Maggie reached over to her instrument tray and snatched up a plastic bag.Inside were two dirty-white globes.
‘These.Definitely not oysters.’
Ella took a closer look at the little pearls.The size of lychee berries, dulled by residue Ella didn't want to contemplate.‘Marbles?’
‘Marbles indeed.They’re due for forensic analysis sometime today.’
Cheap glass, mass produced.Dime a dozen, any general store would sell these.There was probably no way to trace them, Ella thought, but what did it matter?Knowing where they came from wouldn't change what happened.
Maggie moved her pointer to Sophie’s skull.There was a light smattering of pinpricks, faint as freckles, speckling an otherwise pristine landing strip of skin.‘Punctures where your perp lodged barbed wire around her head.Nothing notable about that.’
‘Defensive wounds?’Ella asked.
‘Nothing.No skin cells under the nails or bruises to the hands or feet.The only bruising I found was to the back of her skull and her left hip.’
Theories began to percolate but none felt quite right.‘Her left hip?As if she fell?’
‘Yup.Finding a cause of death was a challenge, because I naturally assumed it was blood loss or nervous system shutdown.But your forensics team told me there was a lack of blood at the scene, so once I went with the theory that all of these lacerations were done postmortem, it left only one result.’
‘Which was?’
‘Trauma to the brain.’Maggie pointed to the side of Sophie’s head.‘There’s a distinct bruise here, covering the temple and the rim of the skull.’
Ella slotted the pieces into place.‘Our unsub knocked her unconscious with a blunt object.’
‘Yep, hard enough to kill.Any impact to the temples can result in brain damage or death with enough force.If your perp immediately begun mutilating the body as soon as she collapsed, her nervous system could have been shocked into failure.’
It was a small mercy, at least.Sophie Draper died in a split-second, unaware that she would become a mutilated angel in the afterlife.
‘Tox reports?’
‘Clean as holy water.No drugs, no poison.Just a few traces of ethanol that had been there for a while.’
Damn.Ella had been hoping for something to sink her teeth into; maybe ketamine, GHB, any of the old standby date rape specials.Anything to tell her how the unsub had gotten the drop on a grown woman in the sanctum of her own home.‘What about the cuts on her back?’
‘Thought you’d never ask.Any chance you could put those toned arms of yours to use?’
‘Come again?’
‘Grab her bottom half and help me flip her over.’
Ella recoiled at the idea because putting her hands on a victim of such a senseless death felt wrong in many ways, but she shuffled forward all the same.She snapped on a pair of gloves and took her place at the table in a clumsy echo of the coroner’s efficiency.She and Maggie each cradled half of Sophie’s body and eased her onto her front.Ella leaned in for a closer look and wished she hadn’t.
Shoulder to waist, Sophie’s back was a portrait of red and black.Gouges drew lines from her neck to the base of her spine, deep enough to dig through dermis and down into the wet red beneath.
Ella said nothing.She couldn’t speak past the brick wall in her throat.
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’Maggie sliced through Ella’s self-flagellation.‘Cuts begin at the shoulder and go right down to the mid-section in a triangle shape.I found traces of carbon in the wounds, so your perp used a stainless steel blade, probably a scalpel for this kind of accuracy.’
‘Accuracy?How accurate are we talking?’
‘Well, his linework is good, but the way he peeled the flesh back isn’t.He also sawed at the flesh when making the lines in a few places, which suggests your perp isn’t familiar with this kind of work.’
‘So not a butcher or hunter.’
‘None of the above, and definitely not a surgeon either.Your perp made a perfect triangle shape with the blade, which means he used something small and malleable.He’s got the strength to penetrate flesh like a chef scoring pig fat, but that’s where his abilities end.’
Ella blinked, and her mind kicked out of first-gear guilt into reverse faster than she could trigger-pull, then Maggie's words penetrated the fog of futility.
