The 9th Girl (6 page)

“What do you think, Sam? Is this the work of our serial killer?”

Kovac shrugged. “You’ll have to tell me. I don’t like the coincidences: holiday, dumped on the road, stabbed, disfigured . . . I don’t want to think there are a lot of guys running around doing shit like that.”

“Any prospects for an ID of the victim?”

“No local missing persons matching her description. At least, not yet. Someone goes missing New Year’s Eve, it might take a day or two for anyone to sound the alarm,” Kovac said. “I pulled a few sheets for missing females in a five-state area. Whoever she is, I hope to God she has a record and we can ID her from her fingerprints. That face is nothing to work with. Have you had a look at her yet?”

“And start the party without you and your lovely partner?” Möller said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Cigarette?”

Kovac took the offer automatically, as a matter of male bonding. He had officially quit the rotten habit about thirty-two times—had quit entirely when he had been seeing Carey Moore and spending time around her little girl, Lucy.

Intellectually, he knew smoking was a stupid thing to do. And Liska kicked his ass for it every time she caught him doing it. Emotionally, he didn’t always care. In his darker moods, he did it deliberately, daring the universe to kill him. Who would give a shit anyway? Today was one of those days.

Möller shared his lighter. They both lit up and stood there in the freezing cold, tarring up their lungs like a couple of fucking idiots. Kovac felt perversely pleased with himself. He reminded himself how much he liked smoking, how soothing the ritual of it was; how a cigarette was like an old friend you called up every time the world kicked you in the teeth, and you went out and got drunk together and felt like shit afterward.

Liska pulled up to the curb then and parked her car in a loading zone. She got out wearing her don’t-fuck-with-me face and stomped up to them.

“You’re a couple of damned fools, and when you die slow, lingering, horrible deaths, don’t come crying to me.”

Möller arched a brow. “Lovely to see you, as well, Sergeant Liska. Happy New Year.”

Liska gave him the stink eye.

Kovac had the grace to feel guilty. He dropped his smoke and ground it out in the snow that had accumulated on the sidewalk overnight. He picked up the butt and discarded it properly. She could accuse him of being a fool, but at least he had some common courtesy.

Liska shot him her mother’s look of utter disgust nevertheless and headed into the building. Kovac looked at Möller and shrugged.

The ME’s mouth curved up on one side in amusement. “You make such a lovely couple.”

“The hell,” Kovac grumbled as they fell in step behind his partner. “She’d eat me alive.”

“And not in the good way,” Liska tossed back over her shoulder. Typical Tinks. Always with the smart mouth.

Kovac had to admit, the two of them had been partners longer than he had stayed married to either of his wives. He doubted there was much one of them didn’t know about the other. Liska delighted in embarrassing him with the details of her dating life. He weighed in routinely on her ex-husband and had learned to read and assess her moods with sharp accuracy.

She was pissed now, but his smoking a cigarette had little to do with it. Quick and tense, her every movement was reminiscent of an angry cat snapping its tail.

“Speed?” he guessed as they hung up their coats and grabbed yellow gowns.

“Isn’t answering his phone,” she said curtly.

“How is that a problem? It’s not as much fun to call him a lazy-ass selfish dick on his voice mail?”

She stood still and looked up at him with grave meaning. “Kyle got into a fight last night.”

“Kyle?”

“I know. Right? Kyle doesn’t get into fights.”

“Does he have an explanation?”

“Sure. It’s bullshit. He claims he and his friends went skating on the lake last night, that he crashed into some kid and got into a fight with him.”

“You don’t believe him.”

“It was seventeen below zero last night,” she reminded him. “Nobody was skating on Lake Calhoun. The knuckles of his right hand are scraped. He wasn’t wearing gloves when he hit whoever he hit. They weren’t outside,” she concluded. “He’s lying to me.”

“And you think he’ll tell Speed the truth?” Kovac asked. “Speed is more apt to give him pointers. How to Sell a Lie 101 by Speed Hatcher. The asshole ought to do a video series. Maybe he could pay his back child support with the proceeds.”

“I don’t know what good he would do,” she admitted. “I just know I want him to suffer through this too.”

