BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“Transferred,” I said. “The lighter, the money, all of it. Out of Thomas’s pockets and stuffed inside the pockets of the designer jeans his dead brother-if it is his brotherwas wearing when his body turned up at the Richmond port.’,

“Pocket contents swapped, but no form of identification turned up.”

“Yes,” I said. “And we don’t know that all of this change of clothing happened after Thomas was dead. That’s rather cumbersome. Better to force your victim to undress.”

“Yes.” Mirot nodded. “I was coming around to that. Exchange clothes that way before killing the person. Both people undress.”

I thought of the inside-out underwear, the grit on the naked knees and buttocks. The scuffs on the back of the shoes might have been caused later when Thomas was drowned, his body dragged into the corner of the container.

“How many crewmen was the Sirius supposed to have?” I asked.

It was Marino who answered. “There was seven on the list. All- of them was questioned, but not by me since I don’t speak the language. Some guy in customs had the honors.”

“The crewmen all knew each other?” I asked.

“No;’ Talley replied. “Which isn’t unusual when you consider that these ships only earn money when they’re moving. Two weeks out to sea, two weeks back, nonstop,

there’s going to be rotating crew. Not to mention, you’re talking about the kind of guys who never stay with anything very long, so you could have a crew of seven and only two of them might have sailed together before.”

“Same seven men on board when the ship sailed back to Antwerp?” I asked.

“According to Joe Shaw,” Marino replied, “none of them ever left the Richmond port. Ate and slept on their ship, unloaded and was gone.”

“Ah,” Talley said. “But that’s not quite the case. One of them supposedly had a family emergency. The shipping agent took him to the Richmond airport but never actually saw him get on the plane. The name on his seaman’s book was Pascal Uger. This Monsieur Uger doesn’t seem to exist and quite possibly was Thomas’s alias, the one he was using when he was killed, the alias Loup-Garou may have taken aftei he drowned him.”

“I’m having trouble envisioning this deranged serial killer as Thomas Chandonne’s brother,” I said. “What makes you so certain?”

“The cover-up tattoo, as we’ve said;” Talley replied. “Your most recent information about the details of Kim Luong’s murder. The beating, biting, the way she was undressed, all the rest of it. A very, very unique and horrific M.O. When Thomas was a boy, Dr. Scarpetta, he used to tell his- classmates he had an older brother who was an espéee de sale gorille. A stupid, ugly monkey who had to live at home.”

“This killer isn’t stupid;’ I said.

“Not hardly,” Mirot agreed.

“We can’t find any record of this brother. Not his name, nothing,” Talley said. “But we believe he exists.”

“You’ll understand all of this better when we go through the cases,” Mirot added.

“I’d like to review them now,” I said.

34

Jay Talley picked up the accordion folder and withdrew numerous thick files. He set them on the coffee table in front of me.

“We’ve translated them into English,” he said. “All the autopsies were done at the Institut Médico-Légal in Paris.”

I began to go through them. Each victim ‘had been beaten beyond recognition, and autopsy photographs and reports showed bruising imprints and stellate lacerations where the skin had split when a blow was struck with some type of weapon that I didn’t believe was the same type as the one used on Kim Luong.

“The punched-out areas of her skull,” I commented as I turned pages, “a hammer, something like that. I presume no weapon was found?”

“No,” Talley said.

All facial structures were broken. There were subdural hematomas, bleeding over the brain and into the chest cavity. The victims’ ages ranged from twenty-one to,fifty-two. Each had multiple bite marks.

“Massive comminuted fractures of the left parietal bone, depressed fractures that drove the inner table of the skull into underlying brain;’ I scanned out loud, flipping through one autopsy protocol after another. “Bilateral subdural hematomata. Disruption of cerebral tissue beneath with accompanying subarachnoid hemorrhaging . . . eggshelllike fractures . . . fracture of the right frontal bone extending down the midline into the right parietal bone . . . Clotting suggests survival time of at least six minutes from the time the injury was inflicted . . .”

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