24

Marino met me at the store's front door. When we stepped inside, the first person we saw was Anderson. She stood in front of the counter, wrapping the empty cash drawer in brown paper as crime-scene technician Al Eggleston dusted the cash register for prints. Anderson looked surprised and unhappy when she saw us.

"What are you doing here?" she confronted Marino.

"Came in to buy a six-pack. How you doin', Eggleston?"

"Same-o, same-o, Pete."

"We're not ready for you yet," Anderson said to me.

I ignored her and wondered how much damage she'd already done to the scene. Thank God, Eggleston was doing the important work. I immediately noticed the overturned chair behind the counter.

"Was the chair like that when the police got here?" I asked Eggleston.

"Far as I know."

Anderson abruptly went out of the store, probably to find Bray.

"Uh-oh," Marino said. "Tattletale."

"You ain't kidding."

On the wall behind the counter were arcs of blood from an arterial hemorrhage.

"Glad you're here, Pete, but you're poking a snake with a stick."

The sweeping trail led around the counter and through the aisle farthest from the store's front door.

"Marino, come here," I said.

"Hey, Eggleston, see if you can find the guy's DNA somewhere. Put it in a little bottle and maybe we can grow his clone in the lab," Marino said as he walked over to me. "Then we'll know who the hell he is."

"You're a rocket scientist, Pete."

I pointed out the arcs of blood made by the rise and fall of the systolic rhythm of Kim Luong's heart as she had bled to death through her carotid. The blood was low to the floor and stretched over some twenty feet of shelves stocked with paper towels, toilet paper and other household needs.

"Jesus Christ," Marino said as the significance hit him. "He's dragging her while she's spurting blood everywhere?"

"Yes."

"How long would she have survived, bleeding like that?"

"Minutes," I said. "Ten at the most."

She had left no other bloody wake except the faint fringed and narrow parallel impressions made by her hair and fingers as they dragged through her blood. I envisioned him pulling her feet first, her arms opening like wings filled with air, her hair trailing like feathers.

"He had her by the ankles," I said. "She has long hair."

Anderson had stepped back inside and was watching us, and I hated it when I had to guard every word I said around the police. But it happened. Over the years, I had worked with cops who were terrible leaks and I had no choice but to treat them like the enemy.

"She sure as hell didn't die right away," Marino added.

"A hole in your carotid isn't immediately disabling," I told him. "You can have your throat cut and still call nineone-one. She shouldn't have been immediately immobilized, but clearly she was."

The systolic sweeps got lower and fainter the further down the aisle we went, and I noted that small blood spatters were dry while larger amounts of blood were congealing. We followed streaks and smears past coolers full of beer, then through the doorway leading into the storeroom where crime-scene technician Gary Ham was on his knees while another officer took photographs, their backs to me, blocking my view.

When I stepped around them, I was stunned. Kim Luong's blue jeans and panties had been pulled down to her knees, a chemical thermometer inserted into her rectum. Ham looked up at me and he froze like someone caught stealing. We had worked together for years.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I said to him in a hard tone he had never heard from me.

"Getting her temp, Doc;" Ham said.

"Did you swab lair before inserting the thermometer? In the event she was sodomized?" I demanded in the same angry voice as Marino made his way around me and stared at the body.

Ham hesitated "No, ma'am, I didn't:"

"Way to fucking go," Marino said to him.

Ham was in his late thirties, a tall, nice-looking man with dark hair and big brown eyes and long lashes. It wasn't uncommon for a little experience to begin seducing someone like him into believing he could do the forensic scientist's and medical examiner's work. But Ham had always stayed in bounds. He had always been respectful.

"And just how do I interpret the presence of any injury, now that you've introduced a hard object into one of her orifices?" I said to him.

He swallowed hard.

"If I find a contusion inside her rectum, can I swear in court that the thermometer didn't do it? And unless you can somehow vouch for the sterility of your equipment, any DNA recovered will be in question, too," I said.

Ham's face was red.

"Do you have any idea how many artifacts you've just introduced to this crime scene, Officer Ham?" I asked him.

"I've been very careful."

"Please move out of the way. Now."

I opened my case and angrily pulled on gloves, stretching my fingers and snapping latex all in one motion. I handed Marino a flashlight and studied my surroundings before I did another thing. The storeroom was dimly lit; hundreds of six-packs of sodas and beer as far as twenty feet away were spattered with blood. Inches- from the body were Tampax and paper towels, the bottom of the cartons soggy with blood. So far, there was no sign the killer had been interested in anything back here except his victim.

I squatted and studied the body, taking in every shade and texture of flesh and blood, every stroke of the killer's hellish art. I did not touch anything at first.

"God, he really beat the hell out of her, didn't he," said the cop who was taking photographs.

It was as if a wild animal had dragged her dying body off to its lair and mauled it. Her sweater and bra had been ripped open, her shoes and socks removed and tossed nearby. She was a fleshy woman with matronly hips and breasts, and the only way I had a clue about what she had looked like was the driver's license I was shown. Kim Luong had been pretty with a shy. smile and shiny long black hair.

"Were her pants on when she was found?" I asked Ham.

"Yes, ma'am."

"What about shoes and socks?"

"They were off. Exactly like you see them. We didn't touch them."

I didn't have to pick up her shoes and socks to see they were very bloody.

"Why would he take off her shoes and socks but not her pants?" one of the cops asked.

"Yeah. Why would someone do something weird like that?"

I took a look. There was dried blood on the bottom of her feet, too.

"I'll have to get her under a better light when we get her to the morgue," I said.

The gunshot wound in the front of her neck was plain to see. It was an entrance wound, and I turned her head just enough to see the exit in the back, angled to the left. It was this bullet that had hit her carotid artery.

"Did you recover a bullet?" I asked Ham:

"Dug one out of the wall behind the counter," he said, barely able to look at me. "No shell so far, if there is one."

There wouldn't be if she was shot with a revolver. Pistols ejected their cartridge cases, which was about the only helpful thing they did when they were used for violence.

"Where in the Wall?" I asked.

"If you're facing the counter, it would be to the left of where the chair would have been if she was sitting at the cash register."

"The exit wound is also off to the left," I said. "If they were face to face when she was shot, you may be looking for a left-handed shooter."

Kim Luong's face was severely lacerated and crushed, the skin split and torn from blows that had been made by some sort of tool or tools that had a pattern of round and linear wounds. It appeared she also had been beaten with his fists. When I palpatйd for fractures, bits of bone crunched beneath my fingertips. Her teeth were broken and pushed in.