Gallery of the Dead

Six

When it came to crime scenes, it was no real surprise that Hunter and Garcia were known for having ‘thick skin’. They had witnessed more bloody and brutal homicide aftermaths than most detectives in the entire history of the LAPD. Very few acts of violence still had the capacity to shake them. What they saw inside Linda Parker’s bedroom that evening was one of them.

‘What the hell?’ Garcia uttered those words almost unconsciously. Despite all his experience, his brain was having trouble comprehending the images his eyes were capturing.

Everything about that crime scene was unsettling, starting with the temperature inside the room.

In Los Angeles, the average high temperature in April was around twenty-one degrees Celsius, but the room felt a lot more like two, five at a push.

Garcia folded his arms in front of his chest to keep some of his body heat, but the unusual cold temperature was only the beginning. The room before them was plastered in crimson red — the floor, the rug, the curtains, the furniture, the bed, the walls... everything, and still, all that blood amounted to nothing more than a silly joke when compared to the centerpiece in the room.

Linda Parker’s body had been left on the bed, which had its headboard pushed up against the south wall. She was lying on her back, on blood-soaked sheets that had once been white. Her arms were resting by her torso, with her legs naturally extended, but the extremities to all four of her limbs were missing. Her feet had been hacked off at the ankles and her hands at the wrists, but that too played second fiddle to the killer’s main disturbing act.

Linda Parker’s body had been skinned, leaving behind a grotesque mess of brownish-red muscle tissue, naked organs and exposed bones. The smell of rotting flesh toxified the air inside the room.

‘Welcome to your new nightmare, guys.’

The odd greeting came from Kevin White, the forty-eight-year-old lead forensics agent who was standing to one side of the bed. He was five-foot-ten with light brown eyes under thick, unruly eyebrows. His hair, currently covered by the hood of his Tyvek coverall, was fair and thinning at the top. His mask hid a long nose and a thin mustache that looked more like peach fuzz than facial hair. He was a very experienced agent, who had worked with Hunter and Garcia at a handful of crime scenes before. Kevin White was also an expert in forensic entomology.

Across the bed from White, a CSI photographer was clicking away at the body, trying to capture it from all possible angles. With every two or three clicks, before resuming his job, he would stop, shake his head, then look away for an instant, squinting, clearly fighting the urge to be sick.

Hunter and Garcia finally stepped into the room and, being careful to avoid the scattered pools of dried-up blood on the floorboards, approached the bed.

White gave them a few more seconds to fully take in the scene before he spoke again.

‘We’ve been here for just a little over half an hour,’ he explained. ‘And as you can clearly see, this crime scene will take a while to process in full, but I’ll give you the little we’ve come up with so far.’ He nodded at the AC unit on the wall across the room from him. ‘The aircon was on full blast when we got here. That’s why the room feels like a fridge.’

‘The killer wanted to preserve the body?’ Hunter asked.

‘Possibly,’ White agreed. ‘But if that was the killer’s intention or not, the low temperature has done just that.’

Intrigue danced across both detectives’ faces.

‘You’ll have to wait for the official autopsy result for a more precise estimate of the time of death,’ White continued. ‘But at this temperature, the normal decomposition process would be delayed by about thirty to forty hours. Given the fact that her body is just entering full rigor mortis, I’d say that she was murdered somewhere between forty to fifty-two hours ago.’

‘That would take us back to Monday evening,’ Garcia said, looking at Hunter. ‘Lieutenant Jarvis told us outside that her mother last spoke to her on Monday afternoon.’ He turned and addressed White again. ‘It sounds like your estimate is pretty much on the money, Kevin.’

Pride lit up in White’s eyes. ‘The temperature, together with the shut windows all around the house, would also explain the lack of blowflies buzzing away in here.’ He paused and looked back at the body on the bed. ‘Her body should’ve been much smaller by now.’

In normal circumstances, even at nighttime, if a body were left at the mercy of the elements either outside or inside, blowflies could settle on it in a matter of minutes. They would’ve concentrated their efforts in the mouth, the nose, the eyes and any open wounds. In the case of a skinned body, the entire body became an open wound and therefore a breeding ground for blowflies. In just a few hours, there would have been as many as half a million eggs laid all over the corpse. Those eggs would have hatched within twenty-four hours and in a single day, the maggots that those eggs produced would have reduced a full-grown human body to half size. Hunter and Garcia knew that well enough.

‘Unfortunately,’ White carried on, ‘for the cause of death you’ll have to wait for the autopsy report. What I can tell you is that there are no visible stabbing or bullet wounds. No apparent blunt trauma to the head, either. No bones seem to be broken, with the obvious exception of the severed hands and feet. Her ribcage looks intact and her neck hasn’t been snapped.’

‘Bled out?’ Garcia ventured.

‘There’s a high possibility that that was how she died,’ White accepted. ‘But as I’ve said, the autopsy report will clear it up.’

Both detectives went silent for a moment.

‘We haven’t found any of the missing body parts,’ White added. ‘No hands, feet, or skin, but we haven’t had time to check the whole house yet.’

‘Any way of telling if any of this savagery was done while she was still alive?’ Garcia asked.

‘Not with any certainty,’ White replied. ‘I hate to sound repetitive here, Carlos, but you’ll have to wait for the autopsy report for a more accurate answer.’

Garcia’s eyes circled the room one more time. Judging by the amount of blood everywhere, he wouldn’t be surprised if the post-mortem revealed that the victim was indeed alive when she was skinned. But even if that had been the case, something still made no sense to him.

‘I don’t get this,’ he said. ‘What the hell is all this blood everywhere?’ His stare moved to Hunter, but the question was thrown at anyone who cared to answer it. ‘And all the way across the room, too. This isn’t arterial spray. We can all see that.’ He stepped closer to the east wall, studying a long blood mark against it. ‘All these marks look like smudges. As if they were done on purpose.’

‘They could very possibly have been,’ White agreed.

Hunter stepped closer to the bed and began studying what once had been Linda Parker’s face. In the absence of skin, what was left behind was horrifying and hypnotic in equal measures.

As a consequence of over forty hours of exposure, even at low temperatures, the thin muscle layer that sat between her facial bone structure and her skin had darkened into an odd shade of brown, as if it had been lightly scorched by fire. Her nose cartilage was still in place, but the eyelids and lips were gone, completely exposing her gums, teeth, jawbone, skullcap and ocular cavity. Her eyes hadn’t been removed by her killer, but they weren’t there anymore either. Most of the vitreous humor — the transparent jelly-like tissue filling the eyeball behind the lens — had dried up. As a result, Linda Parker’s eyes had deflated and practically disappeared into their sockets.

‘Have you moved her yet?’ Hunter asked.

‘No, not yet,’ White replied. ‘I was waiting for you guys to get here so you could see the body in situ, because here’s the catch — if you look closely, it doesn’t look like the killer skinned her completely.’

Hunter took a step back, tilting his head to one side.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It seems like there’s still a patch of skin left on her back.’

Garcia joined Hunter. ‘That’s odd. Why would the killer skin most of her body, but leave a patch on her back?’

‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ White said, walking around to the other side of the bed. ‘You guys want to give me a hand?’ White asked Hunter and Garcia.

‘Sure.’

The photographer got out of the way, moving over to the other end of the room.

‘Let’s just bring her up into a sitting position as much as we can,’ White said, nodding at Hunter and Garcia, who nodded back. ‘On three... one, two, three.’

As they brought the body up from the bed, Hunter, Garcia and White all angled their heads to one side to have a look at the victim’s back.

As the patch of skin finally came into view, they all froze.

‘Jesus!’ White said. ‘What the hell is this?’