BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“We got too damn many people in here!” Marino announced. “Cooper, Jenkins, go find something useful to

do.”

He jerked his thumb at the open doorway. They stared at him. One of them started to say something.

“Swallow it, Cooper,” Marino told him. “And give me the camera. And maybe you followed orders by securing the scene, but you weren’t told to work the damn scene. What? Couldn’t resist seeing your deputy chief like this? That the deal? How many other assholes been in here gawking?”

“Wait a minute . . .” Jenkins protested.

Marino snatched the Nikon out of his hands.

“Give me your radio,” Marino snapped.

Jenkins reluctantly detached it from his duty belt and handed that over to him, too.

“Go,” Marino said.

“Captain, I can’t leave without my radio.”

“I just gave you permission.”

No one dared remind Marino that he had been suspended. Jenkins and Cooper left in a hurry.

“Sons of bitches,” Marino declared in their wake.

I turned Bray’s body on its side. Rigor mortis was complete, suggesting she had been dead at least six hours. I pulled down her pants and swabbed her rectum for seminal fluid before inserting the thermometer.

“I need a detective and some crime-scene techs,” Marino was saying on the air.

“Unit nine, what’s the address?”

“The one in progress,” Marino cryptically replied.

“Ten-four, unit nine,” said the dispatcher, a woman.

“Minny,” Marino said to me.

I waited for an explanation.

“We go way back. She’s my radio room snitch,” he said.

I withdrew the thermometer and held it up.

“Eighty-eight-point-one,” I said. “The body usually cools about one and a half degrees an hour for the first eight hours. But she’s going to cool a little quicker because she’s partially unclothed. It’s what? Maybe seventy degrees in here?”

“I don’t know. I’m burning up,” he said. “For sure she was murdered last night, that much we know.”

“Her stomach contents may tell us more,” I said. “Do we have any idea how the killer got in?”

“I’m gonna check out the doors and windows after we finish up in here.”

“Long linear lacerations,” ,I said, touching her wounds and looking for any trace evidence that might not make it to the morgue. “Like a tire iron. Then there are these punched-out areas, too. Everywhere.”

“Could be the end of the tire iron,” Marino said, looking on.

“But what made this?” I asked.

In several places on the mattress, blood had been transferred from some object that left a striped pattern reminiscent of a plowed field. The stripes were approximately an inch and a half long with maybe an eighth of an inch of space between them, the total surface area of each transfer about the size of my palm.

“Make sure we check the drains for blood,” I said as voices sounded down the hall.

“Hope that’s the Breakfast Boys,” Marino said, referring to Ham and Eggleston.

They showed up carrying large Pelican cases.

“You got any idea what the hell’s going on?” Marino asked them.

The two crime-scene technicians stared.

“Mother of God,” Ham finally said.

“Does anyone have any idea what happened here?” Eggleston asked, his eyes fixed on what was left of Bray on the bed.

“You know about as much as we do,” Marino replied. “Why weren’t you-called earlier?”

“I’m surprised you found out,” Ham said. “No one told us until now.”

“I got my sources,” Marino said.

“Who tipped the media?” I asked. .

“I guess they got their sources, too,” said Eggleston.

He and Ham began opening the cases and setting up lights. Marino’s unit number blared from his purloined radio, startling both of us.

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Nine,” he said over the air.

Ham and Eggleston put on gray binocular magnifiers, or “Luke Skywalkers,” as the cops called them.

“Unit nine, ten-five three-fourteen,” the radio came back.

Three-fourteen, you out there?” Marino said.

“Need you to step outside;” a voice returned.

“That’s a ten-ten;’ Marino said, refusing.

The techs began taking measurements in millimeters with additional magnifiers that looked rather much like jeweler’s lenses. The binocular headsets alone could magnify only three-and-a-half, and some blood spatters were too small for that.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *