The Cold Room

Nine

Before she left the house, Taylor had downloaded the Dvořák piece to her iPod. Baldwin had been converting all of her CDs over to the computer, and had installed a plug in her truck’s radio so she could stick the nano in the slot and hear all of her music. It was a wide-ranging and eclectic mix, gathered over two decades. It reflected her alternative tastes, but there was a great deal of classical as well, leftover vestiges of her early days in the orchestra. She didn’t play anymore, but she still loved the music.

She climbed into an unmarked pool car, wishing for her truck’s speakers. She put in the earbuds, hit play and left downtown for the fifteen-minute drive to Forensic Medical. The flow of the Dvořák was calming. She liked the scherzo, forwarded to that spot. The opening was the brand music for something, she couldn’t remember what. Some financial institution, something that had quick television spots that needed the grabbiness as their theme.

She forwarded again to the Allegro. The score for Jaws must have been based on this piece. The two-note heartbeat, the quickening pace-John Williams was obviously a Dvořák fan. It was grand, in-your-face music. She wondered what the killer was thinking when he chose it, then admonished herself. She didn’t know for sure that he had chosen it. She pulled her to-do list out of her pocket and added a note, driving with one hand, writing on her knee. Check with owner about CD.

She arrived at Sam’s office well before the piece ended. She sat in the car for a few minutes, letting it play out. Assuming it was the killer’s music, why had he chosen the New World Symphony? Perhaps that was a message, too. If this was the same man who had committed the murders in Italy and England, why was he here in Tennessee? Did he think of it as the new world? It was such a leap, a serial killer crossing the Atlantic to start killing in her backyard with a slightly different M.O. That seemed so highly unlikely, yet Baldwin was struck by the pictures of the scene. The similarities were unmistakable. She groaned aloud when the next thought crossed her mind. Was it a copycat?

Like she needed another one of those.

ViCAP, ViCAP, ViCAP. That was the first thing she’d do when she left the postmortem. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to come. Damn Julia Page and her prescient comments.

Abandoning the nano and her thoughts, Taylor entered the building on Gass Street. She couldn’t help but sigh. The scents were so familiar she sometimes didn’t smell them, but today she felt like she’d walked into her high school biology lab. The pervasive, artificial smell of formalin, the reek of death. It was too much to bear. She wondered how Sam did it sometimes, how she could cross the threshold of this place, day after day, and work. She left the twins at home with a nanny and became another person for ten hours a day.

Taylor wished she could do that as well. Just morph, become someone else, someone who didn’t have to think about death all the time. She knew that would never happen. She wouldn’t trade the idea of working with the police for anything. It was important to her to actually be who she said she was, to be the person she’d set out to be in the beginning. Four deaths on her conscience, cold-blooded murders, yet all justified. She was a cop. It was her job. These were the things that she had to do to survive, and to make the people around her, the strangers she loved, safe.

The desk was manned by Kris, a smiley girl with butter-yellow hair and too-big implants. She’d gotten them recently and they hadn’t dropped yet; they stood out on her chest like overfull water balloons. She waved at Taylor and the breasts bobbled joyfully. Taylor waved back and moved to the door that led to the biovestibule that separated the administrative offices from the gut work. She swiped her card and the lock disengaged.

The locker room was empty. She covered her clothes with surgical scrubs, slipped on blue plastic clogs, then went through the smaller air lock into the autopsy suite. Renn McKenzie was sitting on a stool, gazing anywhere but at the action. Sunlight from the skylights shone down on his hair, making the blond strands at his temples glint silver.

Sam was washing the body of a teenager. She was reverent and slow; Taylor could feel her intensity, aching with the need to make it right for this young man. It was heartbreaking, watching her brush the hair back from his forehead, a thick shock of brunette shot through with lighter streaks of caramel, like he’d been in the sun for days on end. Closer inspection showed Taylor that his head was lying flat against the plastic tray. No, that wasn’t right. It was just his face, straight on the table. There was nothing to the back of his head, he was practically two-dimensional.

“What happened to him?”

Sam started, looked at Taylor guiltily. Caught in the act of caring for her subject. When she realized it was just Taylor, she relaxed and went back to stroking the boy’s hair. Only then did Taylor see she was actually using a fine-tooth comb to gather particles.

“Do you remember Alex, from sophomore year? My French tutor?” Sam asked.

Taylor remembered. How could she ever forget? “Yes, I do.”

