For a moment Noah couldn't swallow. During the past several minutes he had been aware of the lump growing in his throat, at first as some ill-defined sensation that did not require his full attention, then as something he could neither ignore nor swallow. He knew what it was, but it was no less real for that. He shot a quick look around. It wasn't something he often felt anymore. After the first year or two in homicide he had started checking his emotions at the front door. If he didn't, it just took too much out of him. But sometimes, with the sexual homicides, he couldn't help it, and a vaguely defined anxiety darkened the veiny back reaches of his mind. It became a burdensome shadow he couldn't escape, regardless of the mental tricks he played or how fervently he wished to rise above it. And it was happening now, answering to a resonating inner chord. Dread surfaced like something corrosive, and it frightened him. He knew that before he finally beat it down again, it was going to take something out of him; it was going to claim a piece of him.534Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6NcOTqWu7U
All of this Noah recognized and understood in an instant. But he was already into it, already committed. It had had something to do with the cold, and with the bite marks. Especially the bite marks.
He bent down, too, and studied the raw lines almost hidden in the mucosa above the woman's eyeballs. This close, he got a strong sense of the perfume, but it was an altered fragrance. Overpeck had failed to mention the stale smell of a death, the first musty odor of the oncoming decay working in the dead woman's bowels.
"Shit, no eyelids?" Yung dropped his tough-guy act and bent down beside Noah while Pittman, not so curious about the details, craned his neck from the foot of the bed.
"This is precise work," Noah said. He shifted his attention to the carved breasts only inches away. "It's hard to tell if it's postmortem.....the way he's cleaned her." He nudged Pittman aside and, bending close, moved past the wounded breasts to the dead woman's maculated stomach, to the matted caramel wool of her vulva, to the thighs, moving her head from side to side, to and fro, to catch the surface of the body at an angle against the poor lighting. He was trying to find the distinguishing blotches, the scaly, starchy stains of semen. But if she didn't find them, it wouldn't be significant. It didn't always happen; they hadn't found any on Vicki San Felipe either. However, it would be significant if they could determine if the dead woman had in fact been cleaned.
Overpeck looked for the same thing around the wounds on the woman's breast and face. "He's cleaned her mouth before putting on the lipstick," he said. "Maybe this time there'll be something inside." He checked the sides of her body next to the bedsheet, and then watched Noah's examination. He was thorough.
"I think we're going to find something on the insides of her thighs," he said, straightening up. "I believe there's a smear-----going down, just into her left going." He straightened up. "But the perp isn't leaving behind very much."
"He cut her eyelids last time?" Yung asked. He was still staring at Dowey's eyes.
"No," Noah said. "He didn't, but he cut off one nipple. That was all. But everything else seems the same: the ligature marks, the positioning, the makeup, the removed bedclothes, the victim's folded clothes, the bruises, the bite marks. Only it's more severe this time."
"The other woman was blond, too?" It was the first thing Pittman had said.
Noah nodded and said, "But there's something else."
"Yeah, he did something to her." Overpeck was still standing besides the bed, his arms folded, thinking. "He licked her or masturbated on her or something----else. That's why he's washing them."
"A fetishist," Pittman offered soberly. He was writing something on a notepad.
"I could almost buy that it if weren't so damned convenient," Noah said. "He's reducing the trace evidence to nil."
Overpeck shook his head. "No, this guy's a mess. He did something to her." he was still looking at the dead woman. All of them were, standing around the bed looking at her.
"What about the ligatures?" Noah said, noticing again the woman's throat, wrists, and ankles. "There's no evidence of a struggle. A willing victim, I assume. Up to a point."
"Maybe he's quick," Yung said. "Overpowers them, slaps them down here, and that's it."
"Still, there should have been more bruises on her, a scratch at least. There's got to be something." Noah looked over at a dressing table with bottles of perfume, a jewelry case, nail polish. Then he turned back and looked at the dead woman's swollen face. "Maybe he knew her," he said.
