Running Blind (35 page)

"She was into sports," Reacher said. "Her sister told us."

Stavely nodded. "So we'll check the collarbone."

He moved left and studied the first panel. It showed the skull and the neck and the shoulders. The collarbones gleamed and swooped down toward the sternum.

"Small crack," Stavely said, pointing. "It's what I'd expect. An athlete with a cracked wrist will usually have a cracked collarbone too. They fall off their bike or their Rollerblades or whatever, throw out their arm to break their fall, end up breaking their bones instead."

"But no fresh injuries?" Blake asked.

Stavely shook his head. "These are ten years old, maybe more. She wasn't killed by blunt trauma, if that's what you mean."

He hit the switch and the light behind the X rays went out. He turned back to the examination table and knitted his fingers again and his knuckles clicked in the silence.

"OK," he said. "Let's go to work."

He pulled a hose from a reel mounted on the ceiling and turned a small faucet built into its nozzle. There was a hissing sound and a stream of clear liquid started running. A heavy, slow liquid with a sharp, strong smell.

"Acetone," Stavely said. "Got to clear this damn paint."

He used the acetone sluice on the body bag and on the steel table. The technician used handfuls of kitchen towel, wiping the bag and pushing the thick liquid into the drain. The chemical stink was overpowering.

"Ventilator," Stavely said.

The technician ducked away and twisted a switch behind him and the fans in the ceiling changed up from a hum to a louder roar. Stavely held the nozzle closer and the bag began to turn from wet green to wet black. Then he held the hose low down on the table and set up a swirling rinse under the bag straight into the drain.

"OK, scissors," he said.

The technician took scissors from a cart and snipped a corner of the bag. Green paint flooded out. The acetone swirl caught it and it eddied sluggishly to the drain. It kept on coming, two minutes, three, five. The bag settled and drooped as it emptied. The room went quieter under the roar of the fan and the hiss of the hose.

"OK, the fun starts here," Stavely said.

He handed the hose to the technician and used a scalpel from the cart to slit the bag lengthwise from end to end. He made sideways cuts top and bottom and peeled the rubber back slowly. It lifted and sucked away from skin. He folded it back in two long flaps. Alison Lamarr's body was revealed, lying facedown, slimy and slick with paint.

Stavely used the scalpel and slit the rubber around the feet, up alongside the legs, around the contours of the hips, up her flanks, close to her elbows, around her shoulders and head. He pulled away the strips of rubber until the bag was gone, all except for the front surface, which was trapped between the crust of paint and the steel of the table.

The crust of paint was top down to the table, because she was upside down. Its underside was bubbled and jellified. It looked like the surface of a distant alien planet. Stavely started rinsing its edges, where it was stuck to her skin.

"Won't that damage her?" Blake asked.

Stavely shook his head. "It's the same stuff as nail polish remover."

The skin turned greenish white where the paint washed off. Stavely used his gloved fingertips to peel the crust away. The strength in his hands moved the body. It lifted and fell, slackly. He pushed the hose underneath her, probing for stubborn adhesions. The technician stood next to him and lifted her legs. Stavely reached under them and cut the crust and the rubber together, peeling it away up to her thighs. The acetone ran continuously, rinsing the green stream into the drain.

Stavely moved up to the head. Placed the hose against the nape of her neck and watched as the chemical flooded her hair. Her hair was a nightmare. It was matted and crusted with paint. It had floated up around her face like a stiff tangled cage.

"I'm going to have to cut it," he said.

Blake nodded, somber.

"I guess so," he said.

"She had nice hair," Harper said. Her voice was quiet under the noise from the fan. She half turned and backed off a step. Her shoulder touched Reacher's chest. She left it there a second longer than she needed to.

Stavely took a fresh scalpel from the cart and traced through the hair, as close to the paint crust as he could get. He slid a powerful arm under the shoulders and lifted. The head came free, leaving hair matted into the crust like mangrove roots tangled into a swamp. He cut through the crust and the rubber and pulled another section free.

"I hope you catch this guy," he said.

"That's the plan," Blake said back, still somber.

"Roll her over," Stavely said.

She moved easily. The acetone mixed with the slick paint was like a lubricant against the dished steel of the table. She slid face up and lay there, ghastly under the lights. Her skin was greenish white and puckered, stained and blotched with paint. Her eyes were open, the lids rimed with green. She wore the last remaining square of the body bag stuck to her skin from her breasts to her thighs, like an old-fashioned bathing suit protecting her modesty.

Stavely probed with his hand and found the metal implement under the rubber. He cut through the bag and wormed his fingers inside and pulled the object out in a grotesque parody of surgery.

"A screwdriver," he said.

The technician washed it in an acetone bath and held it up. It was a quality tool with a heavy plastic handle and a handsome chromed-steel shaft with a crisp blade.

"Matches the others," Reacher said. "From her kitchen drawer, remember?"

"She's got scratches on her face," Stavely said suddenly.

He was using the hose, washing her face. Her left cheek had four parallel incisions running down from the eye to the jaw.

"Did she have these before?" Blake asked.

"No," Harper and Reacher said together.

"So what's that about?" Blake said.

"Was she right-handed?" Stavely asked.

"I don't know," Poulton said.

Harper nodded. "I think so."

