alarm had gone off.at seven-sixteen and now it was barely nine-thirty. Time of death was elusive and full of deceit if one wasn't careful to account for all of the variables, but Kim Luong's body temperature, liver mortis, rigor mortis and the condition of her spilled blood weren't consistent with her being dead only two hours.

"I feel like this room is shrink-wrapping me, Doc:' "She's been dead at least four or five hours," I said.

He wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, eyes almost glassy. He couldn't stay still and kept nervously patting the pack of cigarettes in his jeans pocket.

"Since one or two in the afternoon? You're kidding me. What's he doing all that time?"

His eyes kept going to the doorway, waiting to see who would fill it next.

"I think he was doing a lot of things to it," I said.

"I guess I just fucked myself pretty good," Marino said.

Shuffling feet and the clacking of a stretcher sound from inside the store. Voices were muffled.

"I don't think she heard your last diplomatic comment;" I answered him. "Might be smart if you leave it that way."

"You think he might have hung out as long as he did because he didn't want to walk out in,broad daylight with blood all over his clothes?"

"I don't think that was the only reason," I said as two paramedics in jumpsuits turned the stretcher sideways to get it through the door.

"There's a lot of blood in here;" I told them. "Go around that way."

"Geez," one of them said.

I took the folded disposable sheets off the stretcher and Marino helped me spread one of them open on the floor.

"You guys lift her a few inches and we're going to scoot this sheet right under her," I instructed. "Good. That's fine."

She was on her back. Gory eyes stared out of shattered orbits. Plasticized paper rustled as I covered her with the other sheet: We lifted her up and zipped her inside a dark red pouch.

"It's getting icy out there," one of the paramedics let us know.

Marino's eyes darted around the store and then out the door into the parking lot where red and blue lights still strobed, but the attention had significantly waned. Reporters had, dashed back to their newsrooms and stations, and only the crime-scene technicians and a uniformed officer remained.

"Yeah, right," Marino muttered. "I'm suspended but you see any other detective here to work this thing? I ought to just let everything go to hell."

We walked back to my car as an old blue Volkswagen Beetle turned into the parking lot. The engine cut so abruptly the clutch popped, and the driver's door flew open and a teenaged girl with pale skin and short dark hair almost fell out, she was in such a hurry. She ran toward the pouched body as the paramedics loaded it into the ambulance. She raced toward them as if she might tackle them.

"Hey!" Marino yelled, going after her.

She reached the back of the ambulance as the tailgate slammed shut. Marino grabbed her.

"Let me see her!" she screamed. "Oh, please let go of me! Lei me see her!"

"Can't do that, ma'am," Marino's voice carried.

The paramedics swung open their doors and jumped in.

"Let me see her!"

"It's gonna be all right."

"No! No! Oh, please, God!" Grief tumbled out of her like a waterfall.

Marino had her from behind, holding tight. The diesel engine rumbled awake and I couldn't hear what else he said to her, but he let go of her as the ambulance drove away. She dropped to her knees. She clamped her hands on both sides of her head and stared up at the icy, overcast night, shrieking and wailing and crying out the slain woman's name.

"KIM! KIM! KIM!"