First to Die

Chapter 43

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I got my first glimpse of the killer's face. Chris Raleigh was talking to the people who had handled the victims' travel arrangements. I was checking into who had planned their weddings. Two different companies. For the De Georges White Lace. For the Brandts, a fancy consultant, Miriam Campbell. That wasn't the link. I was at my desk when the duty clerk put through a call. It was Claire. She had just returned from examining the bodies of the victims with the county coroner in Napa. She sounded excited. "Get over here," she said. "Hurry." "You found a link. Becky De George was sexually disturbed?" "Lindsay, we're dealing with one sick dude." "They were definitely in the act when they were killed," Claire told me minutes later when I met her in the lab. "Semen traces found in Rebecca De George matched those I scraped off her husband. And the angle of the wounds confirmed what I suspected. She was shot from behind. Rebecca's blood was all over her husband's clothes. She was straddling him… But that's not why I asked you here." She fixed her large, wide eyes on me, and I could tell it was something important. "I thought it best to keep this quiet," she said. "Only the local M.E. and I know." "Know what, Claire? Tell me, for God's sake." In the lab, I spotted a microscope on a counter and one of those airtight petri dishes I remembered from high school biology. "As with the first victims," she said excitedly, "there was additional sexual disturbance of the corpse. Only this time, it wasn't so obvious. The labia was normal, what you would assume post intercourse and there were no internal abrasions like with the first bride. Toll missed it… but I was looking for signs of additional abuse. And there it was, inside the vagina, sort of shouting, "Come and get me, Claire."" She picked up the petri dish and a tweezer, and gently removed the top. Her eyes lit up with importance. Out of the clear dish she lifted out a single, half-inch red hair. "It's not the husband's?" Claire shook her head. "Look for yourself." She flicked on the microscope. I leaned in, and against the brilliant white background of the lens, I saw two hairs: one thin, shiny, black brown; the other short, curly, sickle shaped. "You're looking at two sections from Michael De George she explained. "The long one's from his head. The other is genital." Then she placed the hair from the petri dish on another slide and inserted it in the microscope lens bay, side by side with the others. My pulse was starting to race. I thought I knew where she was going with this. The new hair was reddish brown in hue and twice the thickness of either of De George It had tiny filaments twisted around the cortex. It clearly belonged to someone else. "It's neither cranial nor pubic. It's from a beard," Claire announced, leaning over me. I pulled back from the scope and looked at her, shocked. The killer's facial hair had turned up in Becky De George vagina. "Postmortem," she said, to drive it home.