P. Parrish - The Little Death

She pushed away from the steel table. “Which part of him do you want to see first?” she asked.

“Either.”

Dr. Steffel motioned for them to follow her into a second room lined with freezers. She opened one, pulled out a gurney, and threw back the blue sheet.

The body lay chest up. It had been washed, and the skin was pale gray, the chest, arms, and legs knotted with muscle, the belly flat. Louis swallowed back a rise of bile.

There was something surreal about a body that was in perfect shape but had only a ragged stump of a neck. It looked like a toppled Greek statue.

“You’ll notice a pronounced lack of color,” Dr. Steffel said. “The blood loss was massive.”

Louis stepped closer. There were no other wounds, except for some small lacerations just visible over the shoulder. But the kneecaps were bruised and torn.

“May I?” Louis asked, and nodded to a hand.

“Be my guest,” Dr. Steffel said.

Louis took Durand’s wrist and turned it so he could see the palm. It was shredded like the knees.

“His knees and palms are torn up,” Louis said, for Mel’s benefit. “Like he was crawling around.”

“Take a look at this,” Dr. Steffel said. She turned the body onto its side to expose the back. The red marks extended all the way around the torso. Thickest across the middle of the back, they formed a road map of welts, cuts, and tattered skin.

“It looks like he was whipped across the back,” Louis said.

“How bad?” Mel asked.

“Bad.”

Dr. Steffel lowered the body back to the gurney. Louis looked again at the bruised knees. The image of Durand groping around in the darkness with a whip cracking behind him was hard to stomach.

“Where is the head?” Louis asked.

Dr. Steffel moved to a smaller drawer. She paused before opening it and looked to Louis and Mel. “You want something to cut the smell?”

Louis and Mel shook their heads. Dr. Steffel pulled out the drawer and the smell spilled out into the cold room. Louis fought back the urge to gag.

The head was lying on its side, facing them. Unlike the body, it was well into putrefication, the flesh swollen and mottled. Part of the left jaw was missing, exposing the lower teeth, and the eyes were gone, leaving only sunken black holes.

“You guys okay?” Dr. Steffel asked.

Louis managed a nod.

“Peachy,” Mel muttered from behind a handkerchief.

“The head was found three hundred yards from the body and was out there almost a week longer,” Dr. Steffel said. “I’m pretty sure what you see here is the work of animal scavengers. I’ll be able to tell more after I get in for a good look.”

Louis drew in three shallow breaths, not wanting to risk one deep one.

“Come around to this side,” Dr. Steffel said.

Louis and Mel joined Dr. Steffel on the other side of the table. He heard the snap of latex as Dr. Steffel pulled on some gloves. She carefully raised Durand’s tangled, dirty hair from his neck.

“The first thing I wanted to know was if the head was cut off or chewed off,” Dr. Steffel said. “To do that, I needed to expose the vertebrae and look for tool or teeth marks. It was definitely cut off. Grab that magnifying glass over there and I’ll show you.”

There was a fresh vertical incision from the base of the skull down what was left of the neck. The vertebrae glinted in the tattered tissue.

Louis picked up the glass and held it over the neck. Even before Dr. Steffel pointed them out, Louis saw two crevices in the bone-knife nicks. One was deeper than the other by a half-inch.

“Hesitation marks?” Louis asked.

“Or miscalculation,” Dr. Steffel said.

“What do you mean?”

“The killer could have miscalculated the correct spot to place the weapon,” Dr. Steffel said. “Or miscalculated the strength one needs to sever a human neck. Either way, your killer took three swings. The first two are evident here, and the third was complete and fatal.”

Louis felt Mel pressing behind him and stepped aside so he could get a look. Mel bent low over the head, lifted his yellow-lens glasses, and squinted.

“Even I can see that,” he said. He straightened and moved back quickly, taking a breath. “Any thoughts on the exact type of weapon?”

“I haven’t had any time to check my catalogues and make any comparison,” Dr. Steffel said, “but I can tell you it’s going to be a long blade of considerable strength and narrow width. Something that allows a wide-arc swing that would give the killer the momentum needed to sever the neck.”

“Like a sword?” Mel asked.

Dr. Steffel smiled. “That’s the first thing that came to my mind,” she said. “But it’s important we don’t jump to conclusions. There are many other kinds of weapons out there that could do the trick, and we need to eliminate them one by one.”

“Do you have any idea what position Durand was in when he was decapitated?” Louis asked.

“Unless his killer is twenty feet tall, Durand was kneeling,” Dr. Steffel said. “Again, I can be more precise later, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m estimating his killer to be between five-eight and six feet.”

Reggie was about five-nine, Louis thought. But Reggie also looked like he had never seen the inside of a gym.

“Dr. Steffel,” Louis said, “how much strength would it take to cut off a head?”

“Well, it’s not easy to behead someone,” she said. “In the old days, they used axes and broadswords, and you had to be pretty experienced to hit your mark. But then they invented the guillotine to make the task easier.”

“So, an out-of-shape guy could do this?” Louis asked.

She nodded. “If the blade was sharp and the person swung it just right, he could lop the head off. Strengthwise, he wouldn’t have to be Conan the Barbarian.”

A phone rang somewhere in another room, and male voices carried behind it. Louis did not want to be caught here in an unauthorized interview and end up spending the next six hours in a jail cell on a trumped-up obstruction charge. But he had one more question.

“Do you know if any evidence was picked up around the scene?” he asked. “Cigarette butts? Candy wrappers? Anything?”

“I know they didn’t find much,” Dr. Steffel said. “You’d have to talk to the techs to be sure. But I doubt they’ll be very forthcoming. Their supervisor is Barberry’s cousin.”

Dr. Steffel withdrew a business card from her pocket. “Call me if you discover anything worthwhile. I’ll be glad to give you my sense of things.”

Louis stuck the card in his pocket and started to leave, but a final question popped into his head. He turned back to Dr. Steffel.

“Doctor,” he said, “have you ever seen anything like this before? A decapitation with torture?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been a medical examiner for fifteen years, some time here and some out west. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It takes a mean sonofabitch to whip someone when he’s on his hands and knees and probably begging for mercy.”

Dr. Steffel looked back at the head and slowly closed the drawer. The stench lingered in the air.

“I’d say this took a true monster,” she said.

After he left the medical examiner’s office, the first thing Louis did was put the top down on the Mustang. Anything to get the smell of the rotting head from his nose.

They were heading west into the low sun. Louis slowed the Mustang to a crawl as the WELCOME TO CLEWISTON, AMERICA’S SWEETEST TOWN sign came into view.

“Is this berg as ugly as I remember it?” Mel asked.

Louis eyed the Dixie Fried Chicken joint. “It’s a good place to pass through, I’d say.”