Criminal (Will Trent 6)

Pete said, “You can feel there’s a lot of movement in there. So, you’d have to have significant pressure to fracture the hyoid.”

He motioned her to follow him over to the body. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table. Without preamble, he pulled back the sheet, exposing Lucy Bennett’s head and shoulders. “See these bruises here?”

Amanda felt her eyes blur, but not on purpose. She blinked, focusing only on the neck. There were deep purple and red marks around the woman’s throat. They reminded her of Roz Levy. “She was choked.”

“Correct,” Pete agreed. “Her attacker wrapped his hands around her neck and strangled her. See the fingerprints here?”

Amanda leaned in for a closer look. Now that he’d put the thought into her head, she could see the individual strands of bruises that formed the fingers of a hand.

“Carotids,” Pete explained. “Arteries. One on each side of the neck. They deliver oxygenated blood to the brain. Very important. No oxygen, no brain.”

“Right.” Amanda remembered the lesson from her police academy days. They got to watch the men learn how to do choke holds one morning.

“Now.” Pete wrapped both his hands loosely around the woman’s neck. “See where my hands are?” Amanda nodded again. “See how pressing her carotid arteries in order to strangle her exerts enough force on the front of the neck to fracture the hyoid?” Again, she nodded. “Which tells me that this woman was strangled into unconsciousness.”

Amanda looked back at the X-ray. “The fall from the roof wouldn’t break the bone?”

“You’ll see when I open the neck that it’s highly improbable.”

Amanda could not suppress the shudder that came.

“You’re really doing quite well.”

Amanda ignored the compliment. “Could she live with a broken Hy …”

“Hyoid.”

“Right. Could she live with that?”

“Most certainly. A hyoid fracture or break isn’t necessarily fatal. I saw it often in Nam. The officers were trained in hand-to-hand combat, which of course they loved showing off. You hit a man here—” he chopped at his own neck—“with your elbow or even an open hand, and you can stun him or, with enough force, break the bone.” He cupped his hand to his chin like a tweedy college professor. “You feel a very distinctive sensation when you run your fingers along the neck, as if hundreds of bubbles are bursting under the skin. This comes from the air leaking out of the larynx into the tissue planes. In addition to the obvious panic, there’s tremendous pain, bleeding, bruising.” He smiled. “It’s a nasty little injury. Almost totally incapacitating. They’ll just lay there wheezing high up in their throats, praying for someone to help them.”

“Are they able to scream?”

“I’d be shocked if they could manage more than a hoarse whisper, but people surprise you sometimes. Everyone is different.”

Amanda tried to process all this new information. “But what you’re saying is that Lucy Bennett was choked.” She remembered Pete’s earlier terminology. “Strangled to death.”

He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I’ll need to see the lungs. Strangulation causes aspiration pneumonitis—the inhalation of vomit into the lungs. The gastric acids eat into the tissue. This gives us something of a timeline. The more tissue damage, the longer she was alive. Was she strangled into unconsciousness and then thrown off the roof or was she strangled to death and then thrown off the roof?”

“Why does it matter?” Either way, Lucy had been murdered.

“When you catch your perpetrator, you’re going to want to know the details of the crime. That way, you can make sure you’ve got the right guy and not some nut looking for a headline in the newspaper.”

Amanda didn’t see a scenario where she would be catching any perpetrator. She wasn’t even sure why Pete was answering her questions. “But why would the killer give details of the crime? That would just make the case against him stronger.”

“He won’t realize he’s walking into the trap you set.” Pete told her, “You are a lot smarter than he is. Your perpetrator is a man who cannot control himself.”

Amanda considered the statement, which didn’t strike her as wholly true. “He was smart enough to try to cover the crime.”

“Not as smart as you think. Throwing her off the roof was risky. It called attention to the crime. It opened up the possibility of witnesses. Why not leave her in the apartment and let a neighbor report the smell a few days—weeks—later?”

He was right. Amanda remembered the Manson murders, the way the bodies were posed. “Do you think the killer was sending a message?”

“Possibly,” Pete allowed. “We can also assume that he knew the victim fairly well.”

“Why do you say that?”

Pete gripped his hands around the top of the sheet. “Remember to breathe.” He pulled away the covering, exposing the rest of the body.

Amanda put her hand to her mouth. Nothing rushed up her throat. She didn’t pass out. She wasn’t even woozy. As with Roz Levy’s photos, she expected a violent reaction inside her body but was met instead with steely resolve. That same locking sensation from Techwood ran up Amanda’s spine. Her stomach actually stopped churning. Instead of fainting, she felt her vision sharpen.

Amanda had never seen another woman entirely nude before. There was something sad about the way her breasts hung to the side. Her stomach was saggy. Her pubic hair was short, as if it had been trimmed, but the hair on her thighs was grotesquely unshaven. Blood and viscera leaked between her legs. Her body had been pummeled. Bruises blackened her stomach and ribs.

Pete said, “In order to hurt somebody like this, you have to hate them. And hate does not come without familiarity. Just ask my ex-wife. She tried to strangle me once.”

Amanda glanced up at him. There was no suggestion behind his smile. He wasn’t just creepy, he was downright strange. And polite. Amanda could not recall the last conversation she’d had with a man where she wasn’t constantly interrupted or talked over.

Pete said, “You could be very good at this.”

Amanda didn’t know if that was much to write home about. It certainly wasn’t conversation for the dinner table. “Can you tell me anything about the nail polish?”

He took a latex glove out of his pocket. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Amanda didn’t want to, but she took the glove. She tried to shove her hand into the stiff latex.

“Wipe your palm first,” Pete advised.

Amanda wiped her sweaty hand on her skirt. The glove was still a tight fit, but once she managed to force her fingers into the tips, the rest of her hand easily followed.

Gently, she reached out for Lucy’s hand. The skin felt cold through the glove, or maybe Amanda was just imagining that. Instead of being limp, the body was stiff.

“Rigor mortis,” Pete explained. “The skeletal muscles contract, locking the joints. Onset varies depending on temperature and lesser factors. It starts in as little as ten minutes and lasts for up to seventy-two hours.”

“You can tell how long she’s been dead by how stiff she is.”