Undone (Will Trent 3)

"I need to—" Faith didn't finish the sentence. She just turned on her heel and left. Will watched her go, shrugging an apology to Pete.

"Not her favorite part of the job," Pete noted. "She's a bit thin. The victim, that is."

He was right. Jacquelyn Zabel's bones were pronounced under her skin.

Pete asked Will, "How long was she held?"

He shrugged. "We're hoping you can tell us."

"Could be from dehydration," Pete mumbled, pressing his fingers against the woman's shoulder. He asked Sara, "What do you think?"

"The other victim, Anna, was in the same physical condition. He could have been giving them diuretics, withholding food and water. Starvation isn't an unusual form of torture."

"He certainly tried every other kind." Pete sighed, puzzled. "The blood should tell us more."

The examination continued. Snoopy laid down a ruler by the cuts and took photographs as Pete drew hatches on the sketch for the autopsy report, trying to approximate the damage. Finally, he put down the pen, peeling back the eyelids to check the color.

"Interesting," he murmured, indicating Sara should look for herself. Absent a moist environment, the organs of a decomposing body would shrink, the flesh contracting away from any wounds. Sara found several holes in the sclera as she examined the eyes, tiny red dots that opened in perfect round circles.

"Needles or straight pins," Pete guessed. "He pierced each eyeball at least a dozen times."

Sara checked the woman's eyelids, saw the holes went clean through. "Anna's pupils were fixed and dilated," she told him, taking a pair of gloves off the tray, slipping them on as she looked into the woman's bloody ears. Snoopy had cleaned away the clots, but the canals were still coated in dried blood. "Do you have a—"

Snoopy handed her an otoscope. Sara pressed the tip into Zabel's ear, finding the sort of damage she had seen only in child abuse cases. "The drum has been punctured." She turned the head to check the other ear, hearing the broken vertebrae in the neck crunch from the movement. "This one, too." She handed the scope to Pete so he could see.

"Screwdriver?" he asked.

"Scissors," she suggested. "See the way the skin at the opening of the canal has been shaved off ?"

"The pattern slants upwards, deeper at the top."

"Right, because the scissors narrow at the point."

Pete nodded, making more notes. "Deaf and blind."

Sara made the obvious leap, opening the woman's mouth. The tongue was intact. She pressed her fingers against the outside of the trachea, then used the laryngoscope Snoopy handed her to look down the throat. "The esophagus is raw. Smell that?"

Pete leaned down. "Bleach? Acid?"

"Drain cleaner."

"I had forgotten your father is a plumber." He pointed to a dark staining around the woman's mouth. "See this?"

Blood always pooled to the lowest point of a dead body, leaving a stain on the skin called lividity. The face was a deep, dark purple from hanging upside down. It was hard to isolate the rash around her lips, but once Pete pointed it out, Sara could see where liquid had been poured into the mouth and dripped down the sides of the face as the victim gagged.

Pete palpated the neck. "Lots of damage here. It definitely looks like he had her drink some kind of astringent. We'll see if it made it to her stomach when we cut her open."

Sara startled when Will spoke; she had forgotten he was there. "It looked like she broke her neck in the fall. That she slipped."

Sara remembered their earlier conversation, his certainty that Jacquelyn Zabel had been hanging in the tree while he looked for her on the ground. He had told her the woman's blood was still warm. She asked, "Were you the one who took her down?"

Will shook his head. "They had to photograph her."

"You checked her carotid for a pulse?" Sara asked.

He nodded. "The blood was dripping from her fingers. It was hot."

Sara checked the woman's hands, saw the fingernails had been broken, some ripped straight out of the nail bed. Per routine, photographs had been taken of the body before Snoopy had cleaned it. Pete knew what Sara was thinking. He indicated the computer monitor. "Snoopy, do you mind pulling up the pre-wash photos?"

The man did as he was asked, Pete and Sara standing over either shoulder. Everything was on the database, from the initial crime scene photos to the more recent ones taken at the morgue. Snoopy had to click through them all, and Sara saw the original scene in quick succession, Jacquelyn Zabel hanging from the tree, her neck awkwardly bent to the side. Her foot was so firmly caught in the branches that they probably had to cut the limbs to get her down.

Snoopy finally reached the autopsy series. Blood caked the face, the legs, the torso. "There," Sara said, pointing to the chest. They both returned to the body, and Sara stopped herself before reaching down. "Sorry," she apologized. This was Pete's case.

His ego seemed unharmed. He lifted the breast, exposing another crisscrossed wound. This one was deeper in the center of the X. Pete pulled down the overhead light, trying to get a closer look as he pressed the skin apart. Snoopy handed him a magnifying glass, and Pete leaned in even closer, asking Will, "You found a pocketknife at the scene?"

Will provided, "The only print was the victim's, a latent on the case of the knife."

Pete handed Sara the magnifying glass so she could see for herself. He asked Will, "Left or right hand?"

"I—" Will stopped, glancing back toward the door for Faith. "I don't remember."

"Was the print a thumb? Index?"

Snoopy had gone to the computer to pull up the information, but Will provided, "Partial thumb on the butt of the knife. "

"Three-inch blade?"

"About."

Pete nodded to himself as he made the notation in his diagram, but Sara wasn't going to make Will wait for him to finish. "She stabbed herself," she told him, holding the magnifying glass over the site, motioning him over. "See the way the wound is V-shaped at the bottom and flat on the top?" Will nodded. "The blade was upside down and moved in an upward trajectory." Sara made the motion, stabbing herself in the chest. "Her thumb was on the butt of the knife, driving it in deeper. She must have dropped it, then fallen. Look at her ankle." She indicated the slight marks around the base of the fibula. "The heart had stopped beating when her foot caught. The bones were broken, but there's no swelling, no sign of trauma. There would be serious bruising if the blood was still circulating when she fell."

Will shook his head. "She wouldn't have—"

"The facts bear it out," Sara interrupted. "The wound was self-inflicted. It would've been fast. She didn't suffer for long." Sara felt the need to add, "Or much longer than she already had."

Will's eyes locked with hers, and Sara had to force herself not to look away. The man may not have looked like a cop, but she was certain he thought like one. Whenever an open case stopped moving forward, any policeman worth his salt took the time to beat himself up for making an ill-timed decision, missing an obvious clue. Will Trent would be doing that now—searching for ways to blame himself for the death of Jacquelyn Zabel.