Deja Dead Page 0,25

putting his skull back together when the call came.

I’d been expecting it, though not this soon. As I listened my heart raced and the blood below my breastbone felt fizzy, like carbonated soda shaken in a bottle. I felt hot all over.

“She’s been dead less than six hours,” LaManche was saying. “I think you’d better take a look.”

6

MARGARET ADKINS WAS TWENTY-FOUR. SHE HAD LIVED WITH HER common-law husband and their six-year-old son in a neighborhood nestled in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium. She was to have met her sister at ten-thirty that morning for shopping and lunch. She didn’t make it. Nor did she take later phone calls after speaking with her husband at ten. She couldn’t. She’d been murdered sometime between his call and noon, when her sister discovered her body. That was four hours ago. That’s all we knew.

Claudel was still at the scene. His partner, Michel Charbonneau, sat on one of the plastic chairs lining the far wall of the large autopsy suite. LaManche had returned from the murder scene less than an hour ago, the body preceding him by minutes. The autopsy was underway when I arrived. I knew immediately that we’d all work overtime that night.

She lay facedown, her arms straight against her sides, hands palm up with the fingers curving inward. The paper bags placed on them at the scene had already been removed. Her fingernails had been inspected and scrapings taken. She was nude, and her skin looked waxy against the polished stainless steel. Small circles dotted her back, pressure points left by drainage holes in the table’s surface. Here and there a solitary hair clung to her skin, estranged forever from the curly tangle on her head.

The back of her head was distorted, the shape slightly off, like a lopsided figure in a child’s drawing. Blood oozed from her hair and mingled with the water used to clean her, gathering below the body in a translucent, red pool. Her sweat suit, bra, panties, shoes, and socks had been spread across the adjacent autopsy table. They were saturated with blood, and the sticky, metallic smell hung heavy on the air. A Ziploc bag next to the sweats held an elasticized belt and sanitary pad.

Daniel was taking Polaroids. The white-bordered squares lay on the desk next to Charbonneau, their emerging images in varying degrees of clarity. Charbonneau was inspecting them, one by one, then carefully returning each to its original place. He chewed on his lower lip as he studied them.

A uniformed officer from identity was shooting with a Nikon and flash. As he circled the table, Lisa, newest of the autopsy technicians, positioned an old-fashioned screen behind the body. The painted metal frame, with its shirred white fabric, belonged to an era when such paraphernalia were used in hospital rooms to barricade patients during intimate procedures. The irony was jarring. I wondered whose privacy they were trying to protect here. Margaret Adkins was past caring.

After several shots the photographer stood down from his stool and looked questioningly at LaManche. The pathologist stepped closer to the body and pointed to a scrape on the back of the left shoulder.

“Did you get this?”

Lisa held a rectangular card to the left of the abrasion. On it were written the LML number, the morgue number, and the date: June 23, 1994. Both Daniel and the photographer took close-ups.

At LaManche’s direction, Lisa shaved the hair from around the head wounds, spraying the scalp repeatedly with a nozzle. There were five in all. Each showed the jagged edges typical of blunt instrument trauma. LaManche measured and diagrammed them. The cameras captured them in close-up.

At length LaManche said, “That should do it from this angle. Please turn her back over.”

Lisa stepped forward, momentarily blocking my view. She slid the body to the far left side of the table, rolled it back slightly, and snugged the left arm tightly against the stomach. Then she and Daniel turned the body onto its back. I heard a soft thunk as the head dropped onto the stainless steel. Lisa lifted the head, placed a rubber block behind the neck, and stepped back.

What I saw made my blood race even faster, as if the thumb had been slipped from the shaken soda bottle in my chest and a geyser of fear allowed to erupt.

Margaret Adkins had been ripped open from her breastbone to her pubis. A jagged fissure ran downward from her sternum, exposing along its course the colors and textures of her mutilated