Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

The photo expert teams must attempt to match up, as if they were placing jigsaw pieces into a puzzle, the various parts with the parts missing from victims who’d come before Allison Norris. If they had any additional matches, this could speak volumes about the killer. From there, further study would go forward and decisions regarding exhumations made. They hoped such measures could be avoided.

After suiting up, Jessica had gone straight for the freezer cabinet housing what remained of Allison Norris, and now the body, such as it was, lay before her. Two assisting physicians, internists who’d aided Dr. Coudriet in the initial autopsy, were at Jessica’s disposal. The two men stood nearby, ready to assist in any way possible, or so she’d been told.

What she hoped to gain by a second examination, she didn’t herself know, so explaining it to the two internists wasn’t particularly successful. She merely stated-in an effort to cool the two anxious interns and their inquiring minds-”I see no reason for a second full-fledged autopsy.”

“ Good,” one responded in knee-jerk fashion.

“ We’ll call my examination merely a routine check, for the record and my FBI protocol.” She said this for the microphone as well as for the worried pair, who had donned surgical masks and garb, as had Jessica.

One of the men seemed to buy it. She was as cursory as possible, sensing that both Drs. Thorn and Powers were anxious and appeared to have been coached into a reticent silence.

Coudriet’s two men, Theodore Thorn and Owen Powers, both capable young interns, explained that they had felt duty-bound to be on hand. Still, she had little doubt that duty-bound, properly translated, meant that Coudriet had ordered them to be there.

All was routine until Jessica questioned the findings on the throat and the single wrist of the girl. She saw the ligature marks just as Coudriet and his associates had before her-ugly discoloration scars about the neck, indicating that the girl was strangled. Of this, there was no doubt. But the ligature marks were soft compared with the thumb tracks embedded in the tissue at the larynx. Some things even the ocean couldn’t completely wipe away, such as a broken hyoid bone.

Jessica reached up and turned off the camera that was taping the secondary autopsy; she did so lavishly enough to tell the two men that what she was about to say was off the record. “This monster so thrusted his thumbs into the girl’s throat that it scarred and dented tissue far below the surface, so far below that it’s clear even after several layers of skin have sloughed away and nearly a week has gone by since discovery of the body; and it’s estimated that the body’s time in the water was an astounding three and a half to four weeks. Doesn’t that strike anyone as odd, that it took so long for the body to surface?”

Coudriet’s men remained silent, one of them nodding.

Seeing they had no comment, she switched the TV camera back on in just as ceremonious a fashion as before, a bit angry at the two crows who stood across from her. Now on the record, she continued, “The killer rammed his large thumbs deep into her throat. A closer look tells me that the girl’s entire pharynx was bruised and swollen before death.”

The pharynx is the tubelike structure that acts as both the digestive tract and the breathing hose. It also works in speech, changing shape to allow a person to form vowel sounds. Jessica momentarily wondered what kind of sounds Allison might have emitted under such brute force applied to the muscle and cartilage and membrane. The entire structure divides into three distinct regions, the second being the oropharynx, which extends from the soft palate to the level of the hyoid bone just below the lower jaw.

It was this area that Jessica took great time and care in examining, causing Thorn and Powers to stare and sweat beneath their surgical gowns. She asked for one of them to grab the Polaroid nearby and snap close-ups of the area she had opened with her scalpel. After Powers snapped three shots, Jessica asked Thorn to hold up a sterile tray to receive the small samplings she now sliced from the larynx tissue.

“ I thought this was going to be a cursory exam,” said Powers.

Jessica shot back, “It is.” Thorn abruptly said, “Dr. Coudriet was aware of the condition of the throat.”

“ But he chose to examine it only externally?”

“ He examined it by hand, coming up from the breastplate after the Y-cut was made below. He knew she’d been choked to death before she drowned, if that’s what you’re… wondering. And besides, there was pressure on to do as little as possible and still call it an autopsy. Allison Norris’s father’s a very influential man.”

“ Yes, well, if that’s the case, why wasn’t it reported as a strangulation death?”

“ It was, eventually.” She bit her lip and nodded. “I see.” Coudriet was no doubt under some pressure at the time and saw little difference in whether the dead girl was strangled by rope or by hand or drowned, since all had the same result. This explained his qualifying language in the report.

Jessica next repeated her procedure for the laryngophar- ynx, which extends from the base of the hyoid bone to the esophagus. The entire region, up and down, was badly bruised, not simply from the ugly blemish caused by the attempt to mask rope burns, but from powerful hands, the hands of a sociopath who had killed many times before until the routine and habit of his killing had begun to actually bore him. so that now he slowly and lastingly strangled his victims, no doubt in a controlled fashion, in controlled time and in a controlled space-his space- where he felt most comfortable and had a great deal of time to carry out a lingering murder. He then obviously dumped the body into the ocean-but where, to keep it from surfacing for so long?

Thorn and Powers exhibited signs of boredom themselves now. They’d been up and down this territory before, no doubt wondering what volumes of information she hoped to locate in the larynx, or voice box.

“ The hyoid bone,” she said, as if to allay any doubts, “while fractured, remains very much intact, indicating some sort of controlled strangulation, in which the killer took his evil time with the strangulation process. Patient, composed, self-possessed strangulation. The killer shows all the characteristics of an organized murderer who had likely fantasized killing for years before he ever attempted it, and who, once he did attempt the thing, began to meticulously work out the particulars in cool and cunning detail.”

“ You got all that from looking at the throat?” asked a befuddled-looking Thorn, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose.

She ignored his question and continued, “Now that he has any number of killings behind him, it has become a ritualized killing sport, each step as important as the next, and nothing left to chance or forgetfulness.”

She explored the wounds further, no simple task given the bloated condition of the skin; but the freezer had at least held the decay in check. She used a stainless-steel probe and handheld magnifying glass. “He’s devised the perfect murders, so far as he is concerned. And in conceiving such murders and carrying them out, he’s given over his soul to whatever demons drive him.” Yes, the hyoid bone was fractured-as was reported in the original autopsy-indicative of strangulation, but she’d seen many a crushed hyoid bone, and this one was far from crushed. In fact, it was near intact. She so noted this fact for the record, which disquieted Thorn and Powers a bit. Jessica was used to posing questions and scenarios as she worked; it had become part of her modus operandi.

She didn’t bother now with asking Thorn or Powers anything further, but she did ask the microphone and camera, ‘ ‘Could the victim have been alive yet after the fracture of the hyoid? It was quite certain that she was, since the lungs, too, were full of water when the body was discovered, although in and of itself this fact does not prove death by drowning. Clearly, more tests need to be run, but my most educated guess is running along the lines of a torture murder of the sort the FBI rates on a scale of one to ten, Mad Matthew Matisak having been a Tort. 9. This fiend, if he is slowly strangling the life from his victims, only to allow them to resurface from death as it were, only to put them through the torment again, and repeatedly, ranks right up there with the blood-drinking vampire killer. While he does not appear to have cannibalized or drunk his victim’s blood, he obviously breathes in their suffering to empower himself.”