CHAPTER EIGHT
The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office was a squat brown building on Earhart Boulevard that Ella would have driven past without a second look. Inside, it had the sterility of every morgue she’d ever worked in.
They checked in at reception. The woman behind the desk had a crossword puzzle face-down in front of her and didn’t look thrilled about the interruption. Ella showed her badge, gave both their names, and said they were expected.
‘Take a seat. I’ll page Dr. Guidry.’
Ripley didn’t take a seat. She stood by the window with her arms folded and stared at the car park. Ella sat down on a plastic chair that had been bolted to the floor, which was never a good sign in any building.
‘You know what I was doing this time yesterday?’ Ripley said.
‘Complaining? Like you’ve been doing all day?’
‘No. I watched Max build a tower out of cereal boxes. He got it to four high. Now I’m in a morgue in New Orleans.’
‘Life comes at you fast.’
‘You come at me fast.’
‘What’s gotten into you?’ Ella asked. ‘You’re oddly crabby, even for you. Do you have sand in your underwear?’
A door opened at the far end of the corridor. An older woman in scrubs and wire-framed glasses came through. ‘You’re the FBI?’ she asked.
‘Agents Dark and Ripley,’ Ella said. ‘Sergeant Fields called ahead.’
‘He did. I’m Dr. Guidry. Follow me.’
They went down a corridor with grey linoleum floors and through a set of double doors into the examination room.
Two steel tables occupied the centre, both with sheet-covered forms on them.
Ella embraced the smell of the autopsy room with open nostrils and open lungs.
Once was a time when she’d breathe through her mouth the whole time in these places, but the smell was an old friend now.
Guidry set her clipboard on a side counter and positioned herself between the two tables. ‘Fields said you were consulting. You want the full rundown or just the headlines?’
‘Full rundown, please,’ Ella said. ‘Please tell us you’ve found something hinky on these bodies.’
‘I found exactly what your perp wanted me to find. Which one first?’
Ripley said, ‘The most recent vic, if you’ve figured out which one that is.’
The doctor picked up a pointer and removed one of the sheets.
There she was. Rose Michaels, scrubbed clean under the light.
In the alley she’d still looked like a person.
Slumped and discarded, but recognisably someone who’d once had a pulse and a phone full of text messages and a favourite song.
Here she’d been reduced. The brown hair was slicked back off her forehead.
Her skin had a wax quality that made her look like a department store mannequin left too close to a radiator.
The bruising around her throat was worse than Ella remembered — or maybe the lighting strip just made it harder to look away from.
Purple fingerprints were stamped into her neck like a child pressing paint handprints onto paper.
Ella stood with it for a moment. In life, Rose had clearly been a pretty girl. Death was never kind, but it seemed especially cruel here, so the least anyone could do was look at her properly.
She asked, ‘Rose died more recently of the two?’
‘Based on liver temp and rigor, Rose Michaels here died around sixteen hours ago, so about midnight last night. She’s 26 years old.’
‘Cause of death?’
Guidry pointed to the marks around Rose’s neck. ‘Bruises are consistent with manual asphyxiation, but no prints or traces on the skin.’
‘So her killer used gloves. What about defensive wounds?’
‘None. There are no scratches on her hands or forearms and no broken nails. And here-’ she moved to the foot of the table and drew the sheet lower.
‘Strangulation victims typically present with fractures or micro-trauma in the feet, which comes from involuntary kicking while being choked. This woman has no damage to her feet whatsoever.’
‘He came from behind,’ Ella said. ‘And if there are no defensive wounds, it means his grip was powerful enough to drain the energy out of her immediately.’
‘So he’s strong as hell,’ Ripley said.
Guidry looked at her over the top of her glasses. ‘That’s your department, not mine. But from a pathology standpoint, she didn’t see it coming and she didn’t fight.’
Ella asked, ‘Hand size?’
‘Below average for an adult male. About six and a half inches from thumb tip to pinky based on the bruise spread.’
Ripley said, ‘Small hands. Comes from behind. Not a big man and not a confident one, but a strong one nonetheless.’
‘This is the other thing. The figurine that was recovered from her hand was adhered with cyanoacrylate.’
‘Superglue?’ Ripley asked.
‘Close, but this is especially for bonding skin. Surgeons use it instead of sutures on smaller incisions. You can get it online fairly easily these days, but it’s not the kind of thing most people have lying around in a kitchen drawer.’
Ella fixed the pieces together. Her killer was a male with below-average hands who attacked from the rear.
