The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (8 page)

“The body has no contusions, abrasions, or hematomas other than those associated with the victim having been tied by her hands and feet and the trauma to her face and chest area. That she fought these constraints is clearly in evidence.”

“Was she moved after she died?” Maddie didn’t think so, but asked to avoid making a false assumption.

“No. The postmortem hypostasis shows she likely died where she was found.” Ripley must have realized he hadn’t been clear for he went on to more fully comment. “Postmortem hypostasis is also called livor mortis. It’s the dark purple coloring of the skin that occurs when gravity takes the blood to the lowest points after the heart stops pumping. Or lividity, if you prefer.”

From the other side of the table, Steve quietly mirrored Ripley’s moves taking pictures from this angle and that. Click. Rip was maybe two inches taller than Steve and had smoother, fleshier, almost baggy skin compared to his assistant. When Steve stepped around the end of the gurney, his lab coat snagged on Abby’s toe causing her body to wiggle stiffly. Click.

“There are no signs of needle or other puncture wounds on the inner thighs, between the toes or fingers, under the tongue, or along the areas contiguous to her hairline,” the doctor said, “also no birthmarks, tattoos, or other unusual physical features.”

Click. The flash from Steve’s camera briefly removed the shadows cast by Abby’s inner thighs. The two men eased Abby over until she was face down, after which the doc spent the next several minutes examining Abby’s posterior before summarizing remarks that generally matched his anterior findings. Then the two men returned her to the supine position.

“Let’s open her up,” Ripley said, lifting a scalpel from the tray.

Maddie had never been able to watch a medical examiner make the long, deep Y-incision that started high up close to each shoulder. Those cuts continued downward until meeting near the lower end of the sternum to become a single cut down the middle of the abdomen to the pubis. Instead, she focused on Steve organizing a set of stainless pans.

Over the next several minutes, Dr. Ripley removed the heart, lungs, esophagus, and trachea. Each was weighed using a scale not unlike those used to price out a quantity of squash at the market. After the external surfaces of the organs were examined, they were sliced into sections for a later evaluation of their internal structure. Samples of blood were also taken for typing and toxicological testing.

“Her heart looks strong,” Rip observed. “If fate hadn’t intervened, she might have lived to be a grand old dame.”

After checking the abdomen for any visible injuries, Ripley removed the liver, spleen, and the adrenal glands and kidneys together. Next, he removed the stomach, pancreas, and the intestines, en bloc, about the size of a partially inflated soccer ball. He dropped the glob into one of Steve’s pans that seemed more appropriate for baking a family-sized chicken pot pie than holding the leftovers of a person’s life.

Ripley paused to glance at Maddie and with the recorder disengaged, said, “Unlike most doctors, a medical examiner doesn’t observe a patient’s pain. It appears Abigail Knight had the strength to endure excruciating pain.”

He weighted another organ, saying, “The gallbladder is clear of stones and contains a normal amount of greenish bile.”

In a matter-of-fact manner, he spent the next several minutes noting intimate details about Abby’s body that in life had never been made a matter of record, including the fact that her bladder was firm and noted the amount of urine available to toxicology.

“Earlier, I found a hair stuck in the dried blood on her chest,” he told Maddie. “We were able to rule out the victim and her husband. I meant to show you before we started.”

Maddie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know the hair wasn’t from her husband?”

“Bill Molitor’s people can tell.” He made a dismissive wave of his hand. “They had one of the husband’s hairs. I think your partner brought it in, along with a skin scrape.”

Maddie looked down to learn that the recorder was running; she spoke formally. “That’s correct. Dr. Knight offered his samples through Detective Jed Smith so we’d be able to segregate the husband’s physical evidence at the scene.”

After having performed hundreds of autopsies, Ripley and Steve Gibbs, two lifelong bachelors, moved with the practiced choreography of a priest and acolyte during mass. A fitting metaphor, Maddie thought, for nothing seemed more sacred than rummaging around inside one of God’s creations.

There was, oddly enough, given the goriness of what was going on, something monotonous about the exactly choreographed way in which the right-handed doctor and his left-handed assistant worked together. Maddie found her attention drifting.