Kovac held his tongue and bent over to pull on the yellow paper booties over his shoes. Suffering was not on the Speed Hatcher agenda any more than shouldering his share of the responsibility for parenting two teenage boys.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Liska said.

“Well, that’s going to save on conversation, then.”

“I’m worried,” she admitted.

“I know.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and gave a little squeeze at the rock-hard tension there. “Kyle’s a great kid, Tinks. You’re doing a great job raising him and R.J. But they’re boys. Boys do stupid things. Boys get into scrapes. It’s a wonder half of the male population even makes it to maturity.”

“That’s a fact.” She tried without much success to muster her usual smartass smirk.

“Hey, it could be worse,” Kovac pointed out. “He could be a zombie.”

•   •   •

W
ATCHING
U
LF
M
ÖLLER
conduct an autopsy was like watching performance art. Classical music played softly in the background, with bone saws and oscillating saws and the clank of surgical instruments against stainless steel overlaying the orchestral score. The white background of the room was like the white of a blank canvas, clean and austere. Möller and his assistant glided around the table like a pair of ballroom dancers in blue surgical gowns, elegant and smooth and perfectly in step with each other.

The autopsy of Zombie Doe would have been a mesmerizing thing to watch if not for the utter horror embodied by the decedent. Or maybe she was the jarring focal point that put the entire picture into perspective. She was a thing from another dimension, all harsh angles and strong colors, dirty and bloody and broken in too many places. Her face was a mask of raw meat and white bone. The dark hair was shaved to the scalp on one side of the skull and a Medusa’s mane of twisted, matted snarls on the other.

“I see what you mean,” Möller said, glancing from the young woman’s face to Kovac. “You’ll have your work cut out for you to get an ID.”

“Right?” Kovac said. “What are we supposed to do with that? We can’t put out a photograph. And what’s a sketch artist going to make of it? Can you tell what she must have looked like? Any artist’s rendition is going to be pure guesswork.”

“A bad sketch is worse than no sketch at all,” Liska said.

People cruising the missing and unidentified persons websites looking for loved ones rode a double-edged sword, both wanting and not wanting to find the person they were looking for. Staring at sketches, they would fixate not only on similarities to their missing daughter, sister, friend but also on the differences. Maybe this one was . . . but the nose was too narrow or the mouth was too wide. They remembered their lover’s, mother’s, brother’s crooked smile, but no one died smiling, and sketches were rendered with little emotion on the victim’s face so as not to distort the features.

Kovac himself had sat up late at night staring at the computer screen, at those photographs and sketches, trying to put a name to a victim. He had compared their sketch of New Year’s Doe (Jane Doe 01-11) to the missing persons photo of Rose Reiser again and again without being able to conclusively say the two were the same girl. His victim’s nose had been smashed to a pulp. The sketch artist had given her a generic nose. Rose Reiser’s nose in her photograph was short and turned up at the end.

“The witness says her face was messed up like that when she came out of the trunk,” Liska said. “Like half her face had melted, he said.”

Möller gazed down at the dead girl, frowning. “Acid.”

“What kind of acid?” Kovac asked.

“The lab will have to tell you that. Could be one of several. Hydrochloric, ferric, sulfuric, phosphoric. Not hydrofluoric. Hydrofluoric doesn’t damage the skin so much. It’s better for dissolving bone. It likes calcium. If you want to get rid of a skeleton, hydrofluoric acid is your best choice.”

“Why does it creep me out that you know that?” Liska asked.

Möller looked right at her with amusement in his eyes. Behind his mask he was undoubtedly smiling like a cat.

“For the purpose of damaging flesh, I would choose sulfuric acid,” he went on. “It’s easily had.”

“That’s battery acid, right?” Kovac asked.

“Or a component of drain cleaner, or rust remover, or liquid fertilizer. It has a long list of uses,” Möller said. “It can be purchased at the hardware store in a strong concentration—and this would have been quite concentrated to cause this kind of deep-tissue damage.

“At strength not only does it hydrolyze proteins and lipids, causing the primary chemical burn, it also causes a secondary thermal burn by dehydrating carbohydrates,” he said. “And, if combined with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, one creates a substance called a piranha solution, which will dissolve nearly anything, including carbon on glassware.”

