Born in Death (In Death 23)

“Bite your tongue.”

4

EVE WASN’T SURE WHAT IT SAID ABOUT HER that she was more comfortable in the morgue than in a baby boutique. And she didn’t actually care. The cold white walls, the scent of death under the piney odors of cleansers were the familiar.

She pushed through the thick door into Autopsy as Morris, the chief medical examiner, transferred Bick Byson’s brain from his skull to a scale.

“A two-for-one sale, I see.” Morris—his spiffy suit of the day protected with a clear plastic cape—paused to enter data. Then he set the brain in a tray.

He wasn’t tall, but he was built in a way the chocolate brown suit and dull gold T-shirt exploited. He was oddly sexy with those dark, slightly slanted eyes and the ink black hair scooped back in a tight, intricate braid.

“That’s how I see it,” Eve agreed. “You concur. Same method, same killer?”

“Physical force and trauma. In technical terms, he whaled away on them. Binding, ankles, wrists. I’d be very surprised if the CSIs don’t find the tape came from the same roll for both your vics. Death by strangulation on each. Male vic was stunned—full contact just above the sternum. He also has, as you noted in your on-scene, bruises and lacerations on his knuckles. He fought back. I removed a few bits of ceramic from his back and buttocks.”

“Broken lamp. Looks like he grabbed it from the bedroom, came out into the living area, tried to use it as a weapon on the intruder.”

“No postmortem trauma on either. When your killer was done, he was done. No sexual assault on either. Your female vic…”

Morris wiped his sealed hands, then skirted around to where Natalie lay, cleaned, naked, and tagged.

“That’s not your Y-cut,” Eve observed with a frown as she studied the body.

“Quite an eye you have there, Dallas.” And his own twinkled with amusement. “No, I supervised a new ME. Our motto around here is Die To Learn. The female was tortured before death. Broken fingers. The angle and position of the breaks indicate a backward thrust.”

Morris held up his own hand, gripped his pinky with the other, and pulled it back and down. “Effective, and painful.”

Eve remembered the breathless, shocking pain when her father had snapped the bone in her arm. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Burning—shoulder, belly, bottoms of the feet. Looks like contact burns with a laser pointer or something very similar. See the circular shape? It had to be pressed down very hard, very firm to not only burn the skin, but to leave that defined a burn.”

To get a better look, she slid on a pair of microgoggles. “No blurring, or very little on these. Her feet were bound tight at the ankles, but she’d jerk and struggle when he burned her. Had to clamp onto her foot with his hand, hold it still. Very serious about his work.”

She pulled off the goggles. “Her nose is broken.”

“Yes, but when we use the micros, you can see the detail bruising, both sides of the nostrils.” He picked up the pair Eve had laid aside, then offered them to Peabody when Eve jerked a thumb at her partner.

Putting them on, Peabody leaned down. “I just see a big mess of bruising.” She focused, frowning, as Morris shined a pinpoint light over the side of Natalie’s nose.

“Okay, yeah. I get it. I don’t think I’d have seen it, but I get it now. He had her mouth taped, then he clamped her nose closed—hard, with his thumb and finger. Cut off her air.”

“With the broken nose she’d have had considerable trouble breathing. He made it harder.”

“Interrogating her,” Eve said to Morris. “If it was a straight torture killing, he’d have done more. Cut her up some, broken more bones, burned her more severely and over more of her body. There’d most likely be some sexual abuse, or trauma to the breasts and genitals.”

“Agreed. He just wanted to hurt her. On the male, he skipped the interrogation portion of the program. Went from beating to strangling.”

“Because the woman told him what he needed to know, gave him what he needed to have,” Peabody concluded.

“And the second vic had to die because the first told the killer her boyfriend knew what she knew, or had seen what she’d seen. The motive’s in her,” Eve murmured.

At Central, Eve sat at her desk downing coffee and adding data and notes to her initial reports. She put in another call to the PA’s office to check on the warrant, got the runaround.

Lawyers, she thought. The accounting firm’s lawyers had knee-jerked a motion to block the warrant. Not unexpected, Eve mused, but they’d get it—not likely before the end of the business day, however.

She knee-jerked herself and called to harass the lab. The evidence had been gathered, was being processed. They weren’t miracle workers. Blah, blah.

What she had was two DBs—a couple—killed in their separate homes a few blocks