Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(112)
Dr. Lanier has already walked inside the bedroom. He appears in the doorway and looks grimly at her. "She's been stabbed, all right," he replies in a hard voice. "About thirty or forty times."
"Along the wall here are sneeze or cough patterns of blood," Dr. Scarpetta tells him. "You can tell because the dark-rimmed drops here, here, and here"-she points them out-"indicate bubbles. Sometimes you see that when a persons bled into the airway or lungs. Or she may just have had blood in her mouth."
Scarpetta walks to the left edge of the bedroom door, where there is only a small amount of blood. Her eyes follow finger smears of whoever grabbed the door frame, and more drips on the carpet that continue through the doorway onto the hardwood floor. Her view of the body is blocked by Dr. Lanier, Eric and Nic Robillard. Scarpetta walks in and shuts the door behind her without touching any bloody surface, including the knob.
Nic sits on the back of her heels, a thirty-five-millimeter camera gripped in her gloved hands, her forearms resting on her knees.
If she's happy to see Scarpetta, she makes no sign of it. Sweat rolls down her neck, disappearing into the dark green Zachary Police Department polo shirt tucked in khaki cargo pants. Nic gets up and moves to one side so Scarpetta can approach the dead body.
"She's got really weird stab wounds," Nic comments. "The temperature of the room when I got here was seventy degrees."
Dr. Lanier inserts a long chemical thermometer under the body's arm. He leans close to the body, his eyes moving up and down it, taking his time. Scarpetta vaguely recognizes the woman as one she saw in some of the photographs scattered throughout the living room.
It isn't easy to tell. Her hair is matted with dried blood, her face swollen and deformed by contusions, cuts and smashed bones, the degree of tissue reaction to injuries consistent with her having survived for a while. Scarpetta touches an arm. The body is warm as in life. Rigor mortis hasn't begun, nor has livor mortis-or the settling of the blood due to gravity once circulation stops.
Dr. Lanier removes the thermometer, reads it and says, "Body temp's ninety-six."
"She's not been dead long at all," Scarpetta says. "Yet the condition of the blood in the living room, hallway and even some in here suggests the attack occurred hours ago."
"Probably the head injury is what got her, but it took a little while," Dr. Lanier says, gently palpating the back of the head. "Fractures. You get the back of your head smashed against a masonry plaster wall, and you're talking serious injuries."
Scarpetta isn't ready to comment on the cause of death, but she does agree that the victim suffered severe blunt-force trauma to her head. If the stab wounds cut or completely severed a major artery, such as the carotid, death would have occurred in minutes. This is unlikely-impossible, really-since it appears the woman survived for a while. Scarpetta sees no arterial spatter pattern. The woman may still have been barely alive when her boyfriend found her at 12:30 p.m. and was dead by the time the rescue squad arrived.
It is several minutes past 1:30 now.
The victim is dressed in pale blue satin pajamas, the bottoms intact, the top ripped open. Her belly, breasts, chest and neck are clustered with stab wounds that measure sixteen millimeters-or approximately three-quarters of an inch-with both ends blunt, one end slightly narrower than the other. Those injuries that are superficial indicate she wasn't stabbed with an ordinary knife. Almost in the center of those shallow wounds is an area of tissue bridging that indicates the weapon had some type of gap at the tip, or perhaps was a tool that had two stabbing surfaces, each of them a slightly different thickness and length.
"Now that's strange as hell," Dr. Lanier says, his head bent close to the body as he moves a magnifying lens over wounds. "Not any normal knife I've ever seen. How about you?" He looks at Scarpetta. No.
The wounds were made at various angles, some of them V-or Y-shaped due to twisting of the blade, which is common in stab injuries. Some wounds gape, others are button-hole-like slits, depending on whether the incisions are in line with the elastic fibers of the skin or cut across them.
Scarpetta's gloved fingers gently separate the margins of a wound. Again, she puzzles over the area of uncut skin stretching almost across the middle. She looks closely through a lens, trying to imagine what sort of weapon was used. Gently gathering the pajama top together, she lines up holes in the satin with wounds, trying to get some idea where the clothing was when the woman was stabbed. Three buttons are missing from the torn pajama top. Scarpetta spots them on the floor. Two buttons dangle by threads.
When she arranges the pajama top neatly over the chest, the way it would be were the victim standing, of course the holes don't line up with the stab wounds at all, and there are more holes in the satin than there are wounds. She counts thirty-eight holes and twenty-two wounds. Overkill, to say the least-overkill that is typical in lust murders, but also typical when the assailant and victim know each other.
"Anything?" Dr. Lanier asks her.
Scarpetta is still lining up holes and is getting somewhere. "It appears that her top was bunched up above her breasts when she was stabbed. See?" She moves up the top, which is so stained with blood, very little of the satin looks blue. "Some of the holes go through three layers of fabric. That's why there are more holes than wounds."
"So he shoved up her top before he stabbed her or while he was stabbing her? And then tore it open?"