CHAPTER EIGHT
If there was one constant in Ella’s life, it was that coroner’s offices were the same in every town in the country.
The colors sometimes changed, but the rest was copy and paste.
Walking towards the autopsy room of the Ozaukee County Medical Examiners Office, Ella felt, once again, like she’d been here before.
Ripley knocked on the door twice, and a pathologist opened up like they’d been waiting on the other side. They took their mask off, and a young woman stared back at them. ‘Hello, friends. You must be here about the body.’
‘That we are,’ said Ella. ‘Agents Dark and Ripley.’
‘I’m Doctor Sanchez. Come in.’
Death had a scent, and nowhere was it more present than an autopsy room.
Ella couldn’t decide if she'd grown accustomed to it or just better at lying to herself.
The room was a metal slab fit for the dearly departed, because the sterile white lights above exposed nothing but truths.
An autopsy table in the center of the room held a body covered with a pristine sheet.
‘I received the body an hour ago, but I managed to get a quick preliminary done in that time. Toxicology reports are still with the lab, but I should have them back by tomorrow. Where do you ladies want to start?’
‘We’ll follow your lead,’ Ella said.
‘You’ll want your masks and gloves on, because decomposition hasn’t been kind to this one.’
Ella found the gear waiting on the side, but Ripley waved hers off. ‘Ready.’
Doctor Sanchez pulled back the sheet to reveal Julia Dawson’s rigid body in full.
The overhead lights made her look flatter than she'd been in life, like someone had drained her of dimension. But it was the hole in her abdomen that demanded attention; a crater rimmed with tissue that had gone from pink to brown, with its edges curled inward like flower petals in reverse. Ella’s stomach did the flip it always did when presented with a body.
Ripley's face went carefully blank, which meant she was feeling it too.
Sanchez grabbed her pointer and began at the victim’s head. ‘Heavy bruise to the back of the skull. Certainly the result of blunt force trauma, although I can’t pinpoint exactly what made it.’
‘Enough to knock her unconscious?’
‘Very much so. Other than that, it’s all quite strange, because some things don't quite add up. Things that don't align with the initial hypothesis of death.’
‘We’re listening,’ Ripley said.
'Well, you see any cuts, bruises, or lacerations on the arms or legs or torso?’
Ella peered closer. ‘No. Nothing. I see where you’re going with this.’
‘Where am I going with this?’
‘There are no suppression or defensive wounds anywhere, which is rare for victims who were restrained.’
‘Exactly that. I’m no profiler, but if you tie someone up while they’re conscious and they’ll tear themselves apart trying to get free.
You get friction burns, skin stripped off where they've been pulling against rope.
Sometimes they dislocate their own thumbs trying to slip cuffs.
' Sanchez tapped the pointer against Julia's unmarked forearm. 'She didn't do any of that.'
‘So, the victim was probably unconscious by the time the restraints were applied?’ Ella asked.
'I wouldn't say unconscious, but this woman was weakened somehow, maybe in a state of paralysis. I'm certain she was moving under her own power or there'd be more marks on her. You can't lug an unconscious body around without leaving a few scrapes.’
That detail landed sideways in Ella's brain, something to examine later. She moved down to the main event. ‘What about the hole in her stomach?’
‘This is where things get really weird,’ Sanchez said, ‘because I can’t figure out what caused this hole.’
Ella had rarely heard a mortician admit they didn’t know something. ‘You can’t identify the weapon?’
'I spent ten years in the Milwaukee County Morgue before I came here for the peace and quiet.
I've seen everything the city can dream up.
Knife wounds, I know. Gunshots, blunt trauma, saw blades, industrial accidents - I can tell you what made the cut and usually which brand of tool.
' She gestured at Julia's abdomen. 'This is different. Look at the margins.'
Ella studied the edges. Ragged, inflamed, but not sliced. More like something had been scraped away.
'No metal traces?' Ripley asked.
'None. No steel, no iron, no zinc. Not a knife. Not a surgical tool.'
'What about a saw? Drill?'