When Ripley raised one eyebrow, Maddie remembered standing in front of a mirror as a child and trying to do it, but she could not without using a finger to hold down the brow above the other eye. The night after she had first seen Ripley raise one eyebrow she returned to her bathroom mirror and tried again. She still couldn’t. She had better luck lifting one breast, the way she’d seen male bodybuilders do when they alternated the flexing of their pectoral muscles. She remained amazed that anyone could do it—the eyebrows, not the breasts.

She was jerked back to the present by Ripley’s businesslike voice. “As I mentioned in my opening remarks, Sergeant, the night we brought in the body I pulled a vaginal swab. The victim had sex within hours prior to her death. It appeared to have been consensual. We have sperm residues from her partner.”

He continued talking while examining the contents of her stomach. “It appears the subject ingested a shrimp cocktail not long before her death. However, the human body’s processing of food is far from precise, so I will leave further comment until the toxicology work has been performed.”

“Which came first, the intercourse or the shrimp?” she asked.

Rip disengaged the foot pedal long enough to remark, “depending upon the size of her partner perhaps the intercourse and the shrimp were one and the same.” Steve joined his boss in a good laugh. Maddie thought it a cute remark, but could not in this setting bring herself to laugh. Rip reengaged the recorder and said, “A good guess would be that she ate the meal about two to four hours before death, and the intercourse came before the shrimp cocktail.”

So, Maddie thought, Abigail Knight had eaten the shrimp with someone other than her sex partner because we all know that guys rarely take us out to eat after they’ve gotten what they want. Those animals, God love ‘em.

Maddie moved closer without thinking and got a snoot full of the odor of Abby’s refrigerated innards.

Some people believe the last thing a person sees before death is etched onto the retina of the eye like the negative of a photo. If that were true there would be a snapshot of the last thing Abby saw—the maniacal face of her killer. But Maddie saw only sad eyes clouded by the nothingness of death.

“The thoracic area is a mess,” Ripley announced. “There are significant bruises and lacerations on the ventral surface. They all appear related to the attacker’s amputation of her mammary glands. The angle, depth, and manner of the cuttings suggest a left-handed attacker possessing little if any surgical skills.”

Bill Molitor had told Maddie the killer was likely left-handed by the way the knots had been tied, now Rip says left handed because of the attributes of the cuts while amputating the breasts.

The click of Steve’s camera startled Maddie back from her thoughts.

“The victim’s upper and lower lips have been removed along the lines where the lips meet the face.” Rip was now speaking in monotone. “The facial skin also has been removed. The depth of the peeling varies. In some areas only the dermis has been removed. On other portions of the face the removal went deep enough to include the Malpighian layer of the epidermis. A doctor would have started at the scalp, not the lips. This indicates the killer lacked both anatomical and surgical knowledge.”

Ripley raised his arm and, much as a cat uses a licked paw to wash its face, used the back of his fist to scratch the side of his nose through his mask.

Maddie watched Rip make an incision from behind one of Abby’s ears over the top of the head to the other ear. She had to force herself to watch as Rip pulled the scalp down over the front of Abigail’s brutalized face. The oscillating saw, sounding similar to a dentist’s drill, whined as it cut through the bone forcing Abby’s skull to surrender what even in death it fought to protect. Maddie flinched at the sucking sound when Ripley pulled up releasing the front quadrant of the skull before removing Abby’s brain. Several minutes later he stepped on the foot control and spoke.

“Examination of the skull and brain does not reveal any trauma other than the Contrecoup injury on the opposite side from the incapacitating blow. There are no signs of disease or congenital abnormalities.”

Over the next ten minutes, Doctor Ripley stayed mostly silent. Then he caressed the skull cap back into place by aligning it with the front notch he had made for that purpose, and rolled the scalp back over the skull. Maddie looked away momentarily as Abby’s torn face came back into view.

Most of Abby’s organs were placed back inside her body, and Ripley closed the cavity using a thick glistening suture. He then pulled down an overhead hose and sprayed her off.

Maddie watched the circulating water carry tiny scraps of Abigail Knight down the corner spout. Ever since her first autopsy she had been unable to view the workings of the rain gutters on her home in quite the same way.

