Hoc es corpus. This is the body.
Today she had missed these words that began every autopsy, but now she watched the process in reverse. A few organs had been set aside. The parts that would be buried with Kennedy Harper were being returned to her hollowed-out corpse. Mallory leaned down for a closer examination of small holes in the cadaver’s flesh. ‘What’s this? It looks like a shotgun splatter.’
‘That’s from the maggots exiting the dried-out skin.’ He picked up his magnifying glass and held it on the area above the collar bone. ‘You see? The rims of the holes are turned out.’ One bloody, gloved hand pointed to ravaged skin at the cadaver’s throat. ‘Now this is more interesting. The rope did lots of damage here, but the killer wasn’t responsible for it.’ He watched her face and waited for the student to ask the master, Why not?
If she encouraged him in this old game, it would take forever to glean a few simple facts. The doctor was determined to continue her education, and he was too fond of long lessons. So she waited him out, arms folded, blinking only once before he gave in.
‘The damage was self-inflicted.’ He turned his eyes down to the work of coiling the large intestine. ‘This woman was very cool under pressure.’
That sounded like another contradiction, but she recognized an old logic trap. No, I’m not going to ask.
As Dr Slope finished stitching skin to close the gaping wound, he shifted his tactics, offering Mallory a bizarre piece of candy. ‘You’ll never attend another autopsy like this one.’ And with this hook, he led her over to the steel counter by the refrigerator, where he wadded his bloody surgeon’s gown and tossed it into a barrel with his gloves.
‘I’ve seen a lot of hanging victims, mostly suicides, but nothing like this.’ He sorted through a group of photographs. ‘Normally, I find a ligature mark at the back of the neck where the knot is.’ He selected a picture of the victim’s face, taken when the rope was still caught between her teeth. ‘But this woman was facing the knot. Now I never expect a classic hangman’s noose. It’s usually a slip knot.’
‘I know.’ She kept her sarcasm to one syllable, a subtle reminder that she had been present when the noose was removed. ‘This one was a double knot. Heller already – ’
‘And it didn’t close off the carotid artery. So Miss Harper didn’t black out or succumb to euphoria.’
‘Transient cerebral hypoxia,’ said Mallory.
‘You do pay attention.’ Dr Slope graced her with a half smile as he unfolded a diagram of the crime scene. ‘Heller assisted on this part. We choreographed the last minutes of her life like a ballet.’ The doctor pointed to the roughly sketched countertop by the kitchen sink. ‘This is where Heller’s forensic team found footprints and partials. Note the distance to the ceiling light.’ His finger moved across the paper to a drawn circle. ‘That’s where she was left hanging, playing dead.’ He looked up at Mallory. ‘Miss Harper was still alive when the killer left the scene. First, she kicked off her sandals. We found them under the body. When she raised her leg, she could just barely reach the counter with one toe. So she pushed off to make her body swing away and back again.’
The doctor laid out photographs of the Formica surface covered with Heller’s black dust. One close-up showed a partial footprint layered over the mark of a toe. ‘Here you’ve got more of the foot,’ said Slope. ‘Her body swings in a wider arc each time she pushes off. Finally, she lands both feet on the countertop. Now her weight is supported at two points – feet on the counter, neck in the noose. See here?’ He pointed to a shot of two full footprints on the Formica beside the sink. ‘Both soles are flat. Now she has the leverage to rotate her body until she’s facing the knot. That gives her an inch of air between her throat and the noose. She worked her chin under the rope. That’s when it snagged on the upper teeth. I can’t tell you how long she hung there.’
Patiently waiting for the cavalry to come and rescue her – just like Sparrow.
‘She couldn’t dislodge the rope or the hair in her mouth,’ said Slope. ‘She could’ve screamed – but no intelligible sounds.’
The neighbors didn’t come. The cops didn’t come.
Dr Slope pushed the photographs aside. ‘I can tell you she died six days ago, but the cause of death wasn’t asphyxiation. It was heart failure.’ He picked up a pharmacy bottle bagged and tagged as crime-scene evidence. ‘I called the prescribing cardiologist. Miss Harper had a congenital heart defect – inoperable. All her life, she’s been living with a time bomb in her chest.’
‘Good practice for a hanging,’ said Mallory.
‘It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? Twisting on the end of a rope, but no panic. And she nearly escaped.’
Mallory thought of the day this woman had walked into a police station with a bloody note staked to her neck. The hanging scenario worked well with that kind of poise. But now she had two victims who were accomplished at playing dead while their hearts were beating a million times a minute. What were the odds against that? She turned to the medical examiner and smiled.
You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you?
The doctor would never volunteer what he could not swear to in court and back up with evidence, but if he thought this was the end of the autopsy, he was dead wrong. She glanced back at the dissected woman on the other side of the room. There was cutting and there was cutting. ‘So I’ve got a perp who can’t tell the living from the dead. That’s it? That’s all you can tell me? The hangman’s just another screw-up who can’t find a pulse?’
Dr Slope hesitated for a moment. He had always fancied himself a great poker player, born with a face of stone that gave up nothing in his hand. Yet Louis Markowitz had beaten him in every bluff, and everything that cop knew about poker and Slope he had passed along to his foster child. Even if she could not read the doctor’s face, she knew what he was thinking: she was an ungrateful brat, and he was going to put her in her place.
The man’s voice was testy, but still in the lecture mode. ‘You assume he believed his victim was dead. Well, J don’t. After he strung her up, she was getting oxygen, but not enough to keep her conscious for long. So I know the killer left the scene immediately. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been time enough or strength enough for Kennedy’s aerial ballet. He didn’t stay to watch her die.’
Just like Sparrow – a pattern.
A few minutes with this medical examiner was worth ten hours with any psychiatrist, for most witch doctors were light years removed from the carnage of murder. She turned her back on Slope and crossed the room to the steel table and the body of Kennedy Harper all sewn up with crude stitches – a Frankenstein scar. Mallory was striving for the sound of boredom when she asked, ‘What else can you tell me? Anything useful?’
The doctor’s poker discipline was shot to hell. His face was now an easy read, waffling between surprise and indignation. He marched up to the table and confronted her across the body, firing off another contradiction. ‘I’d say your man’s not the violent type. That may seem a bit odd – ’
‘Odd?’
‘All right, Kathy – it’s insane. But he didn’t go off on either of the women. He didn’t beat them or – ’
‘He cut off their damn hair.’
‘But no cuts to the flesh, no fractures from a fist. And the other one, Sparrow – she didn’t have a single defensive bruise. I’ve seen every unspeakable act a man can commit on a woman’s body.’ The doctor looked down at the corpse laid out on the table, the woman he so admired. ‘But I don’t see that kind of violence here – no loss of control, no rage.’