'Power tools leave patterns. Blade marks, scoring. This is more like-' Sanchez paused, searching. 'Like someone used sandpaper. Thousands of tiny abrasions instead of clean cuts. The tissue's been worn away, not severed.'
'Death by a thousand cuts,' Ella said. The phrase surfaced from some documentary she'd watched at two in the morning when sleep wouldn't come. 'Lingchi. Ancient Chinese execution method.'
Ella remembered what Julia's roommate had said about Julia taking an interest in medieval history. A strange theory emerged in Ella’s head, but she benched it for a moment.
‘What could do that?’ asked Ripley. ‘There’s only a six hour window between the victim going missing and her showing up dead. Is that long enough for someone to do this?’
Sanchez placed her pointer down then picked up her clipboard. 'No. Six hours is nowhere near long enough for someone to do this. These cuts have sliced through flesh, muscle, bone, and internal organs, and that's where things get weirder still.'
Ella felt like she’d entered unchartered territory, a new world where the old rules didn’t apply. ‘Weirder still?’
‘The amount of blood loss you'd expect from such a wound... it's not here. It's minimal, almost as if the blood was drained or... never there in the first place.’
‘You're saying she bled out elsewhere?’
'She didn't bleed at all. That's the issue.' Sanchez set down her pointer. 'A wound this size should have emptied her circulatory system. But her blood volume is almost normal. Minimal loss. Which means-,'
'The wound happened after she died,' Ella finished.
‘Correct.’
The room felt smaller suddenly. Julia Dawson had been dead before something carved her open. Ripley asked, ‘So what’s the cause of death?’
‘Usually, in victims who pass out from pain or exhaustion, the official cause of death is a shutdown of the nervous system.’
‘But not here,’ Ella anticipated.
‘No. In fact, I’ve never seen a cause of death quite like this.’
Ella felt like she was getting more questions than answers. ‘So what was it?’
‘Ventricular fibrillation, which is not just worth thirty-three points on a Scrabble board, but also induces an abnormal type of heart rhythm,’ Sanchez said.
Ella wiped sweat from her forehead. 'Her heart just gave out?'
'Essentially. But it’s how it gave out that’s the thing.
I can tell you what I don’t see. No underlying heart conditions according to her medical history, no signs of electrocution, nothing physical that would make a healthy woman’s heart go into v-fib.
But her adrenal glands were hemorrhaged.
That happens when the body is flooded with stress hormones. ’
‘What stress hormones?’
‘Epinephrine, cortisol. The panic cocktail. If you ask me, this woman was in extreme fight-or-flight when she died. Her heart couldn't sustain it.'
Ella assembled the timeline in her head: kidnapped, weakened somehow, tied down, died, then mutilated. No blood. No struggle.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘are you saying Julia Dawson was literally… scared to death?’
Sanchez looked between Ella and Ripley with a glimmer of mutual understanding. ‘Bodily reactions can be as lethal as any physical wound. The heart is a strange tool.’
Ella paced three steps, turned, paced back.
Ripley stayed frozen beside the table like she'd taken root.
'So she died before the mutilation. Which means we need to know what frightened her badly enough to stop her heart. And why would someone bother creating this wound after. What happened in those missing hours?’
Ripley interjected, ‘And why go through the trouble of creating such a bizarre wound post-mortem?’
Ella let her mind go loose. She stopped trying to force connections and just let the pieces float.
Rose Murphy's voice manifested in her head: She started online classes recently.
Something to do with medieval times. She used to put peppermint and garlic near the front door and windows.
Said it helped keep the vermin away.. The secret weekly trips.
The cabin in the woods. The hole in Julia's stomach.
The answer assembled itself slowly, then all at once.
'Ripley,' she said. ‘I don’t think our killer did create this wound post-mortem. In fact, I don’t think our killer created this wound at all.’
'What? Then who did?'
Ella stared at the cavity in Julia's abdomen. Scraped away, the doctor had said. Thousands of tiny abrasions.
'Not who. What.' She looked up. 'Rats. She was eaten by rats.'