Palindrome

CHAPTER 36

Lee Williams arrived at Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, a general-aviation field on the north side of Atlanta, twenty minutes after he got the call. He turned in through the main gate, and he could see, a block away, what he was looking for; two police cars, an ambulance, and the crime lab van were gathered in a parking lot, separated from a line of single-engine airplanes by a row of pine trees. He swung into the lot and stopped next to the ambulance; he could now see that the vehicles surrounded a white Volkswagen Jetta. The group of men were standing sullenly about; he had kept them waiting.

"Can we crack this car, now, Lee?" Mike Hopkins, the lab man, asked.

"Just a minute." He walked slowly around the car; here and there it was grimy with black fingerprinting powder. He looked inside. There was a nurse's uniform in a dry cleaner's plastic bag lying on the backseat. There was a black leather handbag on the front passenger seat. He didn't like that. No woman would deliberately leave her handbag in a car in plain sight.

There was nothing else to see inside the car.

"Okay," he said, "pop the trunk." He walked around to the back of the car and stood while an officer tried keys on the trunk lock.

Williams tried to breathe normally. "Here we go," the man said, as a key turned. The lid came up to complete silence from the gathered group.

They all winced at the smell. Hopkins stepped forward, looked into the trunk, and spoke into a hand-held dictating machine. "The victim was discovered in the trunk of a 1989 Volkswagen Jetta, registered in her name. The body is lying in an unnatural position, which presumes death before entering the trunk; the odor of decay is moderately present. The body is entirely nude and is cold to the touch." He manipulated an arm, then a leg. "Rigor mortis is not present." He stepped away from the car and let the photographer get on with his work.

Williams stepped away with him. "How long?"

"I can tell you better later."

"Best guess."

"Over the weekend. Saturday, probably."

"Was she raped?"

"Too soon to say. They usually are when they're found nude."

"One thing you should know: she had sex with her boyfriend, by his account, on Thursday night.

It may have been pretty rough. You might see if you can differentiate between any bruising from that session and whatever happened at the time of her death."

"Thanks, that's good information."

"When can I have some results?"

"Preliminary"-he glanced at his watch-"ten o'clock tonight. Conclusive, tomorrow, the day after."

"Give me as much as you can tonight," Williams pleaded.

"I'll try. It may be an easy one, who knows? If it'll help, I think cause of death will be a broken neck; I don't think she was strangled."

"A powerful man, then?"

"That's a reasonable assumption."

"Anything else you can tell me now?"

Hopkins looked at his feet. "She's badly beaten up, you can see that. Looks like the guy wanted to hurt her a lot before he killed her."

"Uh, huh. Do you think he just meant to beat her up, that maybe she got the broken neck from a blow to the head?"

Hopkins shook his head slowly. "I think he meant to destroy her."

Williams nodded. "Okay, that fits my senario."

Williams drove slowly from the airport. The ambulance overtook him, no lights blazing. There was no hurry for Mary Alice Taylor. It occurred to him that, in all his years as a policeman, he had never, until that day, seen the dead body of a victim he knew personally. It made a difference.