“Our boy here took a shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He did this to himself. The dummy. Just like Alex did.”

Sam’s voice was thick with emotion. Alex had been a bit more than her tutor. Sam had nursed a horrid crush on him for ages. Alex hadn’t ever reciprocated her puppy love. He was a sad boy. Dark black hair and matching eyes, hidden scars inside the irises.

When they were in tenth grade, Alex could stand the torture of life no longer. He wrote a long note, explaining his actions, loaded his father’s shotgun, slipped it between his lips, and shot himself. He had pulled the trigger with his toes.

It was inconceivable to them, at the time. They sat around in friends’ houses, numb, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, pondering. What could have been so bad in a fifteen-year-old’s life? How had Alex’s world been destroyed to the point he felt the need to take his own life? His note explained his rationale, his father’s coldness, the inability to please. Taylor always suspected it was more than that, but never had the proof.

Sadness overwhelmed her. She looked at the young man on the table, wondered what drove him to despair.

“Do you know why?” Taylor asked. “What might have pushed him to this? Was there a note?”

“No, there wasn’t. But there was a lot of anal tearing. It was pretty apparent that he was being abused, for a prolonged period of time. I’m not sure exactly what his story is, but he doesn’t have biological parents in the state. He was a part of the foster system.”

Taylor felt the fury bubble up from within her soul. “So we have foster kids being raped who kill themselves with shotguns now. Jesus, Sam.”

McKenzie spun on his stool and faced them. “I had a friend kill herself. It was awful.” He spun away and Taylor met Sam’s eyes. That sentiment they understood all too well.

Sam signaled to one of her assistants. “Could you finish this for me? I’ll be back to post him next.”

She walked two tables over to the prepped body of the victim from last night, stripped off her gloves and replaced them with a fresh set.

McKenzie followed them reluctantly. “The prints are back. Her name’s Allegra Johnson.”

Taylor looked at the girl, so insubstantial. The steel table dwarfed her, like it would a child. The wound tract from the knife that had been buried in the girl’s chest glared under the lights, an angry slit.

“She was in the system?”

“Yeah. Solicitation. Shocking. Skinny girl like this-drugs and prostitution were my first guess,” he answered.

Sam and Taylor’s eyes met again. Taylor took a deep breath. “McKenzie, kill the sarcasm. You can never assume, or guess, when it comes to a victim. You end up planting ideas in your head about them, and then you try to make the crime fit your preconceived notion of what makes sense to you. There could be other explanations for her physical appearance. She could very well be ill, or homeless, unable to feed herself. This could have been a crime of opportunity. We don’t know yet why she was chosen. We won’t know until we do a thorough victimology, okay?”

McKenzie’s brows furrowed for a moment while he thought it out. What she said must have made sense, because his forehead smoothed and he nodded. “Okay,” he said. Maybe training him wasn’t going to be as hard as she expected.

Sam cleared her throat, and another tech, a quiet man named Stuart Charisse with incongruously lighthearted curly hair, appeared to help her. He started taking pictures while Sam turned on the microphone attached to her face shield, and started the case rundown. Taylor listened with half an ear as Sam gave the details-date, time, who was present, all the minutiae that was necessary to the formal autopsy process. McKenzie stood next to her, bopping his head up and down in an internal rhythm to Sam’s dispassionate recitation.

Allegra’s body was a mass of wretchedness. Every bone was clearly defined; Taylor could count each rib individually. The girl looked like she’d literally wasted away.

Sam started her assessment. “The body is that of a malnourished twenty-one-year-old female African-American who looks younger than her recorded age. The body was received to the medical examiner’s office naked, attached by fine filament to a post measuring six feet, three-quarter inches long by ten inches square. The filament was wrapped around the forehead, wrists, torso, waist, hips, thighs and feet of the victim’s body.” Sam turned off the mike.

“It was a bitch and a half getting her off that post. The knife was buried two inches into the wood. We documented the whole thing, video and stills. This will be a good teaching case. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something as bizarre.”

Taylor nodded. “Good. That’s the kind of stuff A.D.A. Page loves. Helps for when we catch this guy and try his ass. Was the filament holding her up fishing line?”

