Mariah Stewart - Last Look

He turned back to his guests.

“Now. You wanted to talk about Shannon Randall.” Fuller took the chair nearest the window and rested his hands on the table. “How can I help you?”

“Actually, we were hoping to see the body,” Dorsey said before Andrew could respond. She caught the look he sent her: Back off. I take the lead. With a slight nod of her head, she acknowledged she’d jumped the gun, and gestured to him to pick up at that point in the conversation.

“We’re still not clear on cause of death,” Andrew explained. “We’ve heard she was shot, we heard she’d been stabbed.”

Dorsey’s head snapped up. She stared at Andrew.

“Yes.” Fuller nodded. “Yes, she was.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“She was shot and she was stabbed?” Dorsey heard herself ask.

“Yes. And here’s the odd thing: either could have killed her. The gunshot was at close range, right to the heart. Whoever pulled that trigger wanted to make sure she was good and dead, good and fast.” Fuller leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “And the stab wounds? Any one of three or four of them could have been fatal.”

“How many were there?” Andrew asked.

“Nine.” Fuller nodded grimly. “That girl’d been stabbed nine times.”

“Which actually killed her?” Andrew wanted to know.

“That would have been the gunshot. Like I said, straight to the heart. But the stabbing must have been almost immediately thereafter.” He shook his head. “I pride myself on being meticulous, being up on all the latest forensic techniques. I believe she was technically dead when she was stabbed. Judging by the amount of blood she lost, her heart was still pumping for a time after she was shot.”

He stared at the table for a moment, then said, “I do believe it was the gunshot that killed her.”

“Why stab her if you’ve already shot her?” Dorsey thought aloud.

“Why, indeed?” Fuller asked. “My first thought was the killer was trying to cover up the fact that she’d been shot, three of the stab wounds being precisely over the entry point.”

“She was stabbed over the gunshot wound?” Andrew asked.

“Repeatedly.”

“Was the gun used to kill her something out of the ordinary, something that could be easily traced?” Andrew suggested.

“Looked like your basic.38 caliber to me,” Fuller told them. “Nothing we haven’t seen before.”

“Anything else you can tell us about the stab wounds?” Andrew asked.

“Made with a really sharp knife. Kitchen knife most likely. The kind my wife uses to cut up chickens, goes through bone?” Fuller told them. “Blade was an inch and a quarter wide, non-serrated, pushed in pretty far in most places. Two, almost three inches, in some spots.” Fuller let that sink in, then added, “But here’s the funny thing about that. Usually you see someone with that many stab wounds, they’re jagged in places because the killer’s been in a sort of frenzy, but not here. It was all very deliberate. Edges of each cut nice and clean. Took his time, whoever did this. Sliced her up nice and neat, emphasis on the neat.”

Fuller stood abruptly.

“But come on, you’ll see for yourself. She’s right over here.”

In the time it took for Dorsey and Andrew to stand, Fuller had made it across the room and was standing in front of a drawer in the wall. He pulled the door open, and the body of Shannon Randall slid out on its slab. He waved the agents closer.

Dorsey stood over the body and found it alarmingly difficult to look down, as if seeing Shannon Randall in the flesh would make this nightmare undisputedly true. If this was indeed Shannon, her father was in the deepest shit of his life.

She looked down, and thoughts of her father’s predicament faded completely. She saw, not the child whose murder her father had sought to avenge, but a woman whose life had been taken from her in a violent manner. The corpse was not unlike others she had seen before. The skin dry and a particular shade of gray. The hair lifeless and matted where the skin from the skull had been peeled back. Eyes open and glassy, sightlessly staring into Dorsey’s.

Traces of black mascara had flaked onto the skin under the eyes. For some reason, Dorsey’s eyes kept returning to those flecks. To her, those tiny flecks were the only signs of life, the only indication that this had been a living, breathing woman before something terrible had happened to her. It was all she could do not to reach out and brush them from Shannon ’s face. In her mind’s eye, Dorsey could see Shannon preparing to go out that night-that night she could not have known would be her last-putting on her makeup, applying mascara as she must have done thousands of times before. As Dorsey had done many times herself. As so many women do. It made the victim unexpectedly familiar, and Dorsey forced herself back to the task at hand.

Shannon Randall had been five feet, three inches tall, slim, with muscular legs and arms, and hair dyed red. Dorsey’s fingers curled unconsciously into her own long, naturally red curls. She recalled from the photos of Shannon at fourteen that her hair had been light brown, and wondered whether she’d changed the color to make her stand out more on the street, or if it was part of a disguise she’d adopted long ago.

Which brought Dorsey back to the first question that had gone through her mind when she’d heard Shannon Randall had been alive for the past twenty-four years: What had happened to this girl on that long ago night? Had she run away, and if so, from what? From whom?

“You can see where the knife went in around the gunshot wound-right here, here, and here.” Fuller pointed with the scalpel he’d picked up from a nearby tray. His voice brought Dorsey back, reminded her why she was here.

“Doctor Fuller, do you have some gloves we could use?” Andrew asked.

Ever the gentleman, Fuller offered a box of latex gloves first to Dorsey, then to Andrew. They each took a pair and pulled them on.

Andrew leaned close to the chest and studied the wounds.

“May I?” he asked, and reached for the scalpel. Fuller handed it over, and watched from the opposite side of the table while the agent probed gently at the dry gray flesh to the left of the Y incision from the autopsy.

“Yes, there it is,” he murmured. “You can see where the bullet entered, right here, but you really have to look for it. As you said, it’s almost as if the killer tried to cover up the bullet hole.” He looked up at Doctor Fuller. “Why would the killer try to disguise the cause of death?”

“Knowing the answer to that could be a clue to who the killer is.” Fuller nodded, then paused and added, “Then again, maybe not. Sometimes, you just don’t know what’s significant and what’s mere coincidence. Could be the killer was covering up, could be he just wasn’t watching what he was doing.”

“Even though he was doing it slowly enough to make very clean, very even wounds.”

Fuller nodded. “Right. Still, as you know yourself, things aren’t always what they seem.”

Dorsey studied the still figure for a long moment, her eyes trailing the length of the left arm, then moving down to the thigh, then to the opposite side of the body where her gaze lingered on the right thigh and arm. Andrew watched her without comment. When she raised her eyes to his, she said softly, “She was a cutter.”

“You saw that, too?”

“Probably used a razor blade-see how very thin the scars are?” She pointed with a gloved index finger to the lines that went up and down the woman’s arms and the tops of her thighs like the pale, uneven rungs of a ladder.

“Judging by the scars, I’d say she’d been doing it for a very long time,” Andrew noted. “Some scars have long healed, some have been reopened more than once. Some recently, I’d say.”