"What, you think he knew San Felipe too?" Overpeck was shaking his head.
"It would account for the lack of disarray, lack of defense wounds, and the condition of her face," Noah said.
It was a detective's axiom that when a homicide victim's face had been brutally attacked, the odds were that the perp had prior knowledge of the victim, perhaps even was a relative. It wasn't something anyone pretended to understand, but all too often that was the way it played out.
"I don't know," Overpeck said. "Maybe both women were into this." He raised his chin at the bed. "But I doubt if they wanted to be into it this much."
"He really bit the shit out of her, didn't he?" Yung said, jangling his change again. "Jesus, the guy must've really freaked out."
Noah had noticed that in more than half the bite marks the teeth had actually penetrated the skin, making notched punctures.
"Fine," he said. "The bastard made a big mistake. We'll get perfect impressions." He felt Yung looking back at him, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Pittman and Overpeck exchange looks. He didn't regret the malice in his voice, and he didn't care what they thought. Though he was sure he was missing far more than he was understanding, what he could see of the way this man treated his victims told him more about him than if he had given a lecture on the subject. His intelligence, and his loathing for these women, was evident in every move he'd made. For Noah, he was starting to become something more than just another crazy.
Nobody spoke for a moment, and then Noah said, "Where are they?"
"Huh?" Yung frowned at him.
"The nipples and the eyelids," he said.
"Hell," Overpeck put his hands in the small of his back and bent to one side and then the other to stretch his aching back muscles. "We didn't find the one he cut off San Felipe. We won't find those either."
"He's taking them with him," Noah said.
"Good possibility."
Suddenly irritated at the cold, Noah looked at Yung. "What the hell is the temperature in here?"
"The perp turned it all the way down." Yung was working his gum between his front teeth, stretching it out with his tongue. "I checked it. It's almost fifty."
Overpeck carefully stepped to the bathroom door, keeping to one side, and leaned in, nodding. "Clean as a whistle." He paused. "She's got a bidet in here, for God's sake!"
Noah turned and walked out of the broom, followed by Yung. They went a few steps down the hallway to a second bedroom, obviously unused. The closets served as additional storage, the clothes chests were empty, and a second bathroom was furnished with unused soap, unused towels, and an empty medicine cabinet. A guest room with no guests. They went back down the hall to the kitchen where Overpeck and Pittman were looking around. Overpeck had carefully opened the refrigerator.
"She sure as hell was no Julia Childe," he said. "Mostly sandwich stuff in here. Some fruit. Diet-drink stuff."
Pittman was puttering around in the trash.
Noah, with Yung clinging to his side like a pilot fish, walked through the living room and up a staircase to a study that overlooked the living room. There was a large desk, a sofa, a television, and bookshelves. Outside the study was a balcony overlooking one of the complex's central courtyards and offering a clear view of a swimming pool with shimmering blue water. But it had privacy, a trellis of wisteria. As they came back through the study, she noticed that the desk was neat, with one corner stacked with promotional materials from TechCube. Though there were few rooms, all of them were spacious and well laid-out, making the condo seem comfortably large.
They met back in the living room and milled around for a few moments, everyone pursuing, or pretending to pursue, his own thoughts about what they had just seen. Finally Noah got it out in the open.
"Okay," he said turning to Yung and crossing his arms. "What's the deal? Are you going to give it to us?"
Yung shook his head. "No I am not." One hand made a preening sweep down his gray tie as he quick-shrugged his shoulders.
Overpeck and Pittman looked at one another.
"I should've known better than to ask," Noah said.
"We're going to have to work it together," Yung said.
"Together?" Noah smiled. That admission must've cost Yung some inner peace despite his confident manner. Noah studied him for a moment as he tried to guess the reason for his fidelity to this particular case. If the victim had been a sore-ridden addict----even though an obvious serial victim----Yung magnanimously would have seen the efficacy of turning his case over to Yung and Pittman. But in this instance, Noah suspected his motivation to hang on to the case was based on a different set of criteria. "What do you want out of this, Yung?"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" He tried to be indignant, but it wasn't an attitude he carried well. "This's my job, for God's sake."
