The Butcher and the Wren(37)

“I won’t fail you, Emma,” she promises, using the victim’s name to punctuate her point. She can still hear Emma’s parents’ agonized voices saying the name to her in the hospital morgue as they cradled her lifeless hands in their own. “Take care of my Emma,” her mother had pleaded.

Now, Wren squeezes her eyes shut like pressing a reset button. “I’m here to listen.”

Tears threaten to form behind her eyes, but she stifles them with a hard blink. An external examination is not something you can just half-ass as a medical examiner or coroner. It’s vital to the process. Once the first cut is made, everything changes. Wren refuses to allow her personal stake in this case to jeopardize the task ahead. This is Emma’s time to speak, not Wren’s time to grieve.

She begins at Emma’s head, using her gloved hand to gently brush the matted hair off her forehead. Her eyes are only half open, making her look like someone about to fall asleep. Despite her heavy lids, it’s clear to Wren that these eyes were once brilliantly blue. Unforgettable. Now, they are cloudy and dull. A pale haze has crept across the surface, making them look ghostly. It’s an unfortunate side effect of death, but always harder to accept in a pair of eyes like these. She lifts a lid slightly to check for signs of petechial hemorrhaging. She detects no sign of the tiny blood vessels that burst in and around the eyes when a victim suffers from strangulation.

She can feel her heart race at the thought, and her hands begin to tremble. She gives in for only a second to the lump that has been sitting in her throat. Sometimes just vocalizing a sob can make the pressure dissipate, but instead she straightens back up. She shakes it off and brings her hands down to the next area for examination.

The intubation tube is still taped to Emma’s face. Wren inspects it before slowly pulling it out of her throat. As she tugs on the tube, she gingerly removes the tape that keeps it in place. Trapped air rushes out of Emma’s mouth, creating a slight breathy sound—easily mistakable as a sign of life to the untrained ear. She pauses for a moment, remembering the scene in The Silence of the Lambs when the forensic pathologist removes a death’s-head moth’s cocoon from the throat of one of Buffalo Bill’s victims. Wren always shivered when the trapped air escaped as he pulled it out and credits the scene with helping shape her early fascination with the human body and what happens to it after death.

Emma’s arms have minor bruises scattered across them, no doubt the result of her trying to escape the underground prison after being entombed. These wounds don’t correlate to beatings of any kind. Wren notes them on the chart and takes hold of Emma’s hands, taking note of the broken nails on her fingertips. These splintered edges are a harsh reminder that she woke up in a casket and tried frantically to claw her way out. Wren takes a sample from under the nails. She already knows that he would never allow his victims to come to a morgue with his DNA under their nails. But it is still a necessary part of the autopsy. Diligence pays off when you least expect it.

Wren moves on to the legs Emma’s parents spoke of with pride to any doctors or nurses who would listen. They boasted about what a graceful runner their Emma was, her father’s eyes filling with tears as he talked about how Emma accompanied him on evening runs as a child. His voice broke as he recounted how they challenged and motivated each other. It was clear he loved that their moments of evening bonding had turned into Emma’s passion. When Wren broke the news that Emma was likely paralyzed from the waist down, it was devastating to them both. Wren had held it together in front of them, allowing them their right to grieve their daughter’s immense loss, but that night she had finally crushed under its weight, letting the hot tears flow unimpeded in her dark living room.

Although they can no longer bound across pavement, Emma’s legs are still strong. Wren can feel the defined quadriceps of a runner. She can see the long, lean muscles sculpted from years of training. Now wounds crisscross her skin, likely from running through a densely wooded area. She notices the lacerations on Emma’s feet, like she traveled in harsh conditions without shoes on. She’s seen this same pattern on multiple victims, herself included. She shakes the image from her mind.

“Where have you been?” Wren asks her, rubbing her thumb over the enormous scrape across the side of Emma’s left foot. “Did he take you where he took me?”

She hears Leroux coming down the hallway now, his voice echoing across the corridor while he jokes with a couple of techs. He lets out an infectious laugh, and Wren’s scrambled thoughts suddenly click into place. Leroux presses the button to activate the sliding door to the autopsy suite.

“All right, Muller, what’s going on?” he asks as he steps through the doors. The look on his face is one of genuine concern, but Wren struggles to sort out which bomb to drop first. She turns to look at him, still holding the metal clipboard with Emma’s external examination records.

“John, do you guys have any leads about where the killer pursued his victims?” she answers with a question of her own.

“You sure you’re ready to get into it?”

She clears her throat and reaches out her hand to grip the cool metal table in front of her.

She nods. “You have no idea.”

Leroux takes a seat on a rolling stool.

“Well, when you recorded the same types of wounds that one would get from running across a densely forested area in all our latest victims, we flagged it. He’s clearly drawn to the chase, or rather, the hunt.” He stops to take a breath and pushes on. “But what we can’t figure out is where he’s able to do this.”