Coudriet’s men remained silent, one of them nodding.
Seeing they had no comment, she switched the TV camera back on in just as ceremonious a fashion as before, a bit angry at the two crows who stood across from her. Now on the record, she continued, “The killer rammed his large thumbs deep into her throat. A closer look tells me that the girl’s entire pharynx was bruised and swollen before death.”
The pharynx is the tubelike structure that acts as both the digestive tract and the breathing hose. It also works in speech, changing shape to allow a person to form vowel sounds. Jessica momentarily wondered what kind of sounds Allison might have emitted under such brute force applied to the muscle and cartilage and membrane. The entire structure divides into three distinct regions, the second being the oropharynx, which extends from the soft palate to the level of the hyoid bone just below the lower jaw.
It was this area that Jessica took great time and care in examining, causing Thorn and Powers to stare and sweat beneath their surgical gowns. She asked for one of them to grab the Polaroid nearby and snap close-ups of the area she had opened with her scalpel. After Powers snapped three shots, Jessica asked Thorn to hold up a sterile tray to receive the small samplings she now sliced from the larynx tissue.
“ I thought this was going to be a cursory exam,” said Powers.
Jessica shot back, “It is.” Thorn abruptly said, “Dr. Coudriet was aware of the condition of the throat.”
“ But he chose to examine it only externally?”
“ He examined it by hand, coming up from the breastplate after the Y-cut was made below. He knew she’d been choked to death before she drowned, if that’s what you’re… wondering. And besides, there was pressure on to do as little as possible and still call it an autopsy. Allison Norris’s father’s a very influential man.”
“ Yes, well, if that’s the case, why wasn’t it reported as a strangulation death?”
“ It was, eventually.” She bit her lip and nodded. “I see.” Coudriet was no doubt under some pressure at the time and saw little difference in whether the dead girl was strangled by rope or by hand or drowned, since all had the same result. This explained his qualifying language in the report.
Jessica next repeated her procedure for the laryngophar- ynx, which extends from the base of the hyoid bone to the esophagus. The entire region, up and down, was badly bruised, not simply from the ugly blemish caused by the attempt to mask rope burns, but from powerful hands, the hands of a sociopath who had killed many times before until the routine and habit of his killing had begun to actually bore him. so that now he slowly and lastingly strangled his victims, no doubt in a controlled fashion, in controlled time and in a controlled space-his space- where he felt most comfortable and had a great deal of time to carry out a lingering murder. He then obviously dumped the body into the ocean-but where, to keep it from surfacing for so long?
Thorn and Powers exhibited signs of boredom themselves now. They’d been up and down this territory before, no doubt wondering what volumes of information she hoped to locate in the larynx, or voice box.
“ The hyoid bone,” she said, as if to allay any doubts, “while fractured, remains very much intact, indicating some sort of controlled strangulation, in which the killer took his evil time with the strangulation process. Patient, composed, self-possessed strangulation. The killer shows all the characteristics of an organized murderer who had likely fantasized killing for years before he ever attempted it, and who, once he did attempt the thing, began to meticulously work out the particulars in cool and cunning detail.”
“ You got all that from looking at the throat?” asked a befuddled-looking Thorn, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose.
She ignored his question and continued, “Now that he has any number of killings behind him, it has become a ritualized killing sport, each step as important as the next, and nothing left to chance or forgetfulness.”
She explored the wounds further, no simple task given the bloated condition of the skin; but the freezer had at least held the decay in check. She used a stainless-steel probe and handheld magnifying glass. “He’s devised the perfect murders, so far as he is concerned. And in conceiving such murders and carrying them out, he’s given over his soul to whatever demons drive him.” Yes, the hyoid bone was fractured-as was reported in the original autopsy-indicative of strangulation, but she’d seen many a crushed hyoid bone, and this one was far from crushed. In fact, it was near intact. She so noted this fact for the record, which disquieted Thorn and Powers a bit. Jessica was used to posing questions and scenarios as she worked; it had become part of her modus operandi.
She didn’t bother now with asking Thorn or Powers anything further, but she did ask the microphone and camera, ‘ ‘Could the victim have been alive yet after the fracture of the hyoid? It was quite certain that she was, since the lungs, too, were full of water when the body was discovered, although in and of itself this fact does not prove death by drowning. Clearly, more tests need to be run, but my most educated guess is running along the lines of a torture murder of the sort the FBI rates on a scale of one to ten, Mad Matthew Matisak having been a Tort. 9. This fiend, if he is slowly strangling the life from his victims, only to allow them to resurface from death as it were, only to put them through the torment again, and repeatedly, ranks right up there with the blood-drinking vampire killer. While he does not appear to have cannibalized or drunk his victim’s blood, he obviously breathes in their suffering to empower himself.”
Thorn, even while shaking his head and pushing aside Powers’s restraining hand, asked, “What’re you saying. Dr. Coran?’’
“ I’m saying this murdering… fiend first incapacitates his victim with repeated strangulations and then drowns them, that this evil being, whoever or whatever he is, has turned back down the evolutionary trail, allowing his most base, animal desires to overtake him.”
“ But why repeatedly kill someone?”
“ He obviously gains great pleasure at watching an Allison Norris struggle and suffer, and he too much enjoys watching his victim languish and agonize to allow her a quick death. He wants long hours to pass before he allows her to go.”
“ But why?”
“ He wants to control the clock, hold back time and death itself, to send her soul across a high wire of tension, with himself at the controls; he wants to control death itself.”
If memory served Jessica, Dr. Andrew Coudriet had not questioned the method in which the throat had been brutalized and the bone splintered, as opposed to crushed or mangled. He had taken it at face value that the strangulation was the result of a tightly wound rope about the neck; he’d described it as a hangman’s noose, due to the angle of the ligature marks. And he was definitely correct in that assumption. A hangman’s noose burned the back of the neck at the base of the brain far more than it did across the Adam’s apple and throat. She had noted this in her report.
Yes, Coudriet was right about the rope burns, but before the rope burns, the girl had been strangled by hand, and strangled badly, repeatedly. The question remained, was she choked to death so far as the killer knew-an important distinction in determining the level and duration of torture heaped upon the victim-before or after she was lynched? Also, was she dead before he threw her into the water, or had she been choked repeatedly first and then, while still alive, thrown into the water, where exhaustion and blackout would do the rest? Jessica asked the questions aloud after formulating them. Articulating the horrid questions proved too much for Powers, who suddenly reached up and shut off the camera and audio. He stood staring across at Jessica now, the body lying between them. “Dr. Coudriet’s report had the lungs full with water, so the woman was alive when she swallowed the ocean.”