"You know we're going to want to keep this out of the media, don't you?"
"The media?" Yung kept his face straight for a moment, then a slow and skewed grin began to grow, his gum like a plug of pink putty clamped between his bright front teeth. "You've already been thinking about the media, Bain?"
Noah looked at him and cursed the bad luck that he knew made Yung and Pittman first out that morning. He knew damn well that wasn't anything he could do about it, and Yung knew it, too. The best he could do was to take the initiative and not let Yung think he was going to be running the investigation. He had to be impressed with the fact that he was a latecomer in this game, that the ground rules were already established, set in stone, to be precise. To Yung the guy who killed San Filipe and Dowey was merely the ticket to a particularly flashy case that might, depending on how nutty it got, be good material for a book, TV movie, maybe a film. To Noah he was something else, something he knew he wanted a hell of a lot more than Yung wanted to be on the cover of People magazine. Well, Noah wasn't going to let that bastard that that honor away from him!
"Okay," he said, glancing at Overpeck, who was standing with an elbow propped on the kitchen bar enjoying their confrontation as if it were a cockfight. "Since Zev and I had feared this might be a serial killing from the start," he lied, "we'd better tell you how we've set up the approach to the whole thing." He glanced at Overpeck again, who was keeping a poker face while wondering, he knew, if he could pull this off. "Let's get Jack in here too."
Jack Ball had finished his solitary video stroll and narration through the rest of the condo and was already bringing his equipment back into the living room before continuing the routine in the bedroom. Ball was young, maybe twenty-six, and took his business very seriously. Noah had wondered about his name for a long time; he was clearly Mexican.
He hastily reviewed Vicki San Felipe's case of the month before and hit the high spots of their investigation regarding San Felipe's background, marital status, their interviews with friends and acquaintances, habits, activities, everything. And she was honest----she had no choice---about the dead end they'd come to. The leads in San Felipe's case had quickly come to zilch. Now, however, they had a chance to revive the investigation. Beginning with the scene itself.
"The problem," she said, looking at, looking at Ball, "is that this guy's work is immaculate. Whatever his reasons---whether he's a fetishist, or an ex-con who knows what to clean up and why, or some kinda psycho---he's not leaving us much to work with. We've got to go to extraordinary lengths to gather trace evidence and to keep the scene clean. More than we usually do. There was no semen at the San Felipe scene, and only San Felipe's blood and very little of it since her wounds were postmortem. No saliva. Swabs and smears didn't give us shit. But we did get fair bite-mark impressions, at least. We should do better there because they're more severe.
"Jack, if we catch another one of these we're going to ask for you personally so you can maintain some kind of continuity from one crime scene to another, get to know your man and what he might do, where he might leave something for us to pick up. Be as creative as possible in thinking for this guy because he's way ahead of us. Also, when you take your specifics to the crime lab, make sure you always give them to Ladonna Erickson. She got the material on San Felipe and we need to keep using her for continuity in the lab work."
Noah continued this way for several more minutes, his mind racing to stay ahead of his mouth, hoping he was actually presenting a coherent case plan of approach for such an investigation, his eyes occasionally sliding past Yung to see if he was buying into it.
"That's the general picture," he said finally. He had rolled the dice, and they were spinning. He waited for them to toss up the right dots. "What have I missed?" he asked, looking at Overpeck.
"Actually, I think you covered it," said Overpeck. There was a trace of amusement on his broad face.534Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDPluIRCKc6
For a few moments nobody spoke, and the only sounds in the room came from Yung as he nervously jangled the change in his pocket and popped his gum.
"So? Let's get on with it," Yung blurted.
A two and a five. Noah was in!
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