The shadow of the pen moved, and above us through thick walls muffled gunshots sounded from the indoor range. Emily Steiner’s body was nude. Upon close inspection by the Buncombe County medical examiner, it was determined that she had been sexually assaulted, and large dark shiny patches on her inner thighs, upper chest, and shoulder were areas of missing flesh. She also had been gagged and bound with blaze orange duct tape, her cause of death a single small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head. Ferguson showed slide after slide, and as images of the girl’s pale body in the rushes flashed in the dark, there was silence. No investigator I’d ever met had ever gotten used to maimed and murdered children.
“Do we know the weather conditions in Black Mountain from October one through the seventh?” I asked.
“Overcast. Low forties at night, upper fifties during the day,” Ferguson replied.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly?” I looked at him.
“On the average,” he enunciated slowly as the lights went back on.
“You know, you add the temperatures together and divide by the number of days.”
“Agent Ferguson, any significant fluctuation matters,” I said with a dispassion that belied my growing dislike of this man.
“Even one day of unusually high temperatures, for example, would alter the condition of the body.”
Wesley began a new page of notes. When he paused, he looked at me.
“Dr. Scarpetta, if she was killed shortly after she was abducted, how decomposed should she have been when she was found on October seventh?”
“Under the conditions described, I would expect her to be moderately decomposed,” I said.
“I also would expect insect activity, possibly other postmortem damage, depending on how accessible the body was to carnivores.”
“In other words, she should be in a lot worse shape than this” –he tapped photographs”–if she’d been dead six days.”
“More decomposed than this, yes.”
Perspiration glistened at Wesley’s hairline and had dampened the collar of his starched white shirt. Veins were prominent in his forehead and neck.
“I’m right surprised no dogs got to her.”
“Well, now. Max, I’m not. This ain’t the city, with mangy strays everywhere. We keep our dogs penned in or on a leash.” Marino indulged in his dreadful habit of picking apart his Styrofoam coffee cup.
Her body was so pale it was almost gray, with greenish discoloration in the right lower quadrant. Fingertips were dry, the skin receding from the nails.
There was slippage of her hair and the skin of her feet. I saw no evidence of defense injuries, no cuts, bruises, or broken nails that might indicate a struggle.
“The trees and other vegetation would have shielded her from the sun,” I commented as vague shadows drifted over my thoughts.
“And it doesn’t appear that her wounds bled out much, if at all, otherwise I would expect more predator activity.”
“We’re assuming she was killed somewhere else,” Wesley interpolated.
“Absence of blood, missing clothing, location of the body, and so on would indicate she was molested and shot elsewhere, then dumped. Can you tell if the missing flesh was done postmortem?”
“At or around the time of death,” I replied.
“To remove bite marks again?”
“I can’t tell you that from what I have here.”
“In your opinion, are the injuries similar to Eddie Heath’s?” Wesley referred to the thirteen-year-old boy Temple Gault had murdered in Richmond.
“Yes.” I opened another envelope and withdrew a stack of autopsy photographs bound in rubber bands.
“In both cases we have skin excised from shoulder, upper inner thigh. And Eddie Heath was shot in the head, his body dumped.”
“It also strikes me that despite the gender differences, the body types of the girl and boy are similar. Heath was small, prepubescent.
The Steiner girl is very small, almost prepubescent. ” I pointed out,” A difference worth noting is that there are no crisscrosses, no shallow cuts at the margins of the Steiner girl’s wounds. ”
Marino explained to the North Carolina officers, “In the Heath case, we think Gault first tried to eradicate bite marks by slicing through them with a knife. Then he figures that’s not doing the job so he removes pieces of skin about the size of my shirt pocket. This time, with the little girl he’s snatched, maybe he just cuts out the bite marks and is done with it.”