The Butcher and the Wren(6)
She laughs loudly, covering her mouth as if it will make her look like a lady. He resists the urge to heave, and instead chuckles along with her. She smiles and presses the override key with an acrylic nail.
“You owe me,” she says with a wink.
“I don’t owe you shit,” he responds to her coldly as he leaves the lobby. She will probably take his comment as a joke. He doesn’t care either way.
CHAPTER 4
WREN SECURES HER FACE SHIELD and silently gazes over the body that lays before her on the cold morgue gurney. The woman looks back at her from behind one saggy eyelid. Even the sliver of her right eye screams of the horrors she endured.
Her waterlogged clothing has already been photographed and removed. Technicians are now scanning them for a fiber, hair, or anything that could be traced back to the beast that did this. Wren palpates for signs of broken bones, taking special note of the petechial hemorrhage still visible on her face even though decomposition has already started to ravage her features. The Louisiana sun is pretty unforgiving to the living, but it is particularly cruel to the dead. Wren estimates that this victim was outside in the elements for maybe a day, as evidenced by the slight bloat and lack of significant putrefaction.
She notes the bruising around her throat, where multiple ligatures intersected and cut deeply into the tissue surrounding the larynx. This wasn’t the cause of death. Besides the stomach wound that Wren is betting was the fatal blow, the bruising on her neck indicates blood flow, which only occurs when a heart is beating. This poor girl was mechanically strangled without the intent of death. Her brutal strangulation was just something her killer enjoyed before finally giving her the release of death, in one of the most painful ways imaginable.
The stomach wound, which runs the length of her abdomen, is jagged and deep. Blood coagulated inside the injury, which indicates that the killer inflicted it while she was still alive. Between the rigor mortis that still lingers in some of her muscles and her liver temperature, time of death hovers somewhere in the past thirty-six hours or so. Unfortunately, the postmortem lividity she determined at the crime scene was slightly less time than that. She’d expect these stains to be deep red, blue, or purple, but the pooled blood under Jane Doe’s skin is bright pink.
Wren frowns at the discrepancy but decides to move forward with the examination. Lividity is also helpful in determining whether someone moved the body after death, as was the case with the victim currently on Wren’s table. The blood that stopped flowing after the victim’s stomach was torn open had pooled on the right side of her hip, face, and small portions of her right arm. The victim was lying on her right side after death. There are also signs of pooling on her lower back and across her shoulders, so she was on her back at one point as well. Given the deeper color lividity on her right side, it is safe to deduce that she died while lying on her right side and was later moved to her back. These details piece together like a neatly fitted puzzle, but the color of the lividity still gives Wren pause.
Detective John Leroux enters the room, snapping a mask around his face and slipping his right hand into a latex glove. His angular jaw is set into a noticeable clench, and his deeply blue eyes, the only thing visible above the mask, seem to ask a million questions.
Wren looks up briefly as he enters the autopsy suite. She can read his expressions instantly after years of working together. He’s overworked and hoping for answers.
“Tell me you have something to give me here, Muller,” he says as he adjusts his waistband, placing his hands on his hips.
Wren hesitates a moment before looking up.
“He refrigerated her.”
CHAPTER 5
TAKING A SEAT IN HIS cubicle, Jeremy flicks on his computer screen and arranges his coffee and cell phone within reach. He prefers to ease himself into the day with a couple of passes through news sites and social media. Today, the front page of the Times-Picayune website catches his eye. “Search for Missing Orleans Parish Man and Woman Intensifies as Friends Continue to Hold Vigil.” He can hardly stifle his laughter. Vigils always fascinated him.
What good are your candles and photographs doing while Katie and Matt suffer in my basement?
He infers that these “friends” in the article photos, teary-eyed and solemn, are more interested in seeing themselves in print. Everyone has a motive. It is clear from their willingness to boast about their loss that these folks are basking in the spotlight to satisfy their own disgusting need for attention. He scans the rest of the article, which details the immediate need to locate these two blights on the gene pool.
“Scary as hell, right?” his coworker Corey interrupts, leaning his elbow on the side of Jeremy’s cube as he sips his coffee. “These two are going to end up like the rest of them. The similarities are too glaring to ignore, you know? Once he dumps one, he grabs another within days. You heard that they think they found that other girl that was missing, right?” Corey shakes his head and takes another sip of coffee. He is referring to the others, and he is partially correct. Jeremy has been doing this for a while, racking up six victims at this point. Usually, he did precisely what Corey surmised. Once he grew tired of one, he went in search of another. This was the only time he had ever overlapped. Katie and Matt arrived at his home while Meghan was still partially alive. It wasn’t the plan, and it was risky, but sometimes improvisation is necessary when the right people show up.