“ Dr. Coudriet,” said Powers, taking hold of his boss’s arm. But Coudriet shook off the other man’s touch, continuing, “Is that her brow or that of a Cyclops? If she had eyes, brows, a large or small forehead, at least she’d be somebody, even in death.”
“ I think I’ve seen enough for one night,” Jessica firmly told Coudriet, anxious now to step away from Allison Nor ris’s remains for the last time, angry with Coudriet’s having put her so near the girl and so far from her main objective.
But he continued on, waving his hands as he spoke, a professor repeating a favored lecture to a student. “With this kind of bloated corpse, every minuscule pore and cell is saline-swelled, burying the facial characteristics in pulpy flesh, so there is no recognizing Allison for Allison.”
Now Dr. Thorn tried to intervene, using a kind word. “Doctor Coudriet, it’s late, and you must be exhausted…”
Still he continued on as if he were alone with the corpse. “With Allison Norris, even the distinguishing birthmark on her hip-used along with dental and medical records to ID her-was so ballooned up as to be three times its normal size. She-it-had no identity left, not to speak of, no fingernails or prints, eyebrows or lashes…”
Jessica easily and quickly acknowledged all this as true enough. The sea had been merciless, unaffected actually, uncaring and unforgiving-like a storm-leaving Allison’s body a blank, a mold upon which nothing had been stamped. All color was bleached white to an albino finish, a waxy white lather painted on with a huge brush to create the patina of death. Her auburn hair, once quite close to Jessica’s own in appearance, was bleached from the intense Florida sun. And even this hinted at a horrid truth, Jessica realized. The body had floated atop the water for at least two and perhaps three weeks before discovery. But where and how could it have without being seen by someone somewhere? And if dragged through the water, wouldn’t it have had to be by boat? And if by boat, could not the killing ground have been the sea, the entirety of the ocean itself? If so, this explained a great deal.
Coudriet, like some bad actor now, was still working on his monologue. “Without the birthmark and the dental records, Allison’s body could never have been identified. The quivering mass ot” flesh remaining was like an empty slate, and decay had even blemished this when the abdomen, due to a buildup of noxious gases, had erupted and ruptured. A hell of a lot of lish had dined on her after that.”
As if on cue, a globule of flesh, now at room temperature, first separated itself from the body like a piece of living clay and then spattered onto the white-tiled morgue floor, where it promptly seeped like thick syrup through a grate over a drain below the slab, following the water seeping from a hose that ran continuously to keep the area clean. Pieces of Allison were disappearing before Jessica’s eyes, Jessica thought just as Coudriet. being careless, still wearing his “civvy” shoes, slipped on a second globule off the dripping dead woman, going to one knee. Powers quickly helped the older man back up. Coudriet’s face was flushed red now, and Jessica realized for the first time that he’d been drinking.
There wasn’t much hope of learning anything further from Allison tonight, but at this rate, Jessica wondered how much more Allison’s corpse could tell anyone, including Jessica Coran or even the impatient and obsessed Dr. Coudriet.
Jessica made a few additional quick assumptions about the killer and his modus operandi, but she wisely kept these to herself for the time being. It was late, and Coudriet was being a tad more than strange and eccentric now. When he signaled with a slight nod that he was finished, Ted Thorn took charge to remove the body.
Jessica thanked Coudriet for his opinion and his time, adding that she was tired and thought she’d go back to the hotel to get some rest, in order to return refreshed in the morning.
“ Yes, of course,” Coudriet agreed as if coming out of a trance. She wondered if, besides the booze she now smelled on his breath, he were on something-perhaps medication for an ailment.“Well, good night to you all. I’ll likely see you tomorrow.”
She quickly exited, noticing the embarrassment on the faces of the two junior men in the room. Perhaps their mentor was slipping in more ways than one.
FIVE
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Jessica stared momentarily at her watch as she made her way from the bowels of the teaching hospital’s morgue and back toward Miami-Dade Central Police Headquarters through a series of tunnels, stairwells and twists and turns that eventually brought her to ground level. She wondered why morgues were always located below ground, as if in constructing them a kind of subconsciously created perdition was ever the aim, but she also knew two truths which led architects and builders to place morgues at the base of modern buildings. First, like their Egyptian counterparts who placed their most distinguished dead in secret chambers where cavernous mazes terminated, modern builders utilized the principles of cold storage, and nature provided the first refrigerator in the earth itself; and second, everybody knew that no one really wanted to be reminded of the dead on a daily basis, even if those dead were frozen or mummified. Out of sight, out of mind. Nowhere was that truer than in modern America.
Jessica had made arrangements to have dinner with Eriq Santiva, so she located Detective Quincey to take her back to the hotel. Quincey didn’t know how to be subtle. In the car on the way to the hotel, he wanted to know her and Santiva’s relationship; wanted to know the outcome of the trip to the Keys; wanted to know the outcome of the second autopsy performed on Allison Norris; wanted to know if Dr. Coran had a dinner companion for the evening. She managed to dodge all his questions with the vague generalities she had come to rely on in the early stages of investigations, knowing he’d hear soon enough through Thorn, Powers and possibly Coudriet her views on the crime. She managed to keep the detective happy and satisfied that she was cooperating on the case, yet confused enough to think she might still have some answers forthcoming.
‘‘ Then there is a connection with some of the body parts found in Islamorada?” he pressed. “And not just the Allison Norris/Precious connection?”
She conceded this, saying, “It appears so, but it’s too soon to be a hundred percent, Detective.”
“ Quince… you can call me Quince, Dr. Coran. How much more percentage do you need? I mean, the word Precious on that bracelet turning out to be the girl’s nickname, an endearment from her father?”
“ I take it her father’s whole life is politics, like her grandfather’s and uncle’s?”
“ No, no… not entirely.”
“ What else does he do?”
“ Owns a string of boat lots, yachts and sailboats.
“ Boat lots?”
“ He sells sails-sailboats. You name it. Sales, repairs, outfitting, but he’s never there any more than he was at home.” She wondered if there might be some connection between Allison Norris’s disappearance and her father’s connection with boats.
“ Why? Whataya thinking?”
“ Did Allison perhaps work for her father?”
“ Yeah, out of the Biscayne sales office, as a matter of fact. But we covered all her boyfriends.”
“ She had more than one?”
“ Hey, she was a hot property, quite well-off by most standards.”