Imitation in Death (In Death #17)(7)

"The throat wound killed her."

"Small mercy." Understanding, he lifted his head. His eyes behind his goggles didn't smile, as they usually did, nor did they show, any spark of fascination with his work. "She wouldn't have felt the rest that was done to her, wouldn't have known. She was comfortably dead before he butchered her."

"Was it butchery?"

"How would you define it?" He tossed, the scalpel in a tray, gestured-with one bloody hand over the mutilated body. "How the hell would you define this?"

"I don't have the words. I don't think there are any. Vicious isn't enough. Evil doesn't cover it, not really. I can't get philosophical now, Morris. That won't help her. I need to know, did he know what he was doing, or was it a hack job?"

He was breathing too fast. To steady himself, Moms yanked off his goggles, his cap, then strode over to wash the sealant and blood from his hands.

"He knew. The cuts were precise. No hesitation, no wasted motions." He stepped to a friggie, took out two bottles of water. After tossing one to Eve, he drank deeply. "Our killer knows how to color inside the lines."

"Sorry?"

"Your deprived childhood continues to fascinate me.- I need to sit a minute." He did so, scrubbed the heel of one hand between his eyebrows, up to his hairline. `This one got to me. You can't predict when or how it might happen. With all that comes through here, day after day,' this forty-one year-old woman, with her home job pedicure and the bunion on her left foot got to me."

She wasn't sure how to handle him in this mood. Going with instinct, Eve dragged over a chair, sat beside him, sipped water. He hadn't turned the recorder off, she thought. It would be up to him whether he edited it or not.

"You need a vacation, Morris."

"I hear that." He laughed a little. "I was due to leave tomorrow. Two weeks in Aruba. Sun, sea, naked women the sort who're still breathing-and a great deal of alcohol consumed out of coconut shells."

"Go."

He shook his head. "I've postponed. I want to see this one through." He looked over at her now. "Mere are some you have to see through. I knew as soon as I saw her, what had been done to her, I wouldn't be sitting on a beach tomorrow."

"I could tell you you've got good people working for you here. People who'd take good care of her, and whoever else comes in over the next couple of weeks."

She sipped the water as she studied the husk of Jacie Wooton, laid bare on a slab in a cold room.

"I could tell you that I'm going to find the son of a bitch who did this to her, and build a case that ensures he'll pay for it. I could tell you all that, and all of it would be true. But I wouldn't go either." She rested her head back against the wall. "I wouldn't go."

He mirrored her position, head resting on the wall, legs kicked out. With Jacie Wooton's butchered body on the table a few feet in front of them.

And their silence, after a moment, became companionable.

"What the hell's wrong with us, Dallas?"

"Beats me."

He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing he was settling down again. "We love the dead." When she snorted, he grinned, eyes still, closed. "And not in a sick, boink the corpse sort of way, gutter-brain. Despite whoever they were when they were alive, we love them because they were cheated and misused. The ultimate underdogs."

"I guess we're getting philosophical anyway."

"Guess we are." He did something he rarely did. He touched her. Just a pat of his hand over the back of hers. But it was, Eve realized, a kind of intimacy. An affectionate contact between comrades, and more personal than any act the victim had ever exchanged with a client.

"They come to us," Morris continued, "from babies to the doddering old, and everything between. No matter who loved them in life, we're their most intimate companions in death. And sometimes, that intimacy reaches down inside us and braids our guts like cornrows. Ah, well."

"She didn't seem to have anybody, not really, in life. From the look I got at her place, the lack of-I guess you could say sentiment-she didn't want anybody in life. So... it's you and ;me now."

"Okay." He took-another drink, rose. "Okay." Setting the bottle aside,'he sealed his hands again, replaced his goggles. "I put a rush on the tox, for what it's worth. Liver shows some wear, alcohol abuse. But even with that, I've found no major damage or disease. Last meal of pasta about six hours premortem. She's had breast augmentation and an eye tuck, butt lift and some jaw sculpting. All good work."

"Recent?"

"No. Couple of years, at least on the ass job, and I'd judge that as the last maintenance."

"Fits. Her luck-took a turn, and she wouldn't've had the price of good body work in the last little while."

"Moving to the job most recently done on her: The killer used a thin, smooth-bladed knife, probably a scalpel for the throat cut, going left to right, downward stroke. From the angle, her chin was up, head back. He came in from behind, likely pulled her head back by her hair with his left hand, sliced with his right." Morris demonstrated, using both hands on an invisible form. "One stroke, severing the jugular."

"A lot of blood." Eve continued to study the body, but imagined Jacie Wooton alive and on her feet, face against the dingy wall of the alley. Then the jerk of the head, the quick shock of the pull, the bright pain and confusion. "Lots of gush and splash."