The Lost Witness (5 page)

L
ena hustled down the stairwell
at the coroner’s office, too anxious to wait for the elevator. When she hit the
basement, the smell of disinfectant and decomposing flesh hit back. Wincing at the harsh odor, she rushed past the long line of dead bodies waiting against the left wall without looking at
them.

She hadn’t been able to sleep last night, tossing and turning, and staring out the bedside window. She knew her anxiety came from the investigation being stuck in first gear. The heat from
the sixth floor and the lack of evidence. Her inability to identify the victim or get past go. She couldn’t shake the frustration, and now she was feeding on it.

She stepped inside the changing room. Pulling the scrubs over her slacks, she grabbed a pair of booties and sat down on the bench. When the door swung open, she looked up and saw Art Madina
pulling the mask away from his face.

“How was New Haven?” she asked.

“A bit frightening.”

“Lots of slide shows?”

“The conference was about the food supply. The Feds have cut the number of inspectors by half because of the war. No one’s minding the store.”

“What’s the food supply have to do with pathology?”

“For the past twenty-five years, the first thing we looked for was HIV, Lena. But now it’s Mad Cow disease. You can’t kill it by cooking because it isn’t alive. And
there’s no cure. No drug cocktail to see the patient through.”

“It’s that serious?”

“Like I said, no one’s minding the store. You eat much beef?”

She gave him a look, then noticed the jar of Vicks VapoRub on the shelf.

“Pass me the ketchup,” she said.

Madina smiled, handing over a pair of goggles, a surgical mask, and the jar of Vicks VapoRub. He was a slim man, no older than forty, with bright, curious eyes and black hair cropped so short it
probably qualified as a buzz cut. Madina had become the DA’s favorite when presenting evidence at trial. Lena noted his one-day beard and the dark circles cutting into his cheeks. Although he
may not have had much sleep last night, she still felt lucky that he was performing the autopsy.

“What did the chief say?” she asked.

Madina shrugged. “The plane landed at six-thirty I didn’t bother going home. The X-rays are done. She’s on a table and everything’s ready to go. You’re a half-hour
early.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They pushed open the doors. Three autopsies were under way in the same room with a staff photographer moving from one dead body to the next. Lena could hear a technician working the skull saw.
The zap lights buzzing off and on as bugs hit the dense air, then crashed and burned. She took a deep breath, concentrating on the gel she had wiped beneath her nose. The mentholated odor
wasn’t working today and she wondered why. When she gazed across the room, she realized that the body closest to the rear door was in a state of heavy decomposition.

Autopsies were never easy. Not even when you really needed one.

Madina pointed to the far corner. Lena’s eyes jumped ahead, and for a moment, she thought that they might have brought out the wrong corpse. The young woman lying on the steel operating
table appeared whole, while the victim found in the trash bag had obviously been dismembered. But as she moved closer, Lena could see that Madina had pieced the parts together. The fit was so good,
so tight, that by all appearances Jane Doe was a whole woman again. A twenty-plus-year-old woman with a small heart-shaped tattoo placed between her shaved vagina and her bikini line.

Lena counted the breaks where the body had been severed. Three in each leg, then cuts above the wrists, elbows, and shoulder sockets. After keying in on the decapitation wound, her eyes rose to
the victim’s face. Jane Doe No. 99 had been beaten, her face disfigured. Her soft brown eyes had been spared, but not much else. She was hard to look at, yet she seemed so vulnerable that it
was difficult for Lena to turn away.

“Did you measure her?”

“Five-foot-seven,” Madina said. “A hundred and twenty-two pounds. She’s had a boob job and her belly button is pierced. The ring’s over there on the table.
I’m gonna guess that if we reconstructed her nose and cheekbones, she’d be beautiful. All the way gorgeous. And that whoever did this to her is very strong.”

Lena stepped aside as Madina selected a scalpel and began opening the woman’s chest. She remembered the first time she attended an autopsy. It had been in this room, and she found the
process so difficult that she spent most of the time counting ceiling tiles. There were 729 before the lighting fixtures were changed last year. After that, the count dropped to 715.

