Karin Slaughter - Triptych

“You ever bitten your tongue?” Pete asked.

Trent didn’t answer, so Michael said, “Sure.”

“Heals pretty quickly. The tongue is an amazing organ-unless it’s severed, that is. At any rate,” he continued, “biting through the tongue is not a difficult endeavor.” He rolled back the sheet, showing the top of the Y-incision but stopping just shy of baring Monroe’s breasts.

“Here,” Pete said. Michael could see deep black bruises over the woman’s left shoulder. “The distribution of the livor mortis tells us she died where you found her. On her back, on the stairs. My guess,” Pete said, “is that she was beaten, then raped, and in the course of the rape he bit off her tongue.”

Michael thought about that, pictured her on the stairs, her body lax at first as she endured the rape, then tensing, convulsing in fear as she realized what was going to happen.

Trent finally spoke. “Can you get DNA off the tongue?”

“I imagine I’ll get a significant amount of DNA off her tongue, given her profession.” Pete shrugged his shoulders. “And I’m sure the swabs from her vagina will reveal a cornucopia of suspects for you, but my guess would be that your perpetrator used a condom.”

“Why is that?” Michael asked.

“Powder,” Pete answered. “There was a trace of cornstarch on her right thigh.”

Michael knew that rubbers were often packed in powder to make them easier to use. All the condom makers used the same ingredients, so there was no way of tracing it back to a single manufacturer. Not that knowing whether he used a Trojan or a Ramses would narrow the search.

“I’m guessing it was lubricated,” Pete added. “There were also traces of a compound not inconsistent with nonoxynol- 9.”

Trent seemed to find this interesting. “Were there any traces of this on the stairs?”

“Not that I found.”

Trent surmised, “So, he must have had sex with her somewhere else, probably inside the apartment, before the struggle in the stairway.”

Michael tuned them out. A whore like Monroe wasn’t going to waste her hard-earned money on extravagances like lube and spermicide. Better to just grit her teeth and save the cash. Deal with the consequences later.

Michael said, “The condom must have belonged to the doer.”

Trent looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered Michael was in the room. “That’s possible.”

Michael spelled it out for him. “The doer didn’t mean to kill her. Why bother with an expensive condom, right?”

Trent nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

“Well.” Pete broke the silence. “As I was saying…” He went back to his lecture, opening the woman’s mouth, showing the stub where her tongue used to be attached. “There aren’t any major arteries in the tongue, barring the lingual artery, which spreads out like the roots of a tree, tapering at the ends. You would have to go into the mouth a few inches to get to it, in which case you couldn’t use your teeth.” He frowned, thinking for a moment. “Picture a dachshund trying to fit his snout into a badger hole.”

Michael didn’t want to, but he found the image playing in his mind, the yippy bark echoing in his ears.

“In this case,” Pete continued, “the incision separated the frenulum linguae from the organ, bisecting the submandibular duct.” He opened his own mouth and lifted up his tongue, pointing to the thin stretch of skin underneath. “The removal of the tongue in and of itself is not a life-threatening injury. The problem is, she fell onto her back. Perhaps the shock of the event or the various chemical substances in her body affected her. Subsequently, she passed out. Over the course of a few minutes, the blood from the severed tongue engorged her throat. My official cause of death will be asphyxiation due to the blockage of the trachea by blood, causing respiratory arrest, secondary to exsanguination from the traumatic amputation of the tongue.”

“But,” Michael said, “he didn’t mean for her to die.”

“It’s not in my purview to imagine what goes through a man’s mind when he is biting off a woman’s tongue, but if I were a gambling man, and my ex-wives will tell you I am, then yes. I would guess that the attacker did not intend for her to die.”

Trent said, “Just like the others.”

“There are more?” Pete asked, perking up. “I’ve not heard of any cases similar to this.”

Trent told him, “There are two girls that we know of. The first had her tongue bitten, but not completely severed. It was sewn back on and she was fine-relatively speaking. The second lost her tongue. Too much time had passed to safely reattach it.”

Pete shook his head. “Poor thing. Was this recent? I haven’t read anything about it.”

“The first attack happened on state land, so we were able to keep it quiet. The second girl’s parents shut out the press and the local cops held back the details. There’s no story if nobody’s willing to talk.”

“What about the third one?” Michael had to ask. “The little girl?”

Trent filled Pete in on the case. “My opinion is she bit it herself,” he concluded. “She’s young, ten years old. She must have been terrified. The local PD is good, but they don’t have a lot of experience with this sort of violent crime. I think it was probably very hard for them to elicit a statement from her.”

“No doubt,” Pete agreed, but Michael wondered why Trent hadn’t said any of this earlier. Maybe he had been feeling out Michael, seeing if he could pass the test.

Shit, Michael thought. He was tired of jumping through hoops. He asked the doctor, “How old do you think this one is?” He nodded to Aleesha Monroe.

“It’s hard to say.” Pete studied the woman’s face. “Her teeth are a mess because of the drug. Given the hard nature of her life and her prolonged drug dependency, I’d put her in the late-thirties; possibly older, possibly younger.”

Michael looked at Trent. “But not a teenage girl.”

“Definitely not,” Pete agreed.

“So, we’ve got two teenagers thirty miles away and an old junkie in Atlanta and the only thing linking them is this tongue shit.” He tried to stare his meaning into Trent. “Right?”

Trent’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen, then excused himself with an apology as he left the room.

Pete gave a heavy sigh, covering up the body, tugging the sheet tight over her head. “Messy situation.”

“Yeah,” Michael agreed. He was watching Trent through the glass doors, wondering what the fuck was up with the guy.

“He seems on the ball,” Pete said, meaning Trent. “I have to say, it’s a nice change of pace seeing one of your compatriots dressed so smartly.”

“What?” Michael asked. He’d been watching Trent, trying to hear the call.

“The suit,” Pete clarified. “It makes an impression.”

“Like a fucking undertaker,” Michael answered, thinking Pete wasn’t exactly ready to step into a GQ spread. His white lab coats were always starched and clean, but that was because the state took care of the laundry bill. Underneath, Pete generally wore jeans and a wrinkled button-down shirt, his collar wide open, revealing a patch of gray chest hair and a gold medallion that any of the Bee Gees would have been ashamed to wear.

“It is a tenuous connection,” Pete said. “The three cases.”

“You’re telling me.”

“But it does give one pause that the tongues were all bitten off. That’s not a common twist.” He picked up the evidence bag with the tongue and held it up as if Michael hadn’t seen it plenty last night. “I’d have to say in all my years doing this job, I’ve never run across anything similar. Bite marks, yes. I always say if you want scientific proof that we have evolved from animals, you need only look at the average rape victim.” Pete placed the tongue beside Monroe’s arm. “Bite marks were all over her breasts and shoulders. I counted at least twenty-two. It’s a base instinct, I suppose, to bite during a vicious attack. You see dogs and big cats do it in the wild.” He chuckled. “I cannot tell you how many nipples I’ve seen bitten off. Five or six instances of the clitoris being severed. One finger…” He smiled at Michael. “If only these monsters had horns. It would be so much easier finding them.”