There was a dissecting microscope on top of an old metal desk, and I set the magnification to twenty and adjusted the illuminator. I could scarcely believe it when I saw the tiny flattened and twisted silvery shavings in the bright circle of light.
‘This is very important,’ I started talking fast. ‘I’m going to pack them in cotton inside an evidence container, and we need to make double sure there’s no other debris like this in any of the other wounds. To the naked eye, it flashes like a piece of silver glitter.’
‘Transferred from the weapon?’
Gerde was excited, too, and he came over to take a look.
‘They were embedded deep inside the wound to her neck. So yes, I’d say that was a transfer, similar to what I found in the Warrenton case,’ I answered him.
‘And we know what about that?’
‘A magnesium turning,’ I answered. ‘And we don’t mention anything about this to anyone. We don’t want this leaking to the press. I’ll let Benton and McGovern know.’
‘You got it,’ he said with feeling.
There were twenty-seven wounds, and after a painful scrutinizing of all of them, we found no other bits of the shiny metal, and this struck me as a little puzzling since I had assumed the throat had been cut last. If that were the case, why wasn’t the turning transferred to an earlier wound? I believed it would have been, especially in those instances when the knife had penetrated up to the guard and was swiped clean by muscular and elastic tissue as the blade is withdrawn.
‘Not impossible but inconsistent,’ I said to Gerde as I began measuring the cut to the throat. ‘Six and three-quarters inches long,’ I said, jotting it down on a body diagram. ‘Shallow up around the right ear, then deep, through the strap muscles and trachea, then shallow again higher on the opposite side of the neck. Consistent with the knife drawn across the neck from behind, by a left-handed assailant.’
It was almost two P.M. when we finally began washing the body, and for minutes, water draining through the steel tabletop was bright red. I scrubbed stubborn blood with a big soft sponge, and her wounds seemed even more gaping and mutilating when her taut brown skin was clean. Kellie Shephard had been a beautiful woman, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion as smooth as polished wood. She was five-foot-eight, with a lean, athletic figure. Her fingernails were unpainted, and she had been wearing no jewelry when she was found.
When we opened her up, her pierced chest cavity was filled with almost a liter of blood that had hemorrhaged from the great vessels leading to and from her heart and from her lungs. After receiving these injuries, she would have bled to death in, at the most, minutes, and I placed the timing of those attacks later in the struggle, when she was weakening and slowing down. The angles of those wounds were slight enough for me to suspect she had been moving very little on the floor when they had been inflicted from above. Then she had managed to roll over, perhaps in her last dying effort to protect herself, and I conjectured that this was when her throat was slashed.
‘Someone should have had an awful lot of blood on him,’ I commented as I began measuring the cuts to the hands.
‘No kidding.’
‘He had to clean up somewhere. You don’t walk into a motel lobby looking like that.’
‘Unless he lives around here.’
‘Or got into his vehicle and hoped he didn’t get pulled for something.’
‘She’s got a little brownish fluid in her stomach.’
‘So she hadn’t eaten recently, probably not since dinner, at any rate,’ I said. ‘I guess we need to find out if her bed was unmade.’
I was getting an image of a woman asleep when something happened either late Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday morning. For some reason, she got up and turned off the alarm and unlocked the back door. Gerde and I used surgical staples to close the Y incision at shortly past four. I cleaned up in the morgue’s small dressing room, where a mannikin used for staging violent deaths in court was in a state of disarray and undress on the shower floor.