Blindsighted (Grant County #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,12

everything. She wanted for him to magically develop the capacity for empathy. After ten years, she should have known better.

He loosened the knot with a smile, as if with this simple act he had just made everything better. He said, “There.”

Sara took over, tying the strings together in a bow.

He put his hand under her chin. “You’re okay,” he said, not a question this time.

“Yeah,” she agreed, stepping away. “I’m okay.” She pulled out a pair of latex gloves, turning to the task at hand. “Let’s just get the prelim over with before Lena gets back.”

Sara walked over to the porcelain autopsy table bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Curved with high sides, the white table hugged Sibyl’s small body. Carlos had placed her head on a black rubber block and draped a white sheet over her. Except for the black bruise over her eye, she could be sleeping.

“Lord,” Sara muttered as she folded back the sheet. Taking the body out of the kill zone had intensified the damage. Under the bright lights of the morgue, every aspect of the wound stood out. The incisions were long and sharp across the abdomen, forming an almost perfect cross. The skin puckered in places, drawing her attention away from the deep gouge at the intersection of the cross. Postmortem, wounds took on a dark, almost black, appearance. The rifts in Sibyl Adams’s skin gaped open like tiny wet mouths.

“She didn’t have a lot of body fat,” Sara explained. She indicated the belly, where the incision opened wider just above the navel. The cut there was deeper, and the skin was pulled apart like a tight shirt that had popped a button. “There’s fecal matter in the lower abdomen where the intestines were breached by the blade. I don’t know if it was this deep on purpose or if the depth was accidental. It looks stretched.”

She indicated the edges of the wound. “You can see the striation here at the tip of the wound. Maybe he moved the knife around. Twisted it. Also…” She paused, figuring things out as she went along. “There are traces of excrement on her hands as well as the bars in the stall, so I have to think she was cut, she put her hands to her belly, then she wrapped her hands around the bars for some reason.”

She looked up at Jeffrey to see how he was holding up. He seemed rooted to the floor, transfixed by Sibyl’s body. Sara knew from her own experience that the mind could play tricks, smoothing out the sharp lines of violence. Even for Sara, seeing Sibyl again was perhaps worse than seeing her the first time.

Sara put her hands on the body, surprised that it was still warm. The temperature in the morgue was always low, even during the summer, because the room was underground. Sibyl should have been a lot cooler by now.

“Sara?” Jeffrey asked.

“Nothing,” she answered, not prepared to make guesses. She pressed around the wound in the center of the cross. “It was a double-edged knife,” she began. “Which helps you out some. Most stabbings are serrated hunting knives, right?”

“Yeah.”

She pointed to a tan-looking mark around the center wound. Cleaning the body, Sara had been able to see a lot more than her initial exam in the bathroom had revealed. “This is from the cross guard, so he put it all the way in. I imagine I’ll see some chipping on the spine when I open her up. I felt some irregularities when I put my finger in. There’s probably some chipped bone still in there.”

Jeffrey nodded for her to continue.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get some kind of impression from the blade. If not that, then maybe something from the cross guard bruising. I can remove and fix the skin after Lena sees her.”

She pointed to the puncture wound at the center of the cross. “This was a hard stab, so I would imagine the killer did it from a superior position. See the way the wound is angled at about a forty-five?” She studied the incision, trying to make sense of it. “I would almost say that the belly stab is different from the chest wound. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why is that?”

“The punctures have a different pattern.”

“Like how?”

“I can’t tell,” she answered truthfully. She let this drop for the moment, concentrating on the stab wound at the center of the cross. “So he’s probably standing in front of her, legs bent at