Death by asphyxiation takes only several minutes. That’s a very long time when every cell in your body is screaming for air.
“You can come on in, Doc,” the officer with the video camera was saying. “I’ve got all this on film.”
Watching where I walked, I approached the bed, set my bag on the floor and got out a pair of surgical gloves. Next I got out my camera and took several photographs of the body in situ. Her face was grotesque, swollen beyond recognition and a dark bluish purple from the suffusion of blood caused by the tight ligature around her neck. Bloody fluid had leaked from her nose and mouth, staining the sheet. Her straw-blond hair was in disarray. She was moderately tall, no less than five foot seven, and considerably fleshier than the younger version captured in the photographs down the hall.
Her physical appearance was important because the absence of a pattern was becoming a pattern. The four strangling victims seemed to have had no physical characteristics in common, not even race. The third victim was black and very slender. The first victim was a redhead and plump, the second a brunette and petite. They had different professions: a schoolteacher, a freelance writer, a receptionist, and now a physician. They lived in different areas of the city.
Fetching a long chemical thermometer from my bag, I took the temperature of the room, then of her body. The air was 71 degrees, her body 93.5. Time of death is more elusive than most people think. It can’t be pinned down exactly unless the death was witnessed or the victim’s Timex stopped ticking. But Lori Petersen had been dead no more than three hours. Her body had been cooling between one and two degrees per hour, and rigor had started in the small muscles.
I looked for any obvious trace evidence that might not survive the trip to the morgue. There were no loose hairs on the skin, but I found a multitude of fibers, most of which, no doubt, were from the bedcovers. With forceps I collected a sampling of them, minuscule whitish ones and several seeming to have come from a dark blue or black material. These I placed in small metal evidence buttons. The most obvious evidence was the musky smell, the patches of a residue, transparent and dried like glue, on the upper front and back of her legs.
Seminal fluid was present in all of the cases, yet it was of little serological value. The assailant was one of the twenty percent of the population who enjoyed the distinction of being a nonsecreter. This meant his blood-type antigens could not be found in his other body fluids, such as saliva or semen or sweat. Absent a blood sample, in other words, he couldn’t be typed. He could have been A, B, AB or anything.
As recently as two years earlier, the killer’s nonsecreter status would have been a crushing blow to the forensic investigation. But now there was DNA profiling, newly introduced and potentially significant enough to identify an assailant to the exclusion of all other human beings, provided the police caught him first and obtained biological samples and he didn’t have an identical twin.
Marino was inside the bedroom right behind me.
“The bathroom window,” he said, looking at the body. “Well, according to the husband in there,” jerking a thumb in the direction of the kitchen, “the reason it was unlocked’s because he unlocked it last weekend.”
I just listened.
“He says that bathroom’s hardly ever used, unless they got company. Seems he was replacing the screen last weekend, says it’s possible he forgot to relock the window when he finished. The bathroom’s not used all week. She” he glanced again at the body- “has no reason to give it a thought, just assumes it’s locked.”
A pause. “Kind of interesting the only window the killer tried, it appears, was that window. The one unlocked. The screens to the rest of ’em aren’t cut.”
“How many windows are in the back of the house?” I asked.
“Three. In the kitchen, the half bath and the bathroom in here.”
“And all of them have slide-up sashes with a latch lock at the top?”