Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 4

"And not in the good way," Liska tossed back over her shoulder. Typical Tinks. Always with the smart mouth.

Kovac had to admit, the two of them had been partners longer than he had stayed married to either of his wives. He doubted there was much one of them didn't know about the other. Liska delighted in embarra.s.sing him with the details of her dating life. He weighed in routinely on her ex-husband and had learned to read and a.s.sess her moods with sharp accuracy.

She was p.i.s.sed now, but his smoking a cigarette had little to do with it. Quick and tense, her every movement was reminiscent of an angry cat snapping its tail.

"Speed?" he guessed as they hung up their coats and grabbed yellow gowns.

"Isn't answering his phone," she said curtly.

"How is that a problem? It's not as much fun to call him a lazy-a.s.s selfish d.i.c.k on his voice mail?"

She stood still and looked up at him with grave meaning. "Kyle got into a fight last night."

"Kyle?"

"I know. Right? Kyle doesn't get into fights."

"Does he have an explanation?"

"Sure. It's bulls.h.i.+t. He claims he and his friends went skating on the lake last night, that he crashed into some kid and got into a fight with him."

"You don't believe him."

"It was seventeen below zero last night," she reminded him. "n.o.body was skating on Lake Calhoun. The knuckles of his right hand are sc.r.a.ped. He wasn't wearing gloves when he hit whoever he hit. They weren't outside," she concluded. "He's lying to me."

"And you think he'll tell Speed the truth?" Kovac asked. "Speed is more apt to give him pointers. How to Sell a Lie 101 by Speed Hatcher. The a.s.shole ought to do a video series. Maybe he could pay his back child support with the proceeds."

"I don't know what good he would do," she admitted. "I just know I want him to suffer through this too."

Kovac held his tongue and bent over to pull on the yellow paper booties over his shoes. Suffering was not on the Speed Hatcher agenda any more than shouldering his share of the responsibility for parenting two teenage boys.

"I know what you're thinking," Liska said.

"Well, that's going to save on conversation, then."

"I'm worried," she admitted.

"I know."

He put a hand on her shoulder and gave a little squeeze at the rock-hard tension there. "Kyle's a great kid, Tinks. You're doing a great job raising him and R.J. But they're boys. Boys do stupid things. Boys get into sc.r.a.pes. It's a wonder half of the male population even makes it to maturity."

"That's a fact." She tried without much success to muster her usual smarta.s.s smirk.

"Hey, it could be worse," Kovac pointed out. "He could be a zombie."

WATCHING ULF MoLLER conduct an autopsy was like watching performance art. Cla.s.sical music played softly in the background, with bone saws and oscillating saws and the clank of surgical instruments against stainless steel overlaying the orchestral score. The white background of the room was like the white of a blank canvas, clean and austere. Moller and his a.s.sistant glided around the table like a pair of ballroom dancers in blue surgical gowns, elegant and smooth and perfectly in step with each other.

The autopsy of Zombie Doe would have been a mesmerizing thing to watch if not for the utter horror embodied by the decedent. Or maybe she was the jarring focal point that put the entire picture into perspective. She was a thing from another dimension, all harsh angles and strong colors, dirty and b.l.o.o.d.y and broken in too many places. Her face was a mask of raw meat and white bone. The dark hair was shaved to the scalp on one side of the skull and a Medusa's mane of twisted, matted snarls on the other.

"I see what you mean," Moller said, glancing from the young woman's face to Kovac. "You'll have your work cut out for you to get an ID."

"Right?" Kovac said. "What are we supposed to do with that? We can't put out a photograph. And what's a sketch artist going to make of it? Can you tell what she must have looked like? Any artist's rendition is going to be pure guesswork."

"A bad sketch is worse than no sketch at all," Liska said.

People cruising the missing and unidentified persons websites looking for loved ones rode a double-edged sword, both wanting and not wanting to find the person they were looking for. Staring at sketches, they would fixate not only on similarities to their missing daughter, sister, friend but also on the differences. Maybe this one was . . . but the nose was too narrow or the mouth was too wide. They remembered their lover's, mother's, brother's crooked smile, but no one died smiling, and sketches were rendered with little emotion on the victim's face so as not to distort the features.

