Heart of Ice

Chapter Twenty-nine

San Diego

Two members of a litter crew from a San Diego youth detention home found Lily Ann Denton’s body, the day after it was dumped in a gully behind the restroom of a rest stop. At first the boys who found her thought she was a blow-up doll that had been coated in ketchup.

“Dude, check this out. Some sick shit over here. One of those plastic chicks guys bone when they can’t get a real chick.”

The older boy, a Mexican gangbanger with an ironic name—Angel—bent down to take a look.

“Shit, that’s no doll, dude. That’s a dead ho.”

“I’m not baggin’ that. Let’s get the boss over here.”

“Bitch must have really pissed off her pimp.”

“Yeah, stupid ho.”

The young men went back to the van. Within twenty minutes, the rest stop was bathed in the blue light of ten squad cars and the red light of an ambulance—as unneeded as it was. An hour later, a coroner’s van from the city of Rialto showed up.

“A mile west, and the dead girl would have been in San Diego County,” one cop said to another as they watched Rialto’s finest bag the body for transport. “Getting murdered is bad enough, but Jesus, to end up in penny-pinching Rialto’s system. That’s just insult to injury.”

Someone’s daughter had been brought in the night before, unceremoniously dumped in the chiller until that morning. Dr. Kenneth Jensen looked at the body on the autopsy table, water running from a rubber hose around the figure like a bloody moat. Every now and then, water pressure would ebb and the bloody moat would drain completely to reveal the gleam of the stainless-steel construction. The table was a thing of beauty. Brand-new. Never been used.

Because of his age—fifty-nine—Dr. Jensen saw every young woman as a “girl” when she was splayed out and presented for the last conversation she’d ever have with another human being.

That it was a one-way conversation was irrelevant. Even though she couldn’t say a word, her body told him so much. It was almost funny that way. But as he looked over the body, he could almost hear the voice of the girl telling him in breathless detail who she was and what had been done to her.

What had led her to his table for that last conversation?

She was white. Thin, but well-nourished. Her hair was shaved in strips, hastily so. She had the remnants of blond hair that had been bleached at a salon—a good mix of colors, not the cheap from the bottle look. She had perfect teeth, undoubtedly aided by expensive orthodontia. He noticed the front teeth had been fronted by porcelain veneers, again a sign of a person with means and with the desire for perfection. Her jeans, Sevens for All Mankind, were unbuttoned and dropped far below her waist. Her thong underwear had been torn at the crotch, so its waistband rode up high like a bloody and tattered ribbon around her waist.

Who was this pretty girl? he wondered.

Dr. Jensen spoke into his microcassette recorder, which rested on the dissecting tray that swiveled over her lifeless body. He gave his sad and final description of what he saw, the details as cold and clinical as they had to be. Earlier in his career, he’d made the mistake of showing emotion and his transcriber asked him about it. Emotion, he learned, had nothing to with medicine for the dead or the living.

He shut off the recorder.

“Now, my dear, tell me, what happened to your hair?”

It was a good question, of course. Her head had been crudely shaved. By her? By her killer? And why? He thought of the pop star who in some fit of lunacy had pulled into a California hair salon and grabbed the clipper and shaved her head. In two minutes, she’d turned from a beautiful young woman to a sad-looking alien being. She had gigantic eyes and a dome head that was the sickly whitish grey of a body drained of life, of blood. Pundits said that the pop star had been crying for help or had sought to cleanse her mixed-up life by shearing her locks and starting over. Renewal. New beginnings.

Balderdash, Dr. Jensen thought.

In this case, he doubted that the woman had cut her own hair. She was a girl, it appeared, who was very concerned about her looks. The killer must have done the hasty clip job. Track marks where the clipper hadn’t done its job left a few thin bands of long hair. Those hairs, more so than the stubble, indicated that she had been a blonde in life. But the killer had taken all of that away. It was as if killing her hadn’t been enough.

The killer.

Yes, it was obvious it was a homicide. The cause of death was staring him right in the face and it was incontrovertible. Even though it wasn’t his job—that was the bailiwick of the detectives—he wanted more than merely the cause. Dr. Jensen was all about the why.

Fixing her weight at 110 was easy; a scale was built into the table. Height was easy, too. She was 5 feet 3 inches. There was a centimeter option, too. But he ignored it.

This is America, for God’s sake! he thought.

Working from her feet to her waist, the medical examiner used heavy shears to snip through the fabric of her dark-dyed jeans. The shear’s tips were bull-nosed so as not to snag her flesh. The poor girl had been through so much already. No need to add insult to injury.

A song came on the radio he piped into the autopsy suite and he pinpointed the artist and the date: Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” 1972. He smiled. He had a grim job, and with no money in the budget for an assistant, the radio kept him company.

“You weren’t even born when this was a hit,” he said to the dead girl.

She was completely nude now. Jeans cut off. The tattered thong was snipped away and placed into a stainless-steel tub along with the jeans. She had been topless when she was found. No jewelry. Nothing else on her body.

He probed her mouth, vagina, and anus with three clean swabs. It was hard to tell if this girl had been raped. There were no injuries to those orifices, but the lab guys would be able to determine if there was any semen, any killer’s DNA.

Gilbert O’Sullivan’s depressing little ditty had ended and the radio offered up news about the weather. It wasn’t what the ME wanted to hear. Shit, more rain, he thought. What happened to “It never rains in Southern California”?

Albert Hammond. He was unsure if the year was ’71 or ’73.

He made a mental note to remind himself to cancel Saturday’s tee-time at the links. He hated playing golf in the rain and he didn’t care who thought he was a pussy.

So there she was, this baldheaded girl on a stainless-steel table. Her eyes stared into the space of the autopsy suite. He turned the overhead light toward her exposed breasts and the hideously large gash in her chest.

He lifted a flap of skin, and water and blood squirted at him.

“Damn it,” he said, taking a step backward, before resuming his exam.

The wound was enormous. It had been cut crudely, not in the fashion that had been suggested by the cops who’d found the body.

He cut a wider incision and reached for the rib spreader.

“Wonder if someone harvested her kidney or something. You know,” the cop who helped transfer the body to the ME’s office had said, “one of those black market deals.”

The ME didn’t think so. If someone had sought the girl’s kidneys, they didn’t do a good job. Both kidneys were in place.

More fluid oozed. It wasn’t blood. It appeared to be bloody water, a kind of watered down Bloody Mary that came from a sprinkler system that had rained on her since she died.

Mary, he thought, I’ll call her Mary. Until we find her folks.

The music playing was a Mariah Carey song, one of those in which the singer contorted her voice to such a degree that to Dr. Jensen’s old-school way of thinking, he could no longer make out the tune. He didn’t play his date-the-song game when Mariah came on the radio.

The rib spreader moved easily. Too easily. Normally, it took some force to pull apart the bones so that the ME could have access to the vital organs. They all waited there, in their protective cage to be plucked out, examined, weighed and photographed like an organic and hideous still life.

Something was wrong. The ribs on the right side of the body had been snapped. Car wreck? Beaten in the chest with a baseball bat?

No bruising to indicate that at all.

Dr. Jensen went inside. Something was missing. Yes, the kidneys were there. He aimed a light toward the right of the dark red cavity that was the girl’s chest. It was empty. Dark. A void.

“I’ll be,” he said out loud, “the cop might be right, after all.”

The girl’s heart was gone.