Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

Diane Bray’s blood cries out in drips and droplets, splashes and smears. It tattles on who did what and how and in some instances, why. The severity of a beating affects the velocity and volume of blood flying through the air. Cast-off blood from the backswing of a weapon tells the number of blows, which in this case were at least fifty-six. That is as pre­cisely as we can calculate, because some blood spatters over­lay other spatters and sorting out how many might be on top of each other is like trying to figure out how many times a hammer struck a nail to drive it into a tree. The number of blows mapped in this room are consistent with what Bray’s body told me. But again, so many fractures overlaid others and so much bone was utterly crushed that I, too, lost count. Hate. Incredible lust and rage.

There has been no attempt to clean up what happened in the master bedroom, and what Berger and I find contrasts pro­foundly with the stillness and sterility of the rest of the house. First, there is what looks like a massive bright pink web spun by crime scene technicians who have used a method called stringing to find the trajectories of blood droplets that are sim­ply everywhere. The objective is to determine distance, veloc­ity and angle, to conjure up through a mathematical model the exact position of Bray’s body when each blow was struck. The results look like a strange modern art design, a weird fuchsia geometry that leads the eye to walls, ceiling, floor, antique furniture and the four ornate mirrors where Bray once ad­mired her spectacular, sensual beauty. Coagulated puddles of blood on the floor are now hard and thick like dried molasses, and the king-size bed where Bray’s body was so crudely dis­played looks as if someone dashed cans of black paint across the bare mattress.

I feel Berger’s reaction as she stares. She is silent as she absorbs what is ghastly, truly incomprehensible. She becomes charged with a peculiar energy that only people, especially women, who battle violence for a living can really under­stand. “Where are the bed linens?” Berger opens the accor­dion file. “Were they turned in to the labs?”

“We never found them,” I reply, and I am reminded of the motel room at the campground. Those bed linens are missing, too. Chandonne claims bed linens disappeared from his apart­ment in Paris, I recall his saying.

“Removed before or after she was killed?” Berger slips photographs out of an envelope.

“Before. That’s apparent from the bloody transfers on the bare mattress.” I step inside the room, moving around strings that point accusingly at Chandonne’s crime like long slender fingers. I show Berger unusual parallel smears on the mat- tress, the bloody stripes transferred by the coil handle of the chipping hammer when Chandonne set it down on the mat­tress between or after blows. Berger doesn’t see the pattern at first. She stares, slightly frowning as I decipher a chaos of dark stains that are handprints and smears where I believe Chandonne’s knees may have been as he was straddling the body and acting out his horrific sexual fantasies. “These pat­terns wouldn’t have been transferred to the mattress if there were linens on the bed at the time of the attack,” I explain.

Berger studies a photograph of Bray on her back, sprawled across the middle of the mattress, black corduroy pants and belt on, but no shoes and socks, naked from the waist up, a smashed gold watch on her left wrist. A gold ring on her bat­tered right hand is driven into the bone of her finger.

“So either there were no linens on the bed at the time, or he removed them for some reason,” I add.

“I’m trying to envision that.” Berger scans the mattress. “He’s in the house. He’s forcing her down the hallway, back to this area, to the bedroom. There’s no sign of a struggleno evidence he injured her until they get in here and then boom! All hell breaks loose. My question is this: He gets her back here and then says, ‘Hey, wait a second while I strip the bed’ ? He takes time to do that?”

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