Karin Slaughter - Faithless

“I don’t know,” she said. “There aren’t any defensive wounds on his arms or hands, but that could just mean that he was taken by surprise.”

“How could one person do this to somebody?”

She knew he wasn’t asking a philosophical question. “The abdominal wall is slack and compressible. Normally, when something hits it, it readily transmits the force to the abdominal viscera. It’s like slapping your palm against a puddle of water. Depending on the force, hollow organs like the stomach and intestines can burst, the spleen is lacerated, the liver is damaged.”

“Houdini died like that,” Jeffrey told her, and despite the circumstances, Sara smiled at his love of mundane history. “He had an open challenge to anyone in the world to hit him in the stomach as hard as they could. Some kid caught him off guard and ended up killing him.”

“Right,” Sara agreed. “If you tighten your abdominal muscles, you can disperse the impact. If not, you can get yourself killed. I doubt Donner had time to think about it.”

“Can you make a guess about what killed him yet?”

Sara looked at the body, what was left of the head and neck. “If you told me this kid had been in a car crash, I would absolutely believe you. I’ve never seen this much blunt force trauma in my life.” She pointed to the flaps of skin that had been rubbed off the body from sheer impact. “These avulsive injuries, the lacerations, the abdominal injuries…” She shook her head at the mess. “He was punched so hard in the chest that the back of his heart was bruised by his spinal column.”

“You sure this happened last night?”

“At least in the last twelve hours.”

“He died in the room?”

“Definitely.” Donner’s body had festered in his intestinal juices as they dripped down from the open wound in his side. Stomach acids had eaten black holes in the shag. When Sara and Carlos had tried to move the body, they had found the corpse was stuck to the green carpet. They had been forced to slice off his jeans and cut out the section of the rug they had been glued to in order to remove him from the scene.

Jeffrey asked, “So, what killed him?”

“Take a number,” she said. “A dislocation at the atlanto-occipital junction could have transected the spinal cord. He could’ve had a subdural hematoma caused by rotational acceleration.” She counted off the possibilities on her hand: “Cardiac arrhythmia, transected aorta, traumatic asphyxia, pulmonary hemorrhage.” She gave up counting. “Or it could have been just plain old shock. Too much pain, too much trauma, and the body just shuts down.”

“You think Lena was right about the brass knuckles?”

“It makes sense,” she allowed. “I’ve never seen anything like these marks. They’re the right width, and it would explain how someone could do this with their fists. External damage would be minimal, just whatever the force of the metal against the skin would do, but internally”-she indicated the mess of viscera she had found inside the body- “this is exactly what I would expect to find.”

“What a nasty way to die.”

She asked, “Did you find anything in the apartment?”

“No fingerprints but Donner’s and the landlady’s,” he said, flipping back through his notes and reading, “Couple of bags- probably heroin- and some needles hidden in the stuffing on the underside of the couch. Around a hundred bucks in cash tucked into the base of a lamp. A couple of porn mags in the closet.”

“Sounds about right,” she said, wondering when she had stopped being surprised at the amount of pornography men consumed. It was getting so that if a man didn’t have some sort of pornography at his disposal, she was instantly suspicious.

Jeffrey said, “He had a gun, a nine-mil.”

“He was on parole?” Sara asked, knowing the gun violation would have sent Donner back to jail before he could open his mouth to explain.

Jeffrey didn’t seem bothered by it. “I’d have a gun if I lived in that neighborhood, too.”

“No sign of Rebecca Bennett?”

“No, no sign of any girl, for that matter. Like I said, there were only the two sets of fingerprints in the room.”

“That could be suspicious in and of itself.”

“Exactly.”

“Did you find the wallet?” After they’d cut the pants off, Sara had noticed that Donner’s pockets were empty.

“We found some loose change and a receipt from the grocery store for some cereal behind the dresser,” Jeffrey told her. “No wallet, though.”

“He probably emptied his pockets when he got home, went to the bathroom and then his room, where he was blindsided.”

“By who, though?” Jeffrey asked, more of himself than Sara. “It could be some dealer he screwed over. A friend who knew he had the Baggies, but not where he kept them. A thief from the neighborhood looking for some cash.”

“I would assume a bartender kept cash around.”

“He wasn’t beaten for information,” Jeffrey said.

Sara agreed. No one had stopped in the middle of attacking Chip Donner to ask him where he kept his valuables.

Jeffrey seemed frustrated. “It could be somebody connected to Abigail Bennett. It could be somebody who never met her. We don’t even know if the two of them are connected.”

“It didn’t look as if there were signs of a struggle,” Sara said. “The place looked ransacked.”

“It didn’t look that ransacked,” Jeffrey disagreed. “Whoever was looking for something wasn’t doing a very good job.”

“A junkie can’t exactly maintain focus.” She contradicted herself by saying, “Of course, anyone that strung out wouldn’t be coordinated enough for this kind of attack.”

“Not even with PCP?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sara admitted. PCP was a volatile drug and had been known to give users unusual strength as well as vivid hallucinations. When she had worked in Atlanta ’s Grady Hospital, she’d admitted a patient to the ER one night who had broken the weld on the metal bedrail he was handcuffed to and threatened one of the staff with it.

She allowed, “It’s possible.”

He said, “Maybe whoever killed him messed up the room so it’d look like a robbery.”

“Then it would have to be a person who came there specifically to kill him.”

“I don’t understand why he doesn’t have any defensive wounds,” Jeffrey said. “He just lay down and took the beating?”

“He has a high transverse fracture of the maxilla, a LeFort III. I’ve only seen that in textbooks.”

“You’ve got to speak English for me.”

“The flesh of his face was nearly beaten off his skull,” she said. “If I had to guess what happened, I would say someone took him completely by surprise, punched him in the face and knocked him out.”

“One punch?”

“He’s a small guy,” she pointed out. “The first hit could’ve been the one that snapped his spinal cord in two. His head jerks around, that’s it.”

“He was holding on to the laundry line,” he reminded her. “It was wrapped around his hand.”

“He could’ve reflexively grabbed it as he fell,” she countered. “But there’s no way at this point to tell which injury is ante- and what’s postmortem. I think what we’ll find is that whoever did this knew how to put a beating on somebody, and they did it quickly and methodically, then got out of there.”

“Maybe he knew his attacker.”

“It’s possible.” She asked, “What about his next-door neighbor?”

“Around ninety years old and deaf as a board,” Jeffrey said. “Tell you the truth, from the way the room smelled, I don’t even think the old man leaves it to go to the bathroom.”

Sara thought that could be true about all the occupants of the house. After being in Donner’s room for just half an hour, she felt filthy. “Was anybody else in the house last night?”