“Piranha solution?” Kovac said. “Sounds like something out of an old James Bond movie.”

“Indeed.”

Using his fingers with delicate care, Möller examined what was left of the victim’s lips and mouth. One side of the tongue—which had the appearance of raw hamburger—was visible through the hole the acid had burned through the cheek.

“Burns in the mouth . . . ,” he said, gently prying the jaws open, “on the tongue—the tongue appears to have been bitten quite badly.”

Kovac said nothing but ground his back teeth together. He had once worked the homicide of a hooker whose pimp had poured Drano down her throat. It had been a horrific death. The caustic chemical had seared her esophagus all the way to her stomach, and all the way back up as the woman’s body tried to reject it.

Liska asked the question they were all thinking. “Was she alive when that happened?”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Möller said.

He continued his visual examination, counting the stab wounds to the chest and throat. He made note of the length and depth of each wound. Seventeen in all.

“This knife was smaller than with the other girl I autopsied,” he commented. “This looks more like a paring knife or a pocketknife. The wounds are not as wide nor as deep.”

The knife wounds to all three of the previous cases attributed to Doc Holiday—Rose Reiser, Independence Doe, and Labor Day Doe—had been deep and vicious, made with intent.

Möller pointed out several lesser marks on the victim’s chest. “Hesitation marks, perhaps? Or perhaps the assailant was not so physically powerful after the initial attack.”

“Hesitation or torture?” Kovac asked. “The killer didn’t hesitate to pour acid on her face. Why be shy to stab her?”

“That, my friend, is for you to discover, yes? If I were to guess—and of course, it is not my place to do so—I would guess the acid came after the stabbing,” Möller said. “If the intent was to hinder identification, yes? The worst deed was already done.”

“Stabbing is hands-on,” Liska said. “It doesn’t get much more personal and real than physically shoving a knife through another person’s flesh.”

Möller raised an eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought, have you?”

“More than you’d care to know. As for the acid . . . It’s not so hard to open a bottle and pour out the contents.”

“Onto someone’s face?”

She shrugged. “If you’re pissed enough or sick enough to stab somebody seventeen times, why not? It’s a hell of a lot easier than dismemberment.”

“That’s true,” Kovac conceded. “All the satisfaction of depersonalizing the victim, and none of the hard labor.”

Möller’s young assistant piped up. “The three of you are freaking me out.”

“You must be new,” Liska said. “Wait until we’re in here eating egg salad sandwiches while Doc scrapes the maggots off a severed head.”

The assistant tried very hard not to react. The first rule of dealing with cops, Kovac thought: Show no fear.

Möller continued his examination of the body. The damage done to their unknown young woman was devastating—the broken bones, the shattered skull, the stab wounds, the acid burns. Kovac wanted to know which had been inflicted by the assailant and which had been a result of falling from the trunk of the car and being struck by the Hummer limo. Some of those answers were obvious; others were not.

Doc Holiday’s victims had been severely beaten—a lot of blunt-force trauma to the head with a hammer or something similar. With this victim having struck her head with some force as she fell to the road, it would be all but impossible to tell if any of the skull or facial fractures had been inflicted manually.

Möller pointed out matching bruising on both arms, both above the elbows and around the wrists. Finger marks, not ligature marks. She had been grabbed hard and held on to, possibly held down.

Doc Holiday’s victims had shown similar bruising, but ligature marks as well. His previous torture repertoire had included cigarette burns. This girl had no cigarette burns. There was no obvious evidence of forcible sexual penetration and no semen present, yet the fact that she had been naked from the waist down strongly suggested a sexual component to the crime.

Möller and his assistant turned the body over with great care, mindful of the alignment of broken bones and the delicacy of torn flesh, handling the head like a basket of eggs. The most significant finding on this side of the victim was a small tattoo on the left shoulder, a couple of Chinese characters that meant nothing to anyone present. Liska took a photograph of the mark with her iPhone.

After the initial visual examination, Möller chose to go to the skull, to carefully dismantle the puzzle pieces of shattered bone in order to extract what was left of the brain to be weighed and examined. He then moved on to the torso and, with an artist’s hand, drew the scalpel down the body, creating the Y incision: shoulders to sternum, sternum to groin.