Madina gave her a look, laying out the victim’s lungs in an extra-large plastic container.

“She grew up in the city,” he said. “Jane Doe’s not a country girl.”

“How can you tell?”

“The black spots on her lungs. Look at these carbon deposits. They’re not from cigarettes. They’re from air pollution. Thirty years ago, only a coal miner’s lungs
would’ve looked like this.”

Lena examined the tissue. Jane Doe’s lungs were peppered with dark gray spots that had the look and apparent texture of cinders.

“But she’s young.”

The pathologist laughed. “She’s been breathing every day for twenty years, Lena. Twenty years without a break. Why do you think so many kids have asthma? It’s not like
it’s a mystery. Just follow the freeways.”

Madina moved back to the body. Lena watched him complete the operation, then helped as he rolled Jane Doe’s hands with ink and made a copy of her palm and fingerprints. Oddly enough, Lena
thought that she could smell the clean scent of the woman’s perfume somehow rising above the stench of the room. But the fragrance seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. When they were
finished—and the house photographer made his final pass—the body was no longer whole. No longer the sum of its parts. No longer a pretty girl with her entire life ahead of her. As Lena
gazed at the victim’s remains, she couldn’t help but think of the murderer.

He had committed the ultimate violation and shown no mercy.

“What about time of death?” she asked.

Madina shrugged off the question, then jotted something down on his clipboard. “Yesterday,” he said. “Right now that’s as close as I can get. But we’ve got a
problem, Lena.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“No, I mean we’ve got a
real
problem. This wasn’t a sex crime. And this wasn’t done by some slime bag living on the streets.”

“What are you saying?”

Madina didn’t answer her. Instead, he started piecing the body back together until the breaks were almost invisible and Jane Doe looked whole again.

“Let’s start with the cause of death,” he said. “There’s a laceration here on her neck. It’s not just in any spot. The cut was made in exactly the right
spot.”

Lena moved in for a closer look. “The right spot for what?”

“He didn’t slice open the jugular vein. He went for the carotid artery. And he knew exactly where to find it.”

“What’s the significance?”

“You tell me.”

“Arteries move blood away from the heart,” she said. “Veins carry it back.”

“Exactly. The man you’re looking for cut the carotid artery because he wanted to move blood away from the heart. He wanted to drain the blood out of her body. You see the ligature
marks around her legs and ankles. He hung her upside down and kept her alive, Lena. He kept her heart beating until she bled out. That’s why I’m saying we’ve got a real
problem.”

Lena turned to the worktable and eyed Jane Doe’s organs laid out in those oversized plastic containers. In every other autopsy she had attended the internal organs were rich in color. Jane
Doe’s organs were a pale brown. It wasn’t time that had changed the color. It was the lack of blood.

“You see it, don’t you?” Madina said in an urgent voice. “Look at her liver. It should be a deep purple.”

Lena glanced at the container, then turned back to the body. The killer bled her out while she was alive. She tried not to picture the moment, but the horror was sharp enough to cut through.
This was a special kind of madness. A new brand drawn from the other side of the road.

“What can you tell me about who did this?” she said.

“I can tell you a lot. I can tell you almost everything you need to know except for his name and address.”

She met his eyes, steady and even.

“Then you definitely think we’re looking for a male.”

“No question about it,” he said, pointing to the ligature marks. “And he’s strong. He was able to lift her by her ankles.”

“What else?”

Madina pulled away his face mask. “He’s a surgeon, Lena.”

A moment passed—deep, and long, and rising out of the darkness. When Madina finally spoke again, his voice was tainted with bitterness and a mix of fear and disappointment. The killer was
one of his own. Someone who attended medical school and took the Hippocratic oath.

“He’s a skilled surgeon,” Madina said.

Lena remained quiet, watching the pathologist pull Jane Doe’s body apart again as if the victim had become a mannequin.

“It’s not easy cutting up a body, Lena. A lot of people try. More than you’d think. And most of them don’t have a clue. They leave evidence behind. Hack marks. Saw marks.
Ragged edges from the knife. Rips and tears that anyone could spot from a mile away.”

