“Hold it here,” I directed Marino.
He moved the flashlight as I directed and I gently turned her head to the right and to the left, palpating her scalp through her hair and checking the back and sides of her neck. She was covered with more knuckle bruises, and more of the round and linear injuries, and also striated abrasions here and there.
“Except for pulling down her pants to get her body temp,” I said to Ham, because I had to be sure, “she was just like this?”
“Other than her jeans being zipped up and buttoned, yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Her sweater and bra were just exactly like that.” He pointed. “Ripped right down the middle.”
“With his bare hands.” Marino squatted beside me. “Damn, he’s strong. Doe, she would have pretty much been dead by the time he got her back here, right?”
“Not quite. She still has tissue response to her injuries. Some bruising.”
“But for all practical purposes, he’s beating the shit out of a dead body,” Marino said. “I mean, she sure as hell wasn’t sitting up and arguing with him. She wasn’t struggling. You can look around and see that. Nothing knocked over or shoved around. No bloody footprints going all over the place.”
“He knew her,” Anderson’s voice was behind me. “It had to be someone she knew. Otherwise he probably would have just shot her and taken the money and run:’
Marino was still down beside me, elbows resting on his big knees, flashlight dangling from one hand. He looked up at Anderson as if she had the intelligence of a banana.
“I didn’t know you was a profiler, too;” he said. “You take some classes or something?”
“Marino, if you can shine it right there,” I said. “It’s hard to see:’
The light illuminated a blood pattern on the body that I hadn’t noticed at first because I was too preoccupied with injuries. Virtually every inch of exposed flesh was smeared with bloody swirls and strokes, as if she had been fingerpainted. The blood was drying and beginning to crack. And there were hairs, the same long, pale hairs stuck to her blood.I pointed this out to Marino. He bent closer.
“Quiet,” I warned him as I felt his reaction and knew what I was showing him.
“Here comes the boss,” Eggleston announced as he stepped carefully through the doorway.
The room was crowded and airless. It looked as if a thrashing storm had rained blood upon it.
“We’re going to string all this,” Ham said to me.
“Recovered a cartridge case,” Eggleston happily passed on to Marino.
“If you want a break; Marino, I’ll hold the flashlight for her.” Ham was trying to make up for his unpardonable sin.
“I think it’s fairly obvious she was lying right here, immobile, when he beat her,” I said, because I didn’t think stringing was necessary in this case.
“Stringing will tell us for sure,” he promised.
It was an old French technique in which one end of a string was taped at a bloodstain, and the other at the geometrically computed origin of the blood. This was done multiple times, resulting in a three-dimensional string model that showed how many blows were struck and where the victim was when they were.
“There’s too many people in here,” I loudly said.
Sweat was rolling down Marino’s face. I could feel his body heat and smell his breath as he worked close to me.
“Get this to Interpol right away,” I told him in a voice no one else could hear.
“No kidding.”
“Speer three-eighty. Ever heard of it?” Eggleston said to Marino.
“Yeah. High-performance shit. Gold Dot,” Marino replied. “That don’t fit, at all.”
I got out my chemical thermometer and set it on top of a box of paper plates to get the ambient temperature.
“I can already tell you what it is, Doc,” Ham said. “Seventy-five-point-nine back here. It’s warm.”
Marino was moving the flashlight as my hands and eyes moved over the body.
“Normal people don’t get Speer ammo,” he was saying. “You’re talking ten, eleven bucks for á box of twenty. Not to mention, your gun can’t be a piece of shit or the damn thing will blow apart in your hand.”