The circular skin discoloration is a very faint pink and no bigger than a dime. Under a hand lens I can see the puncture in the middle of it made by a barbed shank that penetrated her right lung, collapsing it.
“Have you come across this before?” I ask Benton as if my question is hypothetical, a teaching exercise, nothing more than a quiz.
What I can’t allude to is the D.C. murders. I don’t want to alert any members of my staff that Gail Shipton likely is the victim of a serial killer who has terrorized our nation’s capital for the past eight months. It will be up to Benton to open that door.
“It looks like an insect bite.” He studies the magnified wound, his disposable gown rustling against me. I feel his warmth. I sense his intensity.
Then his hazel eyes peer at me above his surgical mask and I see what’s in them. He hasn’t encountered this before. The injury is new to him.
“I don’t know what it is, not firsthand,” he says. “Obviously an insect couldn’t penetrate her lung. Do you think it could be an injection site?” he asks and I don’t think that.
We may have discovered how the killer controls his victims. It’s possible this attention-seeking psychopath has inadvertently left a peephole into his modus operandi. I see what the bastard did. I have a better idea what kind of cowardly brute he is.
“It’s not an injection site.” I hold Benton’s gaze and it’s my way of communicating that I’m not going to tell him what caused the wound. Not in front of an audience.
Gail Shipton was shot with an electrical weapon, a stun gun, and not the type the average person can buy on the Internet for home protection. She may have been shot more than once but this wound to her chest is where one of the probes struck her bare skin and the dart penetrated her chest wall and lung. If other probes struck clothed areas of her body, I might not see any injury. Since we don’t have what she was wearing at the bar last night I can’t look for tears.
Stun-gun shocks are silent. The victim is completely incapacitated while wire-attached darts deliver 50,000 volts. It’s like going into a cadaveric spasm or instant rigor mortis while you’re alive, if such a gruesome thing were possible. You can’t speak and you can’t stand up. The most threatening injury can come from dropping like a falling tree and striking your head.
“Do you mind if I borrow your office?” Benton holds my stare. “I’ve got some calls I need to make and then maybe Bryce could drop me by the house so I can get my car.”
“Harold?” I push up my face shield. “If you’ll get Anne in here, please? I’ll be right back and we’ll get started.”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
30
I escort Benton back to the anteroom as if he needs to be shown the way or maybe people assume I want a moment alone with my husband. He removes his protective clothing, pulling apart the papery tie of his white gown, heaping it into a bright red biohazard trash can.
I tell him the truth, a cruel one with even crueler implications.
“If she was killed by the Capital Murderer, then he’s using an electrical weapon, a type of stun gun, on his victims. At least he did on this latest one,” I explain. “And not just any model. The type used on her fires cartridges with wires and weighted probes that anchor into flesh like fishhooks. In other words, he has the sort of weapon I associate with law enforcement.”
“Unless he bought it on the street.” Benton sits down on a bench and pulls off his shoe covers. “Which wouldn’t be hard. And, for that matter, there’s not much you can’t get online.”
“Certainly that’s possible. But he knew what to get and what it does.”
Benton takes off his gloves and surgical mask, reaching for the trash. “Sadism and control,” he says as he folds his safety glasses and gives them to me. “Just the anticipation of being shocked would be terrifying.”
“It would be.” I return his glasses to a shelf lined with different sizes of glasses and a spray bottle of disinfectant.
“That’s why they don’t fight him.” He stares off as if seeing a vision, a horrible one.
“Paralysis lasted only as long as he squeezed the trigger unless you’re as unlucky as I suspect she was. Or maybe what happened to her was unintentionally merciful. Maybe he used an electroshock weapon and her premature death spared her from a tortured one. Maybe that’s why there’s no bag, no frilly tape or bow.”
“He didn’t get to the best part and his ritual was aborted.” Benton rests his arms on his knees and stares at his bare hands, tapered and graceful like a musician’s and pale because of where we live. He fingers his simple platinum wedding band, turning it slowly.
“We’ll see what the autopsy says but if he shot her with a stun gun while she was in the dark parking lot it might be why she suddenly got quiet when she was talking to Carin Hegel,” I add and I tell him about the recorded telephone conversation Lucy played for me.
I describe the sound of a car engine behind the Psi Bar and Gail Shipton saying “I’m sorry? Can I help you?” And then nothing. I sit down next to Benton shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, my papery cocooned feet next to his borrowed black sneakers.
“It would explain Gail not talking anymore,” I suggest. “She would have dropped her phone and been unable to say a word. But she didn’t collapse to the ground or she’d have scrapes, contusions, possibly serious injuries if she struck her head. Something prevented her from falling when her muscles locked up.”
“He may have caught her and maneuvered her into his car.” Benton plays it out, staring down at his hands solemnly as if he’s just discovered he’s been missing something important all along. “She was going to be disoriented and she wasn’t likely to struggle if it meant being shocked again. Obviously she didn’t scream or that would have been on the recording Lucy’s not supposed to have and hasn’t turned over to the police.”
“Not everybody screams and some people black out. If she had underlying cardiac disease or damage, she may have gone into arrest.” I’m not going to get into what Lucy has or hasn’t done.
At the moment I’m not interested in her usual violations of protocols and splintering of rules. I’m more worried about Benton’s FBI boss doing that and then some.
“If she died of a heart attack, that would be a major cheat for whoever this is,” Benton says as we get up and I know what he’s feeling.
I can see it in the tightness in his face and the haunted shadows in his eyes that are the ghosts of every savaged person whose case he’s worked. He has to bring them back from the dead to be their champion. He has to know what they were like before some predator ripped their souls from them. He can’t let the victims go. They are a crowd inside him, a disembodied population that by now is vast.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Please try not to be.” I look at him and touch his hand. “You can’t know something if it hasn’t presented itself. You can’t conjure it up from thin air.”
“There must be some trace of what he’s been doing to them and I missed it.”
“If anybody missed it, the medical examiners did. Maybe he didn’t use a stun gun on the others.”
“Their lack of injuries make me think he subdued them in a similar way.” He collects his blazer and coat from a hook on the wall.
“If they were shocked through clothing, especially layers of it, there’s a good chance the darts wouldn’t have left a mark or at least not one that would have been noticed.”
“Witnessing a victim’s panicky death as she’s suffocating is part of the thrill,” he says. “It would suck for him if she had a heart attack. That would be his coitus interruptus and would frustrate and infuriate him. He was interrupted and his compulsion wasn’t satisfied. Dressed up with no place to go and she cheated him. He’d studied her and yet she did the unexpected. She had the gall to die before he could finish killing her. He’ll do something again. He’ll do it soon. I didn’t calculate this.”