Lena remembered her first impression of the body as she entered the operating room. Jane Doe’s arms and legs fit together so well, she thought the pathologist had brought out the wrong
corpse.

Madina pointed to the cut above the victim’s left wrist, then the elbow. “This was done by someone who cared about what it looked like when he was finished. Only a surgeon would care
about that because only a surgeon would be thinking about the scar.”

“But she ended up in the trash. No one was supposed to find her. No one was supposed to see.”

“That’s irrelevant. The location for each cut is made exactly where it requires the least effort. He’s a professional. There aren’t any hesitation marks. See how straight
they are. How clean. These are incisions, Lena. Incisions made by a skilled surgeon.”

“So, what you’re saying is that where she ended up doesn’t matter. He wasn’t thinking about it when he dismembered the body.”

“Exactly. The two acts are unrelated. When he severed her hand away from the wrist, he was thinking about the incision and possible scar. He was keeping it clean and neat. It’s in a
surgeon’s nature. His DNA. It’s instinctual. He wouldn’t know any other way.”

“Because of his training,” she said. “His experience. He’s done amputations before.”

“So many that I can’t believe he didn’t spend time overseas. Iraq or Afghanistan. You don’t get this good without practice. And this guy’s had a lot of
practice.”

Lena took a step closer, gazing at the victim. The evidence was overwhelming. Jane Doe’s body had been drained of blood and dismembered by someone who knew how to do it, and for whatever
reason, had done it many times before. As she thought it over, a chill moved up her spine. Jane Doe’s murder was performed by someone who liked it. Someone with a medical degree who cared
about the quality of his work. . . .

L
ena ordered an extra-large cup
of Colombian, spotted an empty table by the far window, and cut across the room. Digging
her laptop out of her briefcase, she found an outlet under the table, hit the power switch, and waited for the computer to boot up.

In spite of its close proximity to Parker Center, the Blackbird Café wasn’t exactly a cop hangout. Nor did many tourists wander through the door. Instead, the café catered to
artists and musicians who had migrated downtown over the past decade and sought a quiet place to sip what was probably the best cup of coffee in town. The place was hidden on a side street halfway
down the block—an old brick building with vaulted ceilings that was originally built as a horse stable, served as an auto-repair garage for more than fifty years, and now had the look and
feel of a community reading room. The lights were dim, the walls lined with books, paintings, and photographs. Last month a patron donated three prints by Minor White to the café’s
art collection, three views of the world cast in light and shadow that Lena couldn’t stop looking at.

She had been a regular since her brother turned her on to the place after a gig at the Palladium. The Blackbird Café was open 24/7 every day of the year. Since her transfer from Hollywood
to downtown, the place had become an oasis for her, and she needed it right now. One or two sips worth of high-end caffeine before she stepped back into the grind.

Klinger had called. Chief Logan wanted another briefing in an hour. Lena wasn’t looking forward to the meeting and thought it a complete waste of time.

And the autopsy had been an ordeal. The condition of the victim, worse than anything she had ever experienced before. Lena had worked with Pete Sweeney at the homicide table in Hollywood for two
and half years. Her introduction to the Robbery-Homicide Division ten months ago had been a brutal murder case with multiple victims.

But this one was different. A lot different.

As she thought it over, it was the murderer’s expertise that made it different. The precision he exhibited with the knife. His obvious skills and physical strength. The cuts that
weren’t really cuts, but so well executed that Madina had called them incisions. It all pointed to a level of coldness and brutality that felt like it came from another world, a very dark and
lonely world.

Lena glanced at her computer, still booting up. Lifting the lid off her coffee, she let the steam rise into her face and tried to forget about the foul odor she endured at the autopsy. The smell
of death had permeated her clothes and ruined them. Even though she had showered and changed in the locker room at Parker Center, she could still smell it. Not in her clean pair of black jeans or
her sweater, but lurking in the deepest recesses of her memory. She knew from experience that it would take two or three days, maybe even a week, before it faded into the background.