Reacher closed his eyes and trawled back to her kitchen, watched her pouring coffee from the jug.

"Right-handed," he said.

"I agree," Stavely said. He was examining her arms and hands. "Her right hand is larger than the left. The arm is heavier."

Blake was leaning over, looking at the damaged face. "So?"

"I think they're self-inflicted," Stavely said.

"Are you sure?"

Stavely was circling the head of the table, looking for the best light. The wounds were swelled by the paint, raw and open. Green, where they should have been red.

"I can't be sure," he said. "You know that. But probability suggests it. If the guy did them, what are the chances he would have put them in the only place she could have put them herself?"

"He made her do it," Reacher said.

"How?" Blake asked.

"I don't know how. But he makes them do a hell of a lot. I think he makes them put the paint in the tub themselves."

"Why?"

"The screwdriver. It's to get the lids off with. The scratches were an afterthought. If he'd been thinking about the scratches, he'd have made her get a knife from the kitchen instead of the screwdriver. Or as well as the screwdriver."

Blake stared at the wall. "Where are the cans right now?"

"Materials Analysis," Poulton said. "Right here. They're examining them."

"So take the screwdriver over there. See if there are any marks that match."

The technician put the screwdriver in a clear plastic evidence bag and Poulton shrugged off his gown and kicked off his overshoes and hurried out of the room.

"But why?" Blake said. "Why make her scratch herself like that?"

"Anger?" Reacher said. "Punishment? Humiliation? I always wondered why he wasn't more violent."

"These wounds are very shallow," Stavely said. "I guess they bled a little, but they didn't hurt much. The depth is absolutely consistent, all the way down each of them. So she wasn't flinching."

"Maybe ritual," Blake said. "Symbolic, somehow. Four parallel lines mean anything?"

Reacher shook his head. "Not to me."

"How did he kill her?" Blake asked. "That's what we need to know."

"Maybe he stabbed her with the screwdriver," Harper said.

"No sign of it," Stavely said. "No puncture wounds visible anyplace that would kill a person."

He had the final section of the body bag peeled back and was washing paint away from her midsection, probing with his gloved fingers under the acetone jet. The technician lifted the rubber square away and then she lay naked under the lights, collapsed and limp and utterly lifeless. Reacher stared at her and remembered the bright vivacious woman who had smiled with her eyes and radiated energy like a tiny sun.

"Is it possible you can kill somebody and a pathologist can't tell how?" he asked.

Stavely shook his head.

"Not this pathologist," he said.

He shut off the acetone stream and let the hose retract into its reel on the ceiling. Stepped back and turned the ventilation fan back to normal. The room turned quiet again. The body lay on the table, as clean as it was ever going to get. The pores and folds of skin were stained green and the skin itself was lumpy and white like something that lives at the bottom of the sea. The hair was spiky with residue, roughly hacked around the scalp, framing the dead face.

"Fundamentally two ways to kill a person," Stavely said. "Either you stop the heart, or you stop the flow of oxygen to the brain. But to do either thing without leaving a mark is a hell of a trick."

"How would you stop the heart?" Blake asked.

"Short of firing a bullet through it?" Stavely said. "Air embolism would be the best way. A big bubble of air, injected straight into the bloodstream. Blood circulates surprisingly fast, and an air bubble hits the inside of the heart like a stone, like a tiny internal bullet. The shock is usually fatal. That's why nurses hold up the hypodermic and squirt a little liquid out and flick it with their nail. To be sure there's no air in the mix."

"You'd see the hypodermic hole, right?"

"Maybe, maybe not. And definitely not on a corpse like this. The skin is ruined by the paint. But you'd see the internal damage to the heart. I'll check, of course, when I open her up, but I'm not optimistic. They didn't find anything like that on the other three. And we're assuming a consistent MO here, right?"

Blake nodded. "What about oxygen to the brain?"

"Suffocation, in layman's terms," Stavely said. "It can be done without leaving much evidence. Classic thing would be an old person, wasted and weak, gets a pillow held over the face. Pretty much impossible to prove. But this isn't an old person. She's young and strong."

Reacher nodded. He had suffocated a man once, way back in his long and checkered career. He had needed all of his considerable strength to hold the guy's face down on a mattress, while he bucked and thrashed and died.

"She'd have fought like crazy," he said.

"Yes, I think she would," Stavely said. "And look at her. Look at her musculature. She wouldn't have been a pushover."

Reacher looked away instead. The room was silent and cold. The awful green paint was everywhere.

"I think she was alive," he said. "When she went in the tub."

"Reasoning?" Stavely asked.

"There was no mess," Reacher said. "None at all. The bathroom was immaculate. What was she, one twenty? One twenty-five? Hell of a dead weight to heave into the tub without making some kind of a mess."

"Maybe he put the paint in afterward," Blake said. "On top of her."

Reacher shook his head. "It would have floated her up, surely. It looks like she slipped right in there, like you get into a bath. You know, you point your toe, you get under the water."

"We'd need to experiment," Stavely said. "But I think I agree she died in the tub. The first three, there was no evidence they were touched at all. No bruising, no abrasions, no nothing. No postmortem damage either. Moving a corpse usually damages the ligaments in the joints, because there's no muscle tension there to protect them. At this point, my guess is they did whatever they did strictly under their own power."