“I think so. Trace will tell us exactly what kind. If we’re lucky, maybe he’s some kind of famous bass aficionado and we’ll be able to track the line to his tackle box.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Sam turned her mike back on and bent over her work. “The body is five foot one inches tall and weighs sixty-nine pounds. Body Mass Index is thirteen point four. The body is cachetic, with temporal wasting, prominent bone protrusions, concave abdomen. Pale oral mucosa, pale conjunctivae with some minor petechial hemorrhage. A vitreous fluid level is taken.”

Taylor glanced at McKenzie, expecting him to freak, but he stood his ground and watched. Good. He was toughening up.

Sam took the victim’s hand, pinched a fold of skin between her gloved thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. The skin tented and stayed that way. The silent attendant took a picture. She moved to Allegra’s abdomen and repeated the action. The results were the same.

“Skin is ashy and has exceptionally poor turgor. No one can say this girl was just plain skinny. I’m seeing severe dehydration, for starters,” Sam said.

Taylor nodded. “About that. Baldwin mentioned something last night. He’s been dealing with a serial case in Italy.”

McKenzie brightened. “II Macellaio or II Mostro?”

“How do you know about them?” Taylor asked.

“Oh, I follow serial-killer cases. I find them fascinating.”

Ha. McKenzie didn’t have a clue what it would be like to really follow a serial killer. He wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic.

“II Macellaio. Tell me what you know,” she said.

“Well,” McKenzie began, suddenly blushing at being the center of attention.

She needed to train him away from that, and fast. The minute A.D.A. Page, who was cute as a button and fierce as a shark, got him on the stand, started asking him questions and he blushed, the jury would assume he was lying.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m just curious, okay?”

He continued to redden, though he nodded his head yes. “II Macellaio likes to have sex with dead girls,” he managed.

“Ugh,” Sam said, but Taylor nodded her approval.

“It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, McKenzie, but you’re right. He’s a necrosadist, a killer that murders in order to have sex with the dead victim. Very rare. And he poses his victims like famous paintings after he’s through with their bodies. Which is where I was going. Baldwin said several of the earlier cases’ COD was starvation, but II Macellaio moved on to strangulation. I guess he got tired of waiting for them to die.”

Sam had moved on to the next phase of her exam, had the victim in stirrups and was between her legs taking samples. “Yo, we’ve got lubricant here. Starvation and necrophilia, huh? Sounds like a nice guy. If that’s the case for Ms. Johnson, and I can’t say one way or the other until I finish the post, he’d probably need some lube to get things in the right place, if you know what I mean.”

“Why?” McKenzie asked.

Sam kept working, but spoke over her shoulder to him. “When you’re severely dehydrated, all your fluids dry up. All of them. Your blood thickens, your blood pressure drops dramatically, you’d feel sluggish and unable to move around. With no nourishment at all, it wouldn’t take long to be dry as a chip. That’s why her skin is tenting, there’s no fluid in the body to help the skin return to its normal state. It would be a rough way to go. But here’s our pièce de résistance. Stuart, could you help me roll her? Gently, now.”

It didn’t take much to get the girl over onto her face. Taylor saw the pattern on the girl’s back and sucked in her breath.

Sam traced her finger along the girl’s back. “Yeah. Pretty wild, huh?”

McKenzie cocked his head to the side. “Is this lividity?”

Sam shook her head. “There’s a little bit of lividity, but this is more like prolonged exposure to whatever caused the pattern.”

“Burns, maybe?” Taylor asked.

“Nope. I think it was something she was on. For a while. It created massive indentations in the skin, and once she died, the lividity settled in. That’s the only reason we can still see it. She’s been dead for a few days, you see the level of decomp. Lividity would have passed by now.”

Taylor looked at McKenzie. “What time did the neighbor call it in?”

He consulted his notebook. “5:30 in the evening. Said there was no body when she came over in the morning.”

The lab tech documented the scene, and Taylor moved closer to get a good look. Postmortem lividity was one of the most significant clues a cop had to determine whether a body had been moved or not. The girl’s entire back, including her arms and legs, was a dusky black, much darker than her skin, with perfectly round, equally spaced cocoa-colored circles every few inches along her body. The circles were only an inch or two in diameter, and were equidistant from one another. It wasn’t readily apparent at the scene, but her left arm had what looked like a seam down the outer edge, as if it were wedged against something sharp. This was past lividity, this was almost scarring.

Taylor had never seen anything like it. “It’s like she has polka dots. What in the world would cause that?” she asked.

“That’s something you’ll need to figure out. She was certainly on her back for an extended period of time when she was still alive, lying on something that had these holes.” Sam nodded to the tech and they rolled the girl over onto her back.

