Chapter

18

At that point the old lady I had seen in the diner stuck her head in the door. The hotel’s co-owner. She asked if she could bring us anything. Elizabeth Deveraux shook her head. I asked for coffee. The old lady said sorry, she didn’t have any. She said I could get it to go from the diner, if I really needed it. I wondered what exactly she was offering, therefore, if anything. But I didn’t ask. The old lady left again, and Deveraux said, “Why are you fixated on hunters?”

“Pellegrino told me she was all dressed up for a night out, as neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Those were his words. Is that a fair summary?”

Deveraux nodded. “That’s exactly what I saw. Pellegrino is an idiot, but a reliable one.”

“That’s more proof she wasn’t killed there. She would have fallen forward on her face, not on her back.”

“Yes, I missed that too. Don’t rub it in.”

“What was she wearing?”

“A dark blue sheath dress with a low white collar. Underwear and pantyhose. Dark blue shoes with spike heels.”

“Clothes in disarray?”

“No. They looked neat as a pin. Like Pellegrino told you.”

“So she wasn’t put into those clothes postmortem. You can always tell. Clothes never go on a corpse just right. Especially not pantyhose. So she was still dressed when she was killed.”

“I accept that.”

“Was there blood on the white collar? At the front?”

Deveraux closed her eyes, presumably to recall the scene. She said, “No, it was immaculate.”

“Was there blood anywhere on her front?”

“No.”

“OK,” I said. “So her throat was cut in an unknown location, while she was dressed in those clothes. But she had gotten no blood on her, until she was dumped on her back in a pool that was separately transported. Tell me how that isn’t a hunter.”

“Tell me how it is. If you can. You can help the army all you want, but you don’t have to believe your own bullshit.”

“I’m not helping the army. Soldiers can be hunters too. Many of them are.”

“Why is it a hunter at all?”

“Tell me how you cut a woman’s throat without getting a drop of blood on her front.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You string her up on a deer trestle. That’s how. By her ankles. Upside down. You tie her hands behind her. You haul her arms up until her back is arched and her throat is presented as the lowest point.”

We sat in the shadowed silence for a minute, not saying a word. I guessed Deveraux was picturing the scene. I sure was. A clearing in the woods somewhere, remote and lonely, or a room far from anywhere, with improvised equipment, or a hut or a shack with roof beams, Janice May Chapman hanging upside down, her hands hauled up behind her back, toward her feet, her shoulders straining, her back curving painfully. She was probably gagged, too, the gag tied to a third rope looped over the trestle’s top rail. That third rope must have been pulled tight, arching her head up and back, keeping it well out of the way, leaving her throat completely accessible.

I asked, “How did she wear her hair?”

“Short,” Deveraux said. “It wouldn’t have gotten in the way.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux asked, “Do you really think that’s how it was done?”

I nodded. “Any other method, she wouldn’t have bled out all the way. Not white as a sheet. She would have died, and her heart would have stopped pumping, and there would have been something left inside her. Two, three pints, maybe. It was being upside down that finished the job. Gravity, plain and simple.”

“The ropes would have left marks, wouldn’t they?”

“What did the medical examiner say? Have you had his report?”

“We don’t have a medical examiner. Just the local doctor. One step up from when all we had was the local undertaker, but not a very big step.”

Not a democracy. I said, “You should go take a look for yourself.”

She said, “Will you come with me?”

We walked back to the diner and took Deveraux’s car from the curb and U-turned and headed back down Main Street, past the hotel again, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, and onward to where Main Street turned into a wandering rural route. The doctor’s place was half a mile south of the town. It was a regular clapboard house, painted white, set in a large untidy yard, with a shingle next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The name on the shingle was Merriam, and it was lettered crisply in black over a rectangle of white paint that was brighter and newer than the surrounding surface. A new arrival, not long in town, new to the community.

The house had its ground floor given over to the medical practice. The front parlor was a waiting room, and the back room was where patients were examined and treated. We found Merriam in there, at a desk, doing paperwork. He was a florid man close to sixty. New in town, perhaps, but not new to doctoring. His greeting was languid and his pace was slow. I got the impression he regarded the Carter Crossing position as semi-retirement, maybe after a pressurized career in a big-city practice. I didn’t like him much. A snap judgment, maybe, but generally those are as good as any other kind.

