Deeper Than the Dead

19

The first impression of the LA County morgue was the smell. The ventilation system wasn’t great, but the amount of dead bodies processed through was. No one in the receiving area seemed bothered by it.

Dixon was shooting the breeze with a group of coroner’s assistants sitting at a long white table as they waited for their next delivery. When it arrived, the body would be measured, fingerprinted, photographed, wrapped in plastic, and put in cold storage, where it would wait its turn for an autopsy if an autopsy was deemed necessary. In the meantime, they took a little break to chat, drink coffee, and listen to the bug zapper sizzle.

“Busy day?” Dixon asked, helping himself to the carton of malted milk balls on the table.

“The usual,” said a burly assistant, a bald man the size of a bear, with blue tattoos up and down arms as thick as small tree trunks. He had the demeanor of a man who had been around the morgue for a long time. The kind of guy who could roll in a maggot-riddled corpse, then sit down and eat an egg-salad sandwich.

The lone female assistant, a cute brunette twentysomething, said, “Fourteen field calls, three homicides, four suicides, and six accidental deaths.”

“And a partridge in a pear tree?” Vince asked.

The girl laughed.

“Get this,” the burly guy said. “Two of the accidental deaths were guys that fell out of trees while trying to rescue cats. Dumb shits. Who ever saw a cat skeleton up in a tree? The damn things will get down when they want.”

“They were probably trying to impress their girlfriends,” Vince said.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Any woman who wants a guy that stupid should be taken out of the gene pool.”

Vince flashed a grin at her. “Now where’s your sense of romance?”

She laughed again. “I don’t bring it here.”

“Anyone seen Mikado?” Dixon asked.

“Third suite,” the big guy said. “He’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Good to see you, Cal.”

“You too, Buck.”

Vince winked at the girl, pleased that she winked back. Maybe he didn’t look so bad after all.

He fell in step beside Dixon.

“You pulled some big strings to get your vic bumped to the head of the line in this place.”

The LA County morgue was legendary. Open 24/7/365, something like twenty thousand autopsies were conducted there every year. There were around two hundred fifty corpses stacked on stainless steel shelves in the crypt on any given day.

“I spent a lot of years spinning those strings,” Dixon said. “If there was ever a time to pull them, it’s now.”

They went into one of the three autopsy suites and slipped into yellow gowns and booties, and white surgical masks so as not to contaminate or be contaminated. The pathologist and his staff were in blue gowns. Some wore goggles or face shields. One wore a small gas mask. Introductions were made by Dixon.

“Mik, this is my detective Tony Mendez and Special Agent Vince Leone, FBI. Tony, Vince: Assistant Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Dr. Mik Mikado. “

Mikado was the one in the gas mask. He raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You’re bringing in the BIG guns, Cal.” He nodded to Vince. “Pleased to meet you. I’m a big fan.”

Vince rolled his eyes. “No autographs, please. I’m just here helping out. There’s the star of this show,” he said, nodding toward the dead woman laid out naked on the stainless steel table. “Let’s see what she has to say.”

They settled into the serious business. On the far side of the suite, another autopsy was well under way, the coroner and assistants moving quietly around one another, like dancers performing the same choreography for the hundredth time. A bone saw whined. Steel instruments clanked against steel trays. One of the gowned people approached the table with a huge red-handled tree pruner for cutting ribs.

Mikado began the visual examination.

Lisa Warwick had been a pretty girl in life: dark hair, heart-shaped face, curvy body. The final chapter in her life, however, had not been pretty at all. She had been tortured over who knew how long a period of time. She had been missing as many as ten days. Vince had never known of a serial killer who showed his victims a good time before he killed them. And this one was no exception.

The woman’s torso was a macabre artist’s palette of purple, blue, green, and yellow—severe bruising, particularly to the breasts and lower abdomen. The beating had been inflicted over the course of days according to the variations in color.

Her tormentor had used a fine-bladed knife to inflict deep cutting wounds all over her body, from the soles of her feet to her fingers to her breasts. The first finger of the left hand was missing. Her nipples had been excised.

Her killer had probably kept the parts to help him relive the event. He may have even incorporated them into his daily life somehow. The infamous murderer Ed Gein, “The Butcher of Plainfield,” who had operated in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s, had used the skin of his victims to make lampshades, among other things. Or this killer might have ingested the body parts in a ritual intended to make his victim become a part of himself.

