‘You think he would come here?’ she matter-of-factly stated.
‘I’m not sure what to think except that he clearly had some need to contact me.’ I closed the file and got up. ‘And he has.’
At not quite half past eight, Wingo rolled the body onto the floor scale, and we began what I knew would be a very long and painstaking examination. The torso weighed forty-six pounds and was twenty-one inches in length. Livormortis was faint posteriorly, meaning when her circulation had quit, blood had settled according to gravity, placing her on her back for hours or days after death. I could not look at her without seeing the savaged image on my computer screen, and believed it and the torso before me were the same.
‘How big do you think she was?’ Wingo glanced at me as he parallel parked the gurney next to the first autopsy table.
‘We’ll use heights of lumbar vertebrae to estimate height, since we obviously don’t have tibias, femurs,’ I said, tying a plastic apron over my gown. ‘But she looks small. Frail, actually.’
Moments later, X-rays had finished processing and he was attaching them to light boxes. What I saw told a story that did not seem to make sense. The faces of the pubic symphysis, or the surfaces where one pubis joins the other, were no longer rugged and ridged, as in youth. Instead, bone was badly eroded with irregular, lipped margins. More X-rays revealed sternal rib ends with irregular bony growths, the bone very thin-walled with sharp edges, and there were degenerative changes to the lumbosacral vertebrae, as well.
Wingo was no anthropologist, but he saw the obvious, too.
‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think we got her films mixed up with somebody else’s,’ he said.
‘This lady’s old,’ I said.
‘How old, would you guess?’
‘I don’t like to guess.’ I was studying her X-rays. ‘But I’d say seventy, at least. Or to play it really safe, between sixty-five and eighty. Come on. Let’s go through trash for a while.’
The next two hours were spent sifting through a large garbage bag of trash from the landfill that had been directly under and around the body. The garbage bag I believed she had been in was black, thirty-gallon size, and had been sealed with a yellow plastic-toothed tie. Wearing masks and gloves, Wingo and I picked through shredded tire and the fluff from upholstery stuffing that was used as a cover in the landfill. We examined countless tatters of slimy plastic and paper, picking out maggots and dead flies and dropping them into a carton.
Our treasures were few, a blue button that was probably unrelated, and, oddly, a child’s tooth, which I imagined was tossed, a coin left under a pillow. We found a mangled comb, a flattened battery, several shards of broken china, a tangled wire coat hanger, and the cap of a Bic pen. Mostly, it was rubber, fluff, torn black plastic and soggy paper that we threw into a garbage can. Then we circled bright lights around the table and centered her on a clean white sheet.
Using a lens, I began going over her an inch at a time, her flesh a microscopic landfill of debris. With forceps, I collected pale fibers from the dark bloody stump that once had been her neck, and I found hairs, three of them, grayish-white, about fourteen inches long, adhering to dried blood, posteriorly.
‘I need another envelope.’ I said to Wingo as I came across something else I did not expect.
Embedded in the ends of each humerus, or the bone of the upper arm, and also in margins of muscle around it were more fibers and tiny fragments of fabric that looked pale blue, meaning the saw had to have gone through it.
‘She was dismembered through her clothes or something else she was wrapped in,’ I said, startled.
Wingo stopped what he was doing and looked at me. ‘The others weren’t.’
Those victims appeared to have been nude when they were sawn apart. He made more notes as I moved on, peering through the lens.
‘Fibers and bits of fabric are also embedded in either femur.’ I looked more closely.