He didn’t confront or engage, and he didn’t give Rose a chance to see his face or scream or run.
The psychology suggested he couldn’t hold a woman’s gaze in a bar, let alone overpower one from the front.
Whatever drove him to kill had nothing to do with physical dominance.
He compensated with surprise, and surprise was a coward’s advantage.
Guidry moved to the second table. ‘This one had more going on, and I do have some good news for you.’
‘Oh?’
Guidry pulled the sheet back. The red hair was the first thing Ella registered.
The woman’s face was pale and scattered with freckles that stood out more starkly than they would have done in life.
Her eyes were closed, and Ella was grateful for that.
Open eyes on a slab was something she’d never fully got used to.
The girl looked a couple of years younger than the other victim.
Twenty-two going on never-going-to-see-twenty-three.
‘The good news is we identified her. This is Amber Holloway. I ran her prints through AFIS while I was working on Rose and got a match. 22 years old, and her last known address was in Gentilly. She was in the system from a DUI eighteen months back.’
Amber Holloway. A name to go with the redhead by the river. Ella filed it somewhere it wouldn’t get lost. ‘Cause of death?’
‘Same as the first. Manual asphyxiation, same bruise pattern, same hand size, same lack of defensive wounds. He came from behind on this one too. I wish I had more, but your perp has an approach and sticks to it.’
‘Any differences between them at all?’ Ella pressed.
‘Well, Amber here was killed before Rose. The hypostasis is more pronounced, and the rigor mortis has progressed further. I’d put her time of death about two hours before Rose, based on the degree of livor mortis and the corneal clouding.’
‘So Amber around 10PM, and Rose at midnight.’
‘Approximately.’
For Ella, the take-home point was that both Amber Holloway and Rose Michaels had been killed within a few hours of each other, and that meant she was dealing with a different breed of monster than usual.
‘He’s not a serial killer,’ she said.
‘He’s a spree killer,’ Ripley finished.
Guidry pulled her mask down. ‘Pardon my curiosity, but is there a difference?’
‘Very much so. Serial killers cool off before they strike again, and they usually kill for sexual gratification. But spree killers operate in long bursts and they don’t follow patterns.’
‘And they can stop,’ Ripley added. ‘They have self-control, which is a double-edged sword because it means they can easily disappear and never attack again.’
Guidry said, ‘Well, if it’s any consolation, there was no sexual assault here either. Everything was intact. The items recovered from both victims are on the counter behind you. Fields asked me to hold everything until you’d had a look.’
Ella crossed to the counter. Evidence bags were laid out in two groups, labelled and sealed.
She found Rose Michaels’ belongings and then the bag she wanted.
The ballet dancer figurine. It was hand-painted white, turquoise dress, and its broken foot was visible through the bag.
She picked it up and held it to the light.
Then she found Amber Holloway’s. The thin silver chain with the ceramic snowman hanging from it. White body, black dot eyes, and an orange triangle nose. She held that up too.
One in each hand. Six inches apart.
‘Ripley.’
Ripley came over. Ella held the bags at eye level.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Both of these have blemishes at the bottom. Look at the base of the snowman, and the ballet dancer’s foot.’
Ripley checked them both. Ella waited for it to land.
‘So he broke these off something.’
‘Yeah. Could be from a child’s toy set?’
‘Maybe, but the snowman is ceramic and the ballet dancer is wood.’
‘True. We need to speak with these girls’ families once I’ve signed these items out of here.
Then we dig into these victims’ lives and see if anything overlaps.
Start with social media, mutual friends, then go from there.
Credit card statements, phone records. If they even crossed paths once, we need to know about it. ’
Guidry was already re-covering the bodies. ‘Full written reports will go to Fields by morning. Blood work will take longer.’
‘Appreciate it, doctor.’
Ella signed the items out and pocketed them. She and Ripley said their goodbyes and made their way out into the humid dusk air. Ella breathed it in. After thirty minutes of formaldehyde, even car exhaust tasted good.
‘Precinct?’ Ripley said.
‘Did you bring your laptop?’
‘No.’
‘Great. Some use you’ll be.’
‘I didn’t know I was going to be dragged into a murder case, Dark. Sorry for not being psychic.’
‘Fine. I’ll call Fields and get Amber Holloway’s address. We’ll go and see how the land lies.’
Ripley smirked and made for their car. Ella followed her. These figurines meant something to a man in New Orleans, and Ella needed to learn this person’s language. Right now he was either resting or preparing for another spree. She didn’t know which, and that was the part that made her walk faster.