Authors: Kathy Reichs
Although the workday normally begins at eight-thirty, activity already filled the large autopsy room. Bertrand was there, along with several other SQ detectives and a photographer from SIJ, La Section d’Identité Judiciare. Ryan hadn’t arrived.
The external exam was under way, and a series of Polaroids lay on the corner desk. The body had been taken to X-ray, and LaManche was scribbling notes when I entered. He stopped and looked up.
“Temperance, I am glad to see you. I may need help in establishing the age of the infants.”
I nodded.
“And there may be an unusual”—he searched for a word, his long, basset face tense—“. . . tool involved.”
I nodded and went to change into scrubs. Ryan smiled and gave a small salute as I passed him in the corridor. His eyes were teary, his nose and cheeks cherry red, as though he’d walked some distance in the cold.
In the locker room I steeled myself for what was to come. A pair of murdered babies was horror enough. What did LaManche mean by an unusual tool?
Cases involving children are always difficult for me. When my daughter was young, after each child murder I’d fight an urge to tether Katy to me to keep her in sight.
Katy is grown now, but I still dread images of dead children. Of all victims, they are the most vulnerable, the most trusting, and the most innocent. I ache each time one arrives in the morgue. The stark truth of fallen humanity stares at me. And pity provides small comfort.
I returned to the autopsy room, thinking I was prepared to proceed. Then I saw the small body lying on the stainless steel.
A doll. That was my first impression. A life-size latex baby that had grayed with age. I’d had one as a child, a newborn that was pink and smelled rubbery sweet. I fed her through a small, round hole between her lips, and changed her diaper when the water flowed through.
But this was no toy. The baby lay on its belly, arms at its sides, fingers curled into the tiny palms. The buttocks were flattened, and bands of white crisscrossed the purple livor of the back. A cap of fine red down covered the little head. The infant was naked save for a bracelet of miniature blocks circling the right wrist. I could see two wounds near the left shoulder blade.
A sleeper lay on the adjacent table, blue and red trucks smiling from the flannel. Spread next to it were a soiled diaper, a cotton undershirt with crotch snaps, a
long-sleeved sweater, and a pair of white socks. Everything was bloodstained.
LaManche spoke into a recorder.
“
Bébé de race blanche, bien développé et bien nourri. . . .
”
Well developed and well nourished but dead, I thought, the outrage beginning to build.
“
Le corps est bien préservé, avec une légère macération épidermique. . . .
”
I stared at the small cadaver. Yes, it was well preserved, with only slight skin slippage on the hands.
“Guess he won’t have to check for defense wounds.”
Bertrand had come up beside me. I didn’t respond. I was not in the mood for morgue humor.
“There’s another one in the cooler,” he continued.
“That’s what we’d been told,” I said crisply.
“Yeah, but, Christ. They’re babies.”
I met his eyes and felt a stab of guilt. Bertrand was not trying to be funny. He looked as if his own child had died.
“Babies. Someone wasted them and stashed them in a basement. That’s about as cold as a drive-by. Worse. The bastard probably knew these kids.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Makes sense. Two kids, two adults who are probably the parents. Someone wiped out the whole family.”
“And burned the house as a cover?”
“Possible.”
“Could be a stranger.”
“Could be, but I doubt it. Wait. You’ll see.” He refocused on the autopsy proceeding, hands clutched tightly behind his back.
LaManche stopped dictating and spoke to the autopsy technician. Lisa took a tape from the counter and stretched it the length of the baby’s body.
“
Cinquante-huit centimètres.
” Fifty-eight centimeters.
Ryan observed from across the room, arms crossed, right thumb grating the tweed on his left biceps. Now and then I saw his jaw tense and his Adam’s apple rise and fall.
Lisa wrapped the tape around the baby’s head, chest, and abdomen, calling out after each measurement. Then she lifted the body and laid it in a hanging scale. Normally the device is used to weigh individual organs. The basket swung slightly and she placed a hand to steady it. The image was heartrending. A lifeless child in a stainless steel cradle.
“Six kilos.”
The baby had died weighing only six kilos. Thirteen pounds.