Steve handed Rip the other end of the first of three precut lengths of antiseptic-looking rope. They used the bindings to secure Abby’s legs together and to tie her arms against her torso to prevent them from moving while her body finished its journey from rigor back to flaccidity.

Maddie watched Rip’s left-handed assistant tie the knots left over right across the dead Abigail Knight in the same manner as the killer had tied the pantyhose over the legs of the dead Abigail Knight.

So far, Maddie said to herself, Steve Gibbs and the pimp, Clarence Johnson, have tied knots like the killer.

As Steve closed Abby’s eyes, Maddie said a silent prayer that the poor woman’s spirit had not seen what had happened to her body during the autopsy.

Back in the scrub room, the doctor pulled his latex gloves off inside out.

“The hair,” Maddie said. “You were going to show me the hair.”

“That I was.” Rip picked up a stack of photomicrographs, spread them out on the black granite counter and said, “Pick a card, Sergeant, any card.”

The double doors stood open. Steve stopped covering Abigail Knight to laugh at his boss’s gallows humor. An autopsy was not Maddie’s idea of a place to make jokes, not with Abby’s breastless remains still partially uncovered on the table.

“I sometimes forget that for outsiders, what goes on in this place can seem morbid. Steve and I are here all the time. We get accustomed to it. Humor sometimes helps deal with the horror. My apology, Sergeant Richards.”

Dr. Ripley selected the desired card himself and explained. “The numbers on the side identify this hair as flat,” Rip said, “like tape or ribbon. The experts tell us this means the hair is likely from a black male. Bill Molitor said the DNA from the follicle did not match with his or the other black member of his crime scene team. Forensics was able to rush enough of the lab work to tell us the sperm from the vaginal swab matches with the hair. It looks like we have the killer’s DNA. You just need to bring him in.”

For Maddie, being lead on a front-page murder case was like being the cutie in a trapeze act, without the net. If you can spin around in the air and snag the guy’s arms, you’re the world’s newest heroine. Miss and you’re a temporary stain on the dirt floor inside the big tent.

Fifteen minutes later, Maddie walked out of the examination room breathing more naturally. She had survived the cold and gore of another autopsy. She quickened her stride to get outside and when the warmth of the sun touched her cheeks, she realized what she had to do next.

Chapter 11

The light summer rain, untypical for the season, dotted the hood on Maddie’s car as she started up the hill toward the home where Abigail Knight had lived until her fateful night. The neighborhood now appeared much as Maddie imagined it had the day before death had visited. From the cars she could see stabled in the opened garages, she knew her used Taurus belonged here like a mongrel belonged kenneled with show dogs.

A young boy, his pant legs soaked from the splash off his basketball, dribbled toward the hoop over his garage. After her next turn a sudden splat of hard rain hit her windshield like dive-bombing flies wearing body armor. She hoped, but doubted, the boy had gone indoors.

When Maddie had last been at Abigail Knight’s home, the street had been crowded with the department’s cruisers, their sirens filling the air like buzzing bees around a hive. This time she wanted to see the house in solitude, hopeful she would find something that might link Folami Stowe and Abigail Knight, something that might then triangulate to their killer.

The red bougainvillea leaves the hot desert winds had bunched in the corners of the Knight’s front porch created the feel of an abandoned outpost, an elegant abandoned outpost.

Inside, Maddie stared up the sloping stairway past the life-sized oil painting of Abigail Knight in her flowing white gown, the train trailing on the steps behind her. The background color of the portrait matched the staircase wall, giving the appearance Abigail was descending the stairs at that very moment, staring at Maddie, asking, “Are you good enough to catch this butcher?”

Maddie’s mother would probably call Abigail Knight a gold-digger, that her rich husband and her fancy clothes didn’t change that, but who would say she still didn’t have a right to life.

The living room was busy with leather furniture and glass-topped tables sitting on thick southwestern area rugs over a travertine stone floor. A large window overlooked the backyard and a spillover pool with a five-foot waterfall. The landscaping, alive with small runs of rainwater, gave the appearance the world was melting before her eyes and running down some unseen drain at the bottom of the earth.