“Oh yeah? And I guess he just decided to stop fucking and dance into a knife as a change of pace.”
“According to his brother, and the wife who is still among the living and recovering from a nasty fall that broke her jaw.”
“Takes all kinds. If Baxter’s got the brother in custody, and you’ve got cause of death, why aren’t you working on my case?”
“Come with me.” Morris crooked a finger and walked through a set of swinging doors into another autopsy room. What was left of Bryna Bankhead was the single occupant. She was laid on a stainless steel slab with a thin green sheet covering her to the neck.
That would have been Morris’s touch, Eve thought. He could be very respectful with the dead.
“I imagine she was an attractive young woman once.”
Eve stared down at the ruined face. She thought of the bathroom mirror, the ruthlessly organized drawer of enhancements. “Yeah. Tell me how she died, Morris.”
“I think you know. Your time of death measurement was accurate. She was spared the fear of falling, the insult of the pavement, even the knowledge that she was dying.” He touched sealed fingertips, very gently, to her hair. “She’d ingested, over a period of two and a half to three hours, more than two ounces of the synthetic hormonibital-six, an expensive and very difficult to acquire controlled substance.”
“Street name Whore. An inhibition blocker,” Eve murmured. “Commonly used in date rape once upon a time.”
“Not commonly,” Morris corrected. “Its derivatives are more common, and much less potent and effective. What she had in her was pure. Two ounces, Dallas, would have a street value of more than a quarter million. If you could find it on the street, which you can’t. I haven’t come across traces of it in a body for more than fifteen years.”
“I heard about it when I was in school. Mostly urban legend shit.”
“And most of it was urban legend shit.”
“Did it kill her? An OD?”
“Not by itself. The combination with alcohol was dangerous, but not fatal. But our hero went overboard. Half the amount he slipped her would’ve been enough to ensure her full cooperation. What she had in her would, most likely, have kept her under for eight, maybe ten hours. And she’d wake up with the mother of all hangovers. Headache, vomiting, the shakes, blackouts, lost time. It would take up to seventy-two hours to purge her system.”
It made Eve sick to think it. “She was spared that, too. How?”
“He gave her too much. It would make her lethargic. I’m assuming he wanted a more active fuck because he doctored the last glass of wine with a little cocktail of aneminiphine-colax-B. Wild Rabbit.”
“Covered his bases, didn’t he?” she said quietly.
“It bombards the nervous and respiratory systems, and hers was already compromised. The combination overtaxed her heart. It gave out on her within twenty minutes of ingestion. She’d have been too doped by the earlier doses of Whore to know what was happening.”
“Could she have taken it willingly at that point?”
Gently, Morris lifted the sheet over Bryna’s face. “After the first ounce of inhibition blocker, nothing this girl did was willing.”
“He drugged her, he raped her, and the combination killed her,” Eve said. “Then he tossed her out the window like a used doll in an attempt to cover up what happened.”
“In my esteemed and renowned medical opinion, that’s the scenario.”
“Now make my day, Morris, and tell me he left sperm in her. Tell me you got his DNA.”
Morris’s face went bright as a boy’s. “Oh yeah, I got it. You bring him in, Dallas, and I’ll help you lock the cage.”
Chapter 3
“Sick bastard creep ought to have
his balls scooped off with a rusty spoon.”
Eve settled back in her car. “Don’t hold back, Peabody. Tell me how you really feel.”
“Goddamn it, Dallas, it got to me in there, looking at her on that slab, remembering how pretty she was, how excited when she called her pal about going out to meet this fuckhead. Thinking she was meeting someone romantic and, damn it, nice. Someone nice and the whole time he’s planning to . . .”
“Fuck her to death? I don’t know that he planned that going in, but that’s how it worked out. Could be we get him on Murder One, using the illegals as the murder weapon. More likely, it’s going to Second Degree. And don’t blow your cortex, Peabody, we wrap him on that, add in the sexual assault and his attempt to dispose of the evidence, he’s not going to see daylight again.”