“Why not on the back of her arms?” McKenzie asked.

“Good question. She was shoved up against something, that’s what caused that line down her arm. Maybe they were crossed on her chest? I don’t know.”

Taylor took a lap around the table, looking closer. The fishing line had cut into the girl’s flesh and the marks were clearly visible, concentric circles around her body. “So the knife to the chest was just massive overkill? That didn’t cause her death? What about the lack of blood?”

“The knife acted like an anchor. It helped hold the body up. There wasn’t any blood to spill at that point; it was coagulated and her heart wasn’t pumping.”

Taylor nodded. “Okay. I’m comfortable with the working theory that Love Circle was the secondary crime scene. There’s no way the neighbor would miss the body if it was already in the house. She seems like the type to open a few cabinets and drawers, if you know what I mean. So Allegra was killed elsewhere, then strung up on the post. But why would you do that in someone else’s house? I need to talk to the home owner. That’s just fishy as hell.”

Sam moved toward the scalpel on the tray by her right hand. She used the blunt end to part the knife wound, pointing her finger at the meager layer of yellow just below the dermis. “This chick has zero subcutaneous fat. I mean it’s less than an eighth of an inch. Starvation would certainly do that. What else did Baldwin say about this Mach guy?”

McKenzie perked up again. “II Macellaio. The Butcher. You say it like this-eel matcha lie o, emphasis on the matcha. Though why they call him that is lost on me. He doesn’t cut them up or anything.”

Taylor gave the kid some points for getting the pronunciation correct.

Sam was moving along. She opened the torso and McKenzie stared in fascination at the dead girl’s desiccated organs. “Are they supposed to be so gray?” he asked.

“Honestly, no. And they’ve atrophied, which is why they look so shrunken.” Sam moved through her work, dissecting, observing, taking samples and making notes. She talked to McKenzie the whole time, explaining how starvation worked, that your system breaks down proteins, carbohydrates and fat in different sequences, that the carbs are burned first, then the fat, then the proteins. When the body starts feeding itself on the protein, or muscle mass, death occurs. In someone so small, like Allegra, death would come quicker than a full-grown, nourished, healthy woman. Without water and sustenance, death could occur in as little as a week.

Sam moved to the girl’s head and Taylor turned away, purposefully letting her mind wander as the Stryker saw buzzed to life. She went back to the crime scene. Why choose a house that isn’t your own? To send a message. To frame someone. To obscure your true meaning.

“Brain is unremarkable,” Sam called out.

“Wouldn’t the brain shrink up like the rest of the organs?” McKenzie asked.

“You’d think so, but no. Our histology slides should look relatively normal, comparatively.”

“What’s it like to starve to death?” McKenzie looked sad, and Taylor knew they had him. She’d been wondering what kind of detective he was going to be-blustery and sarcastic, deflecting the daily horror with sharp words, or compassionate and caring. A good detective needed to find the balance between reality and compassion. Overly involved and you burn out. Too cynical and you can’t relate to the victims and can’t find their killers. Finding the middle ground was something that couldn’t be taught, but the look on McKenzie’s face said everything. He was going to do just fine.

Sam began wrapping up. “I need to get all the tox screens back, and look at the electrolytes and the other readings. But if she did starve, it wouldn’t have been pleasant. Hunger pains are one thing, but without water, she’d lose blood volume, and her blood pressure would drop. Headaches, rapid heartbeat, constant fatigue. Toward the end, muscle spasms and delirium. She would have been exceptionally sluggish, and dizzy. She wouldn’t be in much of a position to fight back. T, I’ll run everything, see if I can find any biologicals to test, but the body is pretty clean. Like she’d been washed, clean. Who knows, we might get lucky.”

Sam nodded at McKenzie and went to wash up. Taylor tapped him on the arm and said, “Let’s get out of here. You did good. I need you to track down her particulars, find out an address, see if there’s anyone to do a notification to. Then call the chaplain, we have to have him with us. Let’s grab something to eat and get our ducks in a row. Meet me at Rippy’s?”

“Okay. I’ll see you there.” McKenzie left the autopsy suite dutifully, lost in thought. Taylor wondered what he was thinking.

Sam called out, “Hey, I’ll get the lube tested first thing and call you later.”

Taylor waved at her. “Thanks. Maybe that will tell us something about who this killer really is.”