Whatever his intent, the torture appeared to have been very systematic. There were no hesitation marks in the knife wounds, and the cuts seemed deliberately placed, though the pattern suggested nothing in particular.

Crosses cut into victims were always popular among psychotic killers and had the obvious religious connotations. Initials were not uncommon. He had once worked a case in Philadelphia in which a nun had been savagely raped and murdered in the sanctuary of a church, the word “SIN” carved into her forehead with a penknife.

On this victim the lines added up to nothing, but some were vertical and others horizontal, and he had the feeling the pattern meant something to the killer.

The coroner went to raise one of the victim’s eyelids.

“They’re glued shut,” Mendez said. “The mouth too.”

“Looks like more than once on the mouth,” Vince said, stepping in for a closer look. “Look at the lines, the pieces of flesh missing here and here. I’d guess he glued her mouth shut and at some point during the torture she tore her lips open to scream.”

“Jesus,” Mendez muttered under his breath.

Vince produced a collapsible Polaroid camera from his coat pocket under his surgical gown and snapped a couple of pictures of the lips and of the cuts on the body.

“Can we get some scrapings of the glue from the eyes and mouth for the FBI lab, please?” he asked Mikado then turned to Dixon. “If they can figure out exactly what kind of adhesive it is, and it turns out to be something unusual, that could be helpful.”

Mikado also collected fingernail clippings in a small paper envelope to be sent on to the LA County lab, in case the victim had managed to scratch her assailant at some point. They might be able to get some skin, get a blood type.

“Did you get any trace evidence?” Vince asked.

Mikado cut him a meaningful look. “The body was clean when it got here.”

Vince shot a look at Dixon.

“The funeral home thought they were doing a good deed, cleaning her up,” Dixon said, clearly knowing they may have lost evidence. Any fibers, hairs, or bodily fluids that may have clung to the body were long gone down a drain.

“No sense crying over what we don’t have,” Vince said. “After all the publicity on the Atlanta child murder trial and how trace evidence nailed Wayne Williams’s ass, the more intelligent criminals have started cleaning up after themselves.”

“Maybe we’ll get something on the vaginal swabs,” Mikado offered.

In fact, the autopsy yielded little in the way of evidence. No bite marks that might be matched with a suspect. No marks from any distinctive type of weapon. Lisa Warwick had been strangled with a ligature of some kind, but it had left no marks save bruising, and no fibers of any kind. Some kind of smooth cloth, Vince figured—a scarf, a necktie, pantyhose. Nothing traceable.

There was predictable deep bruising in the muscles of the neck, but the hyoid bone (a small U-shaped bone situated between the base of the tongue and the larynx) was still intact. To Vince’s mind, this, and the lack of bruising caused by fingers, ruled out manual strangulation.

Mikado was unable to raise an eyelid to reveal the almost-certain presence of petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctivae of the eye—a sure sign of asphyxia. And all attempts to remove the lids from the eyes only resulted in tearing of the eye itself.

“Just send the whole mess to Washington,” Vince said, imagining the unpleasant surprise of opening a box to find a pair of mangled eyeballs. “They’ll figure out a way to get to the glue.”

Separating the lips was an easier job. Inside Lisa Warwick’s mouth they found she had bitten her tongue to the consistency of ground hamburger.

Mikado looked inside the victim’s ears and swore under his breath. “Her eardrums have been pierced with something. They’re destroyed.”

“The third piece of our trifecta, gentlemen,” Vince said quietly. “See no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil.”

Mendez turned gray as the images sank in. He went to a trash can marked NO TRASH. ORGANS ONLY and threw up.

Even Dixon, who had seen his share of abject violence, looked undone by this. He turned away, shaking his head. The idea that Lisa Warwick had been literally locked inside her own head with a terror of something so evil was too much to fathom.

Vince would have said a prayer for the girl, born and bred Catholic that he was. But he had not been on speaking terms with God in a very long time. He found a stool off to the side of the autopsy bay and sat down on it, tuning out as Mikado’s assistant turned on the oscillating saw to pop the cap off Lisa Warwick’s brain.

Over the years he had seen so many cases as brutal as this one, and every one of them left him feeling like ten years had been drained from his life. He felt as old as Methuselah, as brittle as bone. He felt as if he would turn to dust and fall to the yellow-tiled floor to be swept up later with the medical waste.

“How do you get used to it?” Mendez asked quietly.

“Kid,” Vince said. “The day you get used to this, turn in your shield and your gun. You won’t belong to the human race anymore.”