BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“Deputy Chief Bray has me on special assignment,” Marino grimly replied into microphones. “I’ll be heading up this investigation.”

“He’s finished;” Bray said to me.

“He won’t go quietly. You’ll never hear so much noise in your life;” I promised her as I walked off.

24

Marino met me at the store’s front door. When we stepped inside, the first person we saw was Anderson. She stood in front of the counter, wrapping the empty cash drawer in brown paper as crime-scene technician Al Eggleston dusted the cash register for prints. Anderson looked surprised and unhappy when she saw us.

“What are you doing here?” she confronted Marino.

“Came in to buy a six-pack. How you doin’, Eggleston?”

“Same-o, same-o, Pete.”

“We’re not ready for you yet,” Anderson said to me.

I ignored her and wondered how much damage she’d already done to the scene. Thank God, Eggleston was doing the important work. I immediately noticed the overturned chair behind the counter.

“Was the chair like that when the police got here?” I asked Eggleston.

“Far as I know.”

Anderson abruptly went out of the store, probably to find Bray.

“Uh-oh,” Marino said. “Tattletale.”

“You ain’t kidding.”

On the wall behind the counter were arcs of blood from an arterial hemorrhage.

“Glad you’re here, Pete, but you’re poking a snake with a stick.”

The sweeping trail led around the counter and through the aisle farthest from the store’s front door.

“Marino, come here,” I said.

“Hey, Eggleston, see if you can find the guy’s DNA somewhere. Put it in a little bottle and maybe we can grow his clone in the lab,” Marino said as he walked over to me. “Then we’ll know who the hell he is.”

“You’re a rocket scientist, Pete.”

I pointed out the arcs of blood made by the rise and fall of the systolic rhythm of Kim Luong’s heart as she had bled to death through her carotid. The blood was low to the floor and stretched over some twenty feet of shelves stocked with paper towels, toilet paper and other household needs.

“Jesus Christ,” Marino said as the significance hit him. “He’s dragging her while she’s spurting blood everywhere?”

“Yes.”

“How long would she have survived, bleeding like that?”

“Minutes,” I said. “Ten at the most.”

She had left no other bloody wake except the faint fringed and narrow parallel impressions made by her hair and fingers as they dragged through her blood. I envisioned him pulling her feet first, her arms opening like wings filled with air, her hair trailing like feathers.

“He had her by the ankles,” I said. “She has long hair.”

Anderson had stepped back inside and was watching us, and I hated it when I had to guard every word I said around the police. But it happened. Over the years, I had worked with cops who were terrible leaks and I had no choice but to treat them like the enemy.

“She sure as hell didn’t die right away,” Marino added.

“A hole in your carotid isn’t immediately disabling,” I told him. “You can have your throat cut and still call nineone-one. She shouldn’t have been immediately immobilized, but clearly she was.”

The systolic sweeps got lower and fainter the further down the aisle we went, and I noted that small blood spatters were dry while larger amounts of blood were congealing. We followed streaks and smears past coolers full of beer, then through the doorway leading into the storeroom where crime-scene technician Gary Ham was on his knees while another officer took photographs, their backs to me, blocking my view.

When I stepped around them, I was stunned. Kim Luong’s blue jeans and panties had been pulled down to her knees, a chemical thermometer inserted into her rectum. Ham looked up at me and he froze like someone caught stealing. We had worked together for years.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said to him in a hard tone he had never heard from me.

“Getting her temp, Doc;” Ham said.

“Did you swab lair before inserting the thermometer? In the event she was sodomized?” I demanded in the same angry voice as Marino made his way around me and stared at the body.