LaManche recorded the weight, and Lisa removed the tiny corpse and placed it on the autopsy table. When she stepped back my breath froze in my throat. I looked at Bertrand, but his eyes were now fixed on his shoes.
The body had been a little boy. He lay on his back, legs and feet splayed sharply at the joints. His eyes were wide and button round, the irises clouded to a smoky gray. His head had rolled to the side, and one fat cheek rested against his left collarbone.
Directly below the cheek I saw a hole in the chest approximately the size of my fist. The wound had jagged edges, and a deep purple collar circled its perimeter. A star burst of slits, each measuring one to two centimeters in length, surrounded the cavity. Some were deep, others superficial. In places one slit crossed another, forming L- or V-shaped patterns.
My hand flew to my own chest and I felt my stomach
tighten. I turned to Bertrand, unable to form a question.
“Do you believe that?” he said dismally. “The bastard carved his heart out.”
“It’s gone?”
He nodded.
I swallowed. “The other child?”
He nodded again. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you learn that you haven’t.”
“Christ.” I felt cold all over. I hoped fervently the children were unconscious when the mutilation took place.
I looked across at Ryan. He was studying the scene on the table, his face without expression.
“What about the adults?”
Bertrand shook his head. “Looks like they were stabbed repeatedly, throats slashed, but nobody harvested their organs.”
LaManche’s voice droned on, describing the external appearance of the wounds. I didn’t have to listen. I knew what the presence of hematoma meant. Tissue will bruise only if blood is circulating. The baby had been alive when the cut was made. Babies.
I closed my eyes, fought the urge to run from the room. Get a grip, Brennan. Do your job.
I crossed to the middle table to examine the clothing. Everything was so tiny, so familiar. I looked at the sleeper with its attached footies and soft, fleecy collar and cuffs. Katy had worn a dozen of them. I remembered opening and closing the snaps to change her diaper, her fat little legs kicking like mad. What were these things called? They had a specific name. I tried to recall but my mind refused to focus. Perhaps it was protecting me, urging me to stop personalizing and
get back to business before I began to weep or simply went numb.
Most of the bleeding had been while the baby lay on his left side. The right sleeve and shoulder of the sleeper were spattered, but blood had soaked the left side, darkening the flannel to shades of dull red and brown. The undershirt and sweater were similarly stained.
“Three layers,” I said to no one in particular. “And socks.”
Bertrand crossed to the table.
“Someone took care that the child would be warm.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Bertrand agreed.
Ryan joined us as we stared at the clothing. Each garment displayed a jagged hole surrounded by a star burst of small tears, replicating the injuries on the baby’s chest. Ryan spoke first.
“The little guy was dressed.”
“Yeah,” said Bertrand. “Guess clothing didn’t interfere with his vicious little ritual.”
I said nothing.
“Temperance,” said LaManche, “please get a magnifying glass and come here. I’ve found something.”
We clustered around the pathologist, and he pointed to a small discoloration to the left and below the hole in the infant’s chest. When I handed him a glass, he bent close, studied the bruise, then returned the lens to me.
When I took my turn I was stunned. The spot did not show the disorganized mottling characteristic of a normal bruise. Under magnification I could see a distinct pattern in the baby’s flesh, a cruciate central feature with a loop at one end like an Egyptian ankh or Maltese cross. The figure was outlined by a crenulated rectangular border. I handed the glass to Ryan and looked a question at LaManche.
“Temperance, this is clearly a patterned injury of some kind. The tissue must be preserved. Dr. Bergeron is not here today, so I would appreciate your assistance.”
Marc Bergeron, odontologist to the LML, had developed a technique for lifting and fixing injuries in soft tissue. Initially he’d devised it to remove bite marks from the bodies of victims of violent sexual assault. The method had also proved useful for excising and preserving tattoos and patterned injuries on skin. I’d seen Marc do it in hundreds of cases, had assisted him in several.
I got Bergeron’s kit from a cabinet in the first autopsy room, returned to room two, and spread the equipment on a stainless steel cart. By the time I’d gloved, the photographer had finished and LaManche was ready. He nodded that I should go ahead. Ryan and Bertrand watched.
I measured five scoops of pink powder from a plastic bottle and placed it in a glass vial, then added 20 cc’s of a clear liquid monomer. I stirred and, within a minute, the mixture thickened until it resembled pink modeling clay. I formed the dough into a ring, and placed it on the tiny chest, completely encircling the bruise. The acrylic felt hot as I patted it into place.
To accelerate the hardening process, I placed a wet cloth over the ring, then waited. In less than ten minutes the acrylic had cooled. I reached for a tube and began squeezing a clear liquid around the edges of the ring.
“What’s that?” asked Ryan.
“Cyanoacrylate.”
“Smells like Krazy Glue.”
“It is.”
When I thought the glue was dry, I tested by tugging gently on the ring. A few more dabs, more waiting, and
the ring held fast. I marked it with the date, and case and morgue numbers, and indicated top, bottom, right, and left relative to the baby’s chest.
“It’s ready,” I said, and stepped back.
LaManche used a scalpel to dissect free the skin outside the acrylic doughnut, cutting deep enough to include the underlying fatty tissue. When the ring finally came free, it held the bruised skin tightly in place, like a miniature painting stretched on a circular pink frame. LaManche slid the specimen into the jar of clear liquid that I held ready.
“What’s that?” Ryan again.
“A solution of ten percent buffered formalin. In ten to twelve hours the tissue will be fixed. The ring will ensure that there’s no distortion, so later, if we get a weapon, we’ll be able to compare it to the wound to see if the patterns match. And, of course, we’ll have the photos.”
“Why not just use the photos?”
“With this we can do transillumination if we have to.”
“Transillumination?”
I wasn’t really in the mood for a science seminar, so I kept it simple. “You can shine a light up through the tissue and see what’s going on under the skin. It often brings out details not visible on the surface.”
“What do you think made it?” Bertrand.
“I don’t know,” I said, sealing the jar and handing it to Lisa.
As I was turning away I felt a tremendous sadness, and couldn’t resist lifting the tiny hand. It felt soft and cold in my fingers. I rotated the blocks circling the wrist. M-A-T-H-I-A-S.
I’m so sorry, Mathias.
I looked up to see LaManche gazing at me. His eyes
seemed to mirror the despair I was feeling. I stepped back, and he began the internal exam. He would excise and send upstairs the ends of all bones cut by the killer, but I wasn’t optimistic. Though I’d never looked for tool marks on a victim this young, I suspected that an infant’s ribs would be too tiny to retain much detail.
I stripped off my gloves and turned to Ryan as Lisa made a Y-shaped incision on the infant’s chest.
“Are the scene photos here?”
“Just the backups.”
He handed me a large brown envelope containing a set of Polaroids. I took them to the corner desk.
The first showed the largest of the outbuildings at the chalet in St-Jovite. The style was that of the main house: Alpine Tacky. The next photo was taken inside, shot from the top of a staircase looking downward. The passage was dark and narrow, with walls on both sides, wooden handrails on the walls, and junk heaped at both ends of each step.
There were several pictures of a basement taken from different angles. The room was dim, the only light coming from small rectangular windows close to the ceiling. Linoleum floor. Knotty pine walls. Washtubs. A hot water heater. More junk.
Several photos zoomed in on the water heater, then on the space between it and the wall. The niche was filled with what looked like old carpets and plastic bags. The next pictures showed these objects lined up on the linoleum, first unopened, then laid out to expose their contents.
The adults had been wrapped in large pieces of clear plastic, then rolled in rugs and stacked behind the water heater. Their bodies showed abdominal bloating and skin slippage, but were well preserved.
Ryan came and stood over me.
“The water heater must have been off,” I said, handing him the picture. “If it was running the heat would have caused more decomposition.”
“We don’t think they were using that building.”
“What was it?”
He shrugged.
I went back to the Polaroids.
The man and woman were both fully dressed, though barefoot. Their throats had been cut and blood saturated their clothing and stained the plastic shrouds. The man lay with one hand thrown back, and I could see deep slashes across his palm. Defense wounds. He had tried to save himself. Or his family.
Oh, God. I closed my eyes for a moment.