The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia (читаем книги онлайн TXT) 📗

Marino's face is the color of a radish.

"You have copies of the autopsy reports already?" I know the answer, but ask her anyway.

"I've been through them numerous times," she responds.

I peel tape off the cases and push them in her direction while Marino pops his knuckles and avoids our eyes. Berger slides color photographs out of an envelope. "What can you tell me?" she asks us.

"Kim Luong," Marino begins in a workmanlike tone, reminding me of M. I. Galloway after he persisted in humiliating her. Marino is seething. "Thirty-year-old Asian, worked part-time in a West End convenience store called Quik Gary. It appears Chandonne waited until there was no one there but her. This was at night."

"Thursday, December ninth," Berger says as she looks at a scene photo of Luong's mutilated, seminude body.

"Yeah. The burglar alarm went off at nineteen-sixteen," he says as I puzzle. What did Marino and Berger talk about last night, if not this? I assumed she met with him to go over the investigative aspects of the cases, but it seems clear the two of them have not discussed the murders of Luong or Bray.

Berger frowns, looking at another photograph. "Sixteen past seven P.M.? That's when he came into the store or when he left after the fact?"

"When he left. Went out a back door that was always armed, on a separate alarm system. So he came into the store sometime earlier than that, through the front door, probably right after dark. He had a gun, walked in, shot her as she was sitting behind the counter. Then he put up the closed sign, locked the door, and dragged her back into the storeroom so he could do his thing with her." Marino is laconic and on good behavior, but beneath all this is a volatile concoction of chemistry that I am beginning to recognize. He wants to impress, belittle and bed Jaime Berger, and all of it is about his aching wounds of loneliness and insecurity, and his frustrations with me. As I watch him struggle to hide his embarrassment behind a wall of nonchalance, I am touched by sorrow. If only Marino wouldn't force misery upon himself. If only he wouldn't invite bad moments like these.

"Was she alive when he began beating and biting her?" Berger directs this at me as she slowly goes through more photographs.

"Yes," I reply.

"Based on?"

"There was sufficient tissue response to the injuries of her face to suggest she was alive when he began beating her. What

we can't know is whether she was conscious. Or better put,

how long she was conscious," I say.

"I got videotapes of the scenes," Marino offers in a voice meant to suggest he is bored.

"I want everything." Berger makes that patently clear.

"At least I filmed the Luong and Diane Bray scenes. Not brother Thomas. We didn't videotape him in the cargo container, which is probably a damn lucky thing." Marino stifles a yawn, his act becoming more ridiculous and annoying.

"You went to all the scenes?" Berger asks me.

"I did."

She looks at another photograph.

"No way I'd ever eat blue cheese again, not after spending quality time with ol' Thomas." Hostility bristles closer to the surface of Marino's skin.

"You know, I was going to put on coffee," I say to him. "Would you mind?"

"Mind what?" Stubbornness holds him in his chair.

"Mind putting on a pot." I look at him in a way that strongly suggests he leave me alone with Berger for a few minutes.

"I'm not sure I know how to work your machine here." He makes a stupid excuse.

"I have complete faith you'll figure it out," I reply.

"I can see you two have a nice rhythm going," I ironically observe when Marino is down the hall and can't hear us.

"We had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted this morning, very early this morning, I might add." Berger glances up at me. "At the hospital, before Chandonne was sent along his merry way."

"Might I suggest, Ms. Berger, that if you're going to spend some time around here, you might want to start by telling him to keep his mind on the mission. He seems to have some battle going with you that overshadows everything else, and it simply isn't helpful."

She continues studying photographs with no expression on her face. "God, it's like an animal tore into them. Just like Susan Pless, my case. These could just as easily be photos of her body. I'm halfway ready to believe in werewolves. Of course, there's the theory in folklore that the notion of werewolves might have been based on real people who suffered from hy-pertrichosis." I am not sure if she is trying to show me how much research she has done, or if she is deflecting what I just said about Marino. She meets my eyes. "I appreciate your words of advice about him. I know you've worked with him forever, so he can't be all bad."

"He's not. You won't find a better detective."

"And let me guess. He was obnoxious when you first met him."

"He's still obnoxious," I reply.

Berger smiles. "Marino and I have a few issues that we still haven't worked out. Clearly, he isn't used to prosecutors who tell him how a case is going to work. It's a little different in New York," she reminds me. "For example, cops can't arrest a defendant in a homicide case without the D.A.'s approval. We run the cases up there, and frankly"_she picks up lab reports_"it works a whole lot better, as a result. Marino feels it excruciatingly necessary to be in charge, and he's overly protective of you. And jealous of anyone who comes into your life," she sums it up, skimming the reports. "No alcohol on board, except Diane Bray. Point-zero-three. Isn't the thought that she'd had a beer or two and pizza before the killer showed up at her door?" She pushes photographs around on the table. "I don't think I've ever seen anybody beaten this badly. Rage, unbelievable rage. And lust. If you can call something like this lust. I don't think there's a word for whatever he was feeling."

"The word is 'evil.' "

"I guess we won't know about other drugs for a while."

"We'll test for the usual suspects. But it will be weeks," I tell her.

She spreads out more photographs, sorting them as if she is playing solitaire. "How does it make you feel, knowing this might have been you?"

"I don't think about that," I answer.

"What do you think about?"

"What the injuries are saying to me."

"Which is?"

I pick up a photograph of Kim Luong_a bright, wonderful young woman by all reports, who was working to put herself through nursing school. "The blood pattern," I describe. "Almost every inch of her exposed skin is smeared with bloody swirls, part of his ritual. He fingerpainted."

"After they were dead."

"Presumably. In this photo"_I show her_"you can plainly see the gunshot wound to the front of her neck. It hit her carotid and her spinal cord. She would have been paralyzed from the neck down when he dragged her into the storeroom."

"And hemorrhaging. Because of the severed carotid."

"Absolutely. You can see the arterial spatter pattern on the shelves he dragged her past." I lean closer to her and show her in several photographs. "Big sweeps of blood that start getting lower and weaker the farther he dragged her through the store."

"Conscious?" Berger is fascinated and grim.

"The injury to her spinal cord wasn't immediately fatal."

"How long could she have survived, bleeding like that?"

"Minutes." I find an autopsy photograph that shows the spinal cord after it has been removed from the body and centered on a green towel, along with a white plastic ruler for a scale. The smooth creamy cord is contused a violent purple-blue and partly severed in an area correlating with the gunshot wound that penetrated Luong's neck between the fifth and sixth cervical disks. "She would have been instantly paralyzed," I explain, "but the contusion means she had a blood pressure, her heart was still pumping, and we know that anyway from the arterial blood spatter at the scene. So yes. She was probably conscious as he dragged her by her feet along the aisle, back to the storeroom. What I can't say is how long she was conscious."