It was impossible for me to sit still. In my bedroom I finally stripped and. washed myself with a cloth. I put on a robe and slippers as I tried to think what I could d to occupy my tune, because I was not one to allow empty space in my mind. I fantasized there was a message from Lucy but I couldn’t access it right now. I wrote letters and end up crumpling them and tossing them into the fire. I watched the paper brown around the edges, ignite and turn black. Sleet smacked, and it began to get colder inside.
The temperature in my house slowly dropped, hours slipping deeper into the still morning. I tried to sleep and couldn’t get warm. My mind wouldn’t get still. My thoughts bounced from Lucy to Benton -to the awful scene where I’d just been. I saw a hemorrhaging woman dragged across the floor, and small owl eyes staring out of rotting flesh. I shifted positions continually. Lucy did not call.
Fear picked at my loose threads when I looked out the window into my dark backyard. -My heath fogged the glass, and the click-click of sleet turned into knitting needles when I dozed, to my mother knitting in Miami when my father was dying, knitting endless scarves for the poor in some cold place. Not a single car went by. I called Rita at the guard booth. She didn’t answer.
My eyes blurred as I tried to drift off again at 3:00 A.M. Tree branches cracked like guns going off, and in the distance a train lumbered along the river. Its forlorn horn seemed to set the pitch for a percussion of screeching, clanking and rumbling that made me more uneasy. I lay in the dark, a comforter wrapped around me, and when daylight bruised the horizon, the power came back on. Marino called minutes later.
“What time you want me to pick you up?” he asked, his voice hoarse from sleep.
“Pick me up for what?” I blearily walked into the kitchen to make coffee.
“Work.”
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“You looked out the window, Doc?” he asked. “No way you’re going anywhere in that Nazi-mobile of yours.”
“I’ve told you not to say that. It’s not funny.”
I went to the window and opened the blinds. The world was rock candy and glass coating every shrub and tree. Grass was a thick, stiff carpet. Icicles bared, long teeth from the eaves, and I knew my car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I need a ride:’
Marino’s big truck with its big chains churned up Richmond’s roads for almost an hour before we reached my office. There wasn’t another car in the lot. We carefully made our way into the building, our feet almost going out from under us several times because the pavement was glazed and we were the first to challenge it. I draped my coat over my chair in my office and both of us headed to the locker rooms to change.
The rescue squad had used a transportable autopsy table so we didn’t have to lift the body off a gurney.We unzipped the pouch in the vast silence of this empty theater of death and opened the bloody sheets. Under the scrutiny of overhead diffused light, her wounds looked even more terrible. I pulled a fluorescent magnifying lamp closer, adjusting its arm and peering through the lens.Her magnified skin was a desert of dried, cracked blood and canyons of gashes and gaping wounds. I collected hairs, dozens of them, those pale blond, baby-fine hairs. Most were six or seven or eight inches long. They adhered to her belly, shoulders and breasts. I didn’t find any on her face, and I placed the hairs inside a paper envelope to keep them dry.Hours were thieves slipping past, stealing the morning, and no matter how hard I tried to find an explanation for the ripped tightly knit sweater and underwire bra, there wasn’t another one except the truth. The killer had done it with his bare hands.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” I said. “You’re talking about incredible strength.”