Nyboe put the pointer away and adopted a pensive posture, one finger on his chin.
“Rigor mortis indicates that the death occurred sometime between midnight and three a.m. last night—the cooling from two hours in the fountain unfortunately makes the calculations a little iffy—and furthermore that the woman was lying completely flat on her back when she died. The killer probably strapped her down, cut her arteries, and then waited for her to bleed out.”
Jeppe noticed that Falck had joined them again and was taking notes. He was humming to himself unknowingly while he wrote, an unwelcome distraction from the music in Jeppe’s own head.
“The killer must have gagged her or used some kind of anesthetic, no? Otherwise surely she would have called for help.”
“Yes, and screamed from the pain,” Nyboe said. He started clipping the body’s fingernails, which were painted with red nail polish, collecting the clippings in a little bag. “Bleeding out is painful. Maybe not for the first ten to fifteen minutes, but once the heart and the vital organs start shutting down, it hurts quite badly. With those cuts it must have taken about a half hour before she died. It would have gone faster if her carotid arteries had been cut.”
“So this was meant to take some time?”
Nyboe nodded thoughtfully and closed the bag of fingernail clippings.
“That was probably the intention, yes.”
“Man!” Jeppe shook off his discomfort. “Then surely the killer didn’t anesthetize her.”
“The toxicology report will obviously confirm that, but my guess is that, no, he didn’t.” Nyboe flipped his headlamp down and forced the body’s mouth open so he could shine the light into it. “No obvious injuries to the teeth, but she could easily have been gagged, maybe with a wadded-up plastic bag or a soft ball. It’s not hard to keep people from screaming.”
Jeppe closed his eyes for a long moment and tried to picture it, the woman undressed and strapped down, bleeding, unable to scream out in pain, while the life slowly and painfully left her.
“Are there signs of anything sexual?” Jeppe asked.
Nyboe stuck a very long cotton swab down into the woman’s throat and then handed it to the forensic tech before responding.
“Nothing obvious,” he said. “Since she was found naked it would be probable, but there are no signs of penetration, resistance, or semen in her orifices.”
“Okay,” Jeppe said, leaning over the table and looking at the woman’s wrist. “Why all these cuts? Why didn’t the killer just cut right across the arteries?”
“Aha! Kørner, a relevant question for once.” Nyboe turned and searched his workbench, picking up a scalpel. “I don’t know. To start, I’d like to know what the cuts were made with.”
The forensic tech lifted the body’s head from the table, Nyboe made an incision across her neck, set the scalpel down, and then peeled the face off the cranium all the way to the chest. Jeppe knew that the next step was to saw the cranium open, so the brain could be removed and weighed, sliced and examined. After it would be placed in her abdomen along with her other organs, and the skin stitched closed. The skull would be filled with cellulose and absorbent paper. If you put the brain back into the cranium there was a risk that fluid would seep out during the funeral.
“Here, give me your hand!” Nyboe instructed.
Jeppe held out his arm so it hovered over the faceless body on the autopsy table.
“Uh, what are you going to do?” Jeppe asked.
“I don’t think I could make cuts as symmetrical as these, no matter how hard I tried.” Nyboe pulled up Jeppe’s sleeve, rotating his palm so it faced up, and rested the edge of a new scalped on the thin skin covering Jeppe’s wrist. “Not even with my smallest scalpel.”
“In other words, we’re looking for a special murder weapon?” Jeppe said, pulling his arm back and tugging his sleeve back down.
“Yes, Kørner, in other words.” Nyboe tipped the scalpel back and forth so it flashed under the bright lights. “We’re looking for a special murder weapon.”
* * *
“SUICIDAL THOUGHTS?” ESTHER de Laurenti repeated, pausing to consider the question.
The psychiatrist regarded her with a learned wrinkle over his frameless lenses, and she wondered yet again whether she, a sixty-nine-year-old woman, could take such a young doctor seriously. How old was he anyway, his early thirties? Esther glanced around the office, skillfully avoiding his questioning gaze. The wall behind him was covered with glass-front cabinets made of polished walnut, filled with professional books about psychiatry and medicine; the other walls were covered with modern art and preserved butterflies in glass display cases.
CHAPTER 3
Esther buttoned her vintage Halston blazer in front of her full-length mirror, carefully smoothing it. Wearing thin wool slacks and a silk blouse, she felt almost too nicely dressed, too formal, but she needed an outfit that would sustain her today.
Her mind was reeling, and a headache weighed behind her eyes. Julie or Caroline? It couldn’t be Julie, mustn’t be her. But it couldn’t be Caroline, either. Little Caroline, whom she had known since she was born. How likely was it that the victim could have been someone else? One of the girls’ friends, maybe, who had borrowed the apartment, spent the night and invited some suspicious character in?
Kristoffer had let himself in and was making noise in the kitchen. She wished he would be quiet. He had been her singing teacher for almost four years, but over time their relationship had evolved. They had a lot in common: their enjoyment of music, art, and all the beautiful things in life. He taught her vocal techniques, she taught him how to cook; they routinely went to operas and museums together. Kristoffer even had a key to her apartment and helped himself to money from her purse when going grocery shopping. She was three times his age, but still he had become a close friend. In some ways the son she had never had, although neither of them would have been comfortable phrasing it that way.
“Kristoffer, dear,” she called. “Are you making coffee?”
Esther walked into the living room to find him already pouring from the French press at the table. She smiled at him, delighted as always by his handsome face, which told tales of a distant Asian ancestry. His eyes were brown, his hair jet-black, and his body lanky. He always wore clothes several sizes too big: a hoodie with his T-shirt sticking out, jeans with the crotch down near his knees, a beanie, and a leather jacket. The clothes made him look even younger than he was, like a homeless teenager.
Kristoffer had given up on a promising singing career in exchange for random gigs and teaching. She didn’t really know why. But he seemed content with his current primary employment as a dresser at the Royal Danish Theatre, which allowed him to stay up at night to work on his odd electronic music and also fit in lessons with his select few singing students.
Esther slouched into the peach-colored wing-back armchair, putting her feet up on the matching pouf. She actually understood him well. Now that she had retired, she too intended to do only what she really wanted, for the rest of her life. Sing, write, and cook. No more exams or faculty meetings ever again! Esther had been waiting a long time to finally return to the love of her youth—the murder mystery, so maligned in academic circles. If she was going to become her generation’s Dorothy L. Sayers, time was of the essence. She eyed the stack of freshly printed manuscript pages that she was supposed to have gone through already, and sighed. It definitely wasn’t happening today.