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 the knee, and he takes the knife back to his side”—she demonstrated, pulling her hand back—“then rams it into her chest.”
“He uses two knives to do this?”
“I can’t tell,” Sara admitted, going back to the belly wound. Something wasn’t adding up.
Jeffrey scratched his chin, looking at the chest wound. He asked, “Why not stab her in the heart?”
“Well, for one, the heart isn’t at the center of the chest, which is where you would have to stab in order to hit the center of the cross. So, there’s an aesthetic quality to his choice. For another, there’s rib and cartilage surrounding the heart. He would have to stab her repeatedly to break through. That would mess up the appearance of the cross, right?” Sara paused. “There would be a great amount of blood if the heart was punctured. It would come out at a considerable velocity. Maybe he wanted to avoid that.” She shrugged, looking up at Jeffrey. “I suppose he could have gone under the rib cage and up if he wanted to get to the heart, but that would have been a crapshoot at best.”
“You’re saying the attacker had some kind of medical knowledge?”
Sara asked, “Do you know where the heart is?”
He put his hand over the left side of his chest.
“Right. You also know your ribs don’t meet all the way in the center.”
He tapped his hand against the center of his chest. “What’s this?”
“Sternum,” she answered. “The cut’s lower, though. It’s in the xiphoid process. I can’t say if that’s blind luck or calculated.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if you’re hell-bent on carving a cross on somebody’s abdomen and putting a knife through the center, this is the best place to stab somebody if you want the knife to go through. There are three parts to the sternum,” she said, using her own chest to illustrate. “The manubrium, which is the upper part, the body, which is the main part, then the xiphoid process. Of those three, the xiphoid is the softest. Especially in someone this age. She’s what, early thirties?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Tessa’s age,” Sara mumbled, and for a second she flashed on her sister. She shook this from her mind, focusing back on the body. “The xiphoid process calcifies as you age. The cartilage gets harder. So, if I was going to stab someone in the chest, this is where I’d make my X.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to cut her breasts?”
Sara considered this. “This seems more personal than that.” She tried to find the words. “I don’t know, I would think that he would want to cut her breasts. Know what I mean?”
“Especially if it’s sexually motivated,” he offered. “I mean, rape is generally about power, right? It’s about being angry at women, wanting to control them. Why would he cut her there instead of in a place that makes her a woman?”
“Rape is also about penetration,” Sara countered. “This certainly qualifies. It’s a strong cut, nearly clean through. I don’t think—” She stopped, staring at the wound, a new idea forming in her mind. “Jesus,” she mumbled.