Deveraux told the guy what we wanted to see and he got up slowly and led us through the house to what might once have been a kitchen. It was now tiled in cold white, and it had no-nonsense medical-style sinks and cupboards all over it. In the center of the floor it had a stainless steel mortuary table, and on the table was a corpse. The light over it was bright.

The corpse was Janice May Chapman. She had a tag on her toe with her name written on it in a spidery hand. She was naked. Pellegrino had called her as white as a sheet, but by that point she was pale blue and light purple, blotched and mottled with the characteristic marbling of the truly bloodless. She had been perhaps five feet seven inches tall, and she might once have weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds, neither fat nor excessively thin. She had dark hair bobbed short. It was thick and heavy, well cut, and still in good condition. Pellegrino had called her pretty, and it didn’t require much imagination to agree. The flesh on her face was collapsed and empty, but her bone structure was good. Her teeth were white and even.

Her throat was a mess. It was laid open from side to side and the wound had dried to a rubbery gape. Flesh and muscle had shrunk back, and tendons and ligaments had curled, and empty veins and arteries had retracted. White bone was visible, and I could see a single horizontal score mark on it.

The knife had been substantial, the blade had been sharp, and the killing stroke had been forceful, confident, and fast.

Deveraux said, “We need to examine her wrists and ankles.”

The doctor made a have at it gesture.

Deveraux took Chapman’s left arm and I took her right. Her wrist bones were light and delicate. The skin lying over them had no abrasions. No rope burns. But there was faint residual marking. There was a two-inch-wide band that was slightly bluer than the rest. Very slightly bluer. Almost not there at all. But perceptible. And very slightly swollen, compared to the rest of her forearm. Definitely raised. The exact opposite of a compression.

I looked at Merriam and asked, “What do you make of this?”

“The cause of death was exsanguination through severed carotid arteries,” he said. “That was what I was paid to determine.”

“How much were you paid?”

“The fee structure was agreed between my predecessor and the county.”

“Was it more than fifty cents?”

“Why?”

“Because fifty cents is all that conclusion is worth. Cause of death is totally obvious. So now you can earn your corn by helping us out a little.”

Deveraux looked at me and I shrugged. Better that I had said it than her. She had to live with the guy afterward. I didn’t.

Merriam said, “I don’t like your attitude.”

I said, “And I don’t like twenty-seven-year-old women lying dead on a slab. You want to help or not?”

He said, “I’m not a pathologist.”

I said, “Neither am I.”

The guy stood still for a moment, and then he sighed and stepped forward. He took Janice May Chapman’s limp and lifeless arm from me. He looked at the wrist very closely, and then ran his fingers up and down, gently, from the back of her hand to the middle of her forearm, feeling the swelling. He asked, “Do you have a hypothesis?”

I said, “I think she was tied up tight. Wrists and ankles. The bindings started to bruise her, but she didn’t live long enough for the bruises to develop very much. But they definitely started. A little blood leaked into her tissues, and it stayed there when the rest of it drained out. Which is why we’re seeing compression injuries as raised welts.”

“Tied up with what?”

“Not ropes,” I said. “Maybe belts or straps. Something wide and flat. Maybe silk scarves. Something padded, perhaps. To disguise what had been done.”

Merriam said nothing. He moved past me to the end of the table and looked at Chapman’s ankles. He said, “She was wearing pantyhose when she was brought in. The nylon was undamaged. Not torn or laddered at all.”

“Because of the padding. Maybe it was foam rubber. Something like that. But she was tied up.”

Merriam was quiet for another moment.

Then he said, “Not impossible.”

I asked, “How plausible?”

“Postmortem examination has its limits, you know. You’d need an eyewitness to be certain.”

“How do you explain the complete exsanguination?”

“She could have been a hemophiliac.”

“Suppose she wasn’t?”

“Then gravity would be the only explanation. She was hung upside down.”

“By belts or straps, or ropes over some kind of padding?”

“Not impossible,” Merriam said again. “Turn her over,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to see the gravel rash.”

“You’ll have to help me,” he said, so I did.