“Maybe he’s on cocaine or angel dust or something,” Marino said. “That might explain what he did to her, too. It might also account for the Gold Dot ammo, you know, if he’s doing drug deals ón the street.”
“I think that’s the ammo Lucy said something about,” I seemed to recall.
“Hot shit on the street,” Marino said. “Big with dopers.”
“If he was wacked out on drugs,” I pointed out as I placed fibers in another envelope, “then it strikes me as rather improbable his thinking would be so organized. He put out the closed sign, locked the door, didn’t go out the back armed door until he was ready. And maybe washed up.”
“No evidence he did,” Marino let me know. “Nothing in the drains or sink or toilet. No bloody paper towels. No nothing. Not even on the door he opened on his way out of the storeroom, so what I’m thinking is he used somethingmaybe part of his clothing, a paper towel, who knows-to
open the door with so he didn’t get blood or prints on the knob.”
“That’s not exactly disorganized. Not the actions of someone under the influence of drugs.”
“I’d rather think he was on drugs;” Marino said ominously. “The alternative’s a really bad one, I mean if he’s the Incredible Hulk or something. I wish. . :’
He stopped himself and I knew he was about to say he wished Benton were here to offer his experienced opinion. Yet it was so easy to depend on someone else when not all theories required an expert. Every scene and every wound resonated the emotion of the crime, and this homicide was frenzied and it was sexual and it was rage. That became only more apparent when I found large irregular areas of contusion. When I looked at them through a lens I saw small, curvilinear marks.
“Bite marks;” I said.
Marino came over to look.
“What’s left of them. Beaten with blunt force,” I added.
I moved the light around, looking for more and found two on the side of her right palm and one on the bottom of her left foot and two on the bottom of the right.
“Jesus,” Marino muttered in an unnerved tone I rarely heard.
He moved from the wounded hands to the feet, staring.
“What the hell are we dealing with, Doc?”.he asked.
All of the bite marks were contused so badly I could . make out the abrasions of teeth but nothing more. The indentations needed for casting had been eradicated. Nothing was going to assist us. There was too little left to ever make a match.
I swabbed for saliva and began taking one-by-one photographs as I tried to imagine what biting palms and soles might mean to whoever had killed her. Did he know her, after all? Were her hands and feet symbolic to him, a reminder of who she was, just as her face had been?
“So he ain’t totally ignorant about evidence,” Marino said.
“It appears he knows bite marks can identify someone,” I replied as I used a spray hose to wash off the body.
“Bnrrr,” Marino shivered. “That always makes me cold.”
“She doesn’t feel it:’
“I hope like hell she didn’t feel any of what’s happened to her.”
“I think by the time he started in, she was already dead or close to dead, thank you, Lord,” I said.
Her autopsy revealed something else to add to the horror. The bullet that had entered Kim Luong’s neck and hit her carotid had also bruised her spinal cord between the fifth and sixth cervical disks, instantly paralyzing her. She could breathe and talk but not move as he dragged her down the aisle, her blood sweeping shelves, her-useless arms spread wide, limp, unable to clutch the wound in her neck. In my mind I saw the terror in her eyes. I heard her whimper as she wondered what he was going to do to her next, as she watched herself die.
“Goddamn bastard!” I said.
“I’m sorry as fucking hell they switched to lethal injection,” Marino said in a hard, hateful voice. “Assholes like this ought to fry. They ought ‘to choke on cyanide gas till their fucking eyes pop out. Instead, we send them off to a nice little nap.”