Kovac himself had sat up late at night staring at the computer screen, at those photographs and sketches, trying to put a name to a victim. He had compared their sketch of New Year's Doe (Jane Doe 01-11) to the missing persons photo of Rose Reiser again and again without being able to conclusively say the two were the same girl. His victim's nose had been smashed to a pulp. The sketch artist had given her a generic nose. Rose Reiser's nose in her photograph was short and turned up at the end.

"The witness says her face was messed up like that when she came out of the trunk," Liska said. "Like half her face had melted, he said."

Moller gazed down at the dead girl, frowning. "Acid."

"What kind of acid?" Kovac asked.

"The lab will have to tell you that. Could be one of several. Hydrochloric, ferric, sulfuric, phosphoric. Not hydrofluoric. Hydrofluoric doesn't damage the skin so much. It's better for dissolving bone. It likes calcium. If you want to get rid of a skeleton, hydrofluoric acid is your best choice."

"Why does it creep me out that you know that?" Liska asked.

Moller looked right at her with amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes. Behind his mask he was undoubtedly smiling like a cat.

"For the purpose of damaging flesh, I would choose sulfuric acid," he went on. "It's easily had."

"That's battery acid, right?" Kovac asked.

"Or a component of drain cleaner, or rust remover, or liquid fertilizer. It has a long list of uses," Moller said. "It can be purchased at the hardware store in a strong concentration-and this would have been quite concentrated to cause this kind of deep-tissue damage.

"At strength not only does it hydrolyze proteins and lipids, causing the primary chemical burn, it also causes a secondary thermal burn by dehydrating carbohydrates," he said. "And, if combined with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, one creates a substance called a piranha solution, which will dissolve nearly anything, including carbon on gla.s.sware."

"Piranha solution?" Kovac said. "Sounds like something out of an old James Bond movie."

"Indeed."

Using his fingers with delicate care, Moller examined what was left of the victim's lips and mouth. One side of the tongue-which had the appearance of raw hamburger-was visible through the hole the acid had burned through the cheek.

"Burns in the mouth . . . ," he said, gently prying the jaws open, "on the tongue-the tongue appears to have been bitten quite badly."

Kovac said nothing but ground his back teeth together. He had once worked the homicide of a hooker whose pimp had poured Drano down her throat. It had been a horrific death. The caustic chemical had seared her esophagus all the way to her stomach, and all the way back up as the woman's body tried to reject it.

Liska asked the question they were all thinking. "Was she alive when that happened?"

"We'll know soon enough," Moller said.

He continued his visual examination, counting the stab wounds to the chest and throat. He made note of the length and depth of each wound. Seventeen in all.

"This knife was smaller than with the other girl I autopsied," he commented. "This looks more like a paring knife or a pocketknife. The wounds are not as wide nor as deep."

The knife wounds to all three of the previous cases attributed to Doc Holiday-Rose Reiser, Independence Doe, and Labor Day Doe-had been deep and vicious, made with intent.

Moller pointed out several lesser marks on the victim's chest. "Hesitation marks, perhaps? Or perhaps the a.s.sailant was not so physically powerful after the initial attack."

"Hesitation or torture?" Kovac asked. "The killer didn't hesitate to pour acid on her face. Why be shy to stab her?"

"That, my friend, is for you to discover, yes? If I were to guess-and of course, it is not my place to do so-I would guess the acid came after the stabbing," Moller said. "If the intent was to hinder identification, yes? The worst deed was already done."

"Stabbing is hands-on," Liska said. "It doesn't get much more personal and real than physically shoving a knife through another person's flesh."

Moller raised an eyebrow. "You've given this some thought, have you?"

"More than you'd care to know. As for the acid . . . It's not so hard to open a bottle and pour out the contents."

"Onto someone's face?"

She shrugged. "If you're p.i.s.sed enough or sick enough to stab somebody seventeen times, why not? It's a h.e.l.l of a lot easier than dismemberment."

"That's true," Kovac conceded. "All the satisfaction of depersonalizing the victim, and none of the hard labor."

Moller's young a.s.sistant piped up. "The three of you are freaking me out."

"You must be new," Liska said. "Wait until we're in here eating egg salad sandwiches while Doc sc.r.a.pes the maggots off a severed head."

The a.s.sistant tried very hard not to react. The first rule of dealing with cops, Kovac thought: Show no fear.

Moller continued his examination of the body. The damage done to their unknown young woman was devastating-the broken bones, the shattered skull, the stab wounds, the acid burns. Kovac wanted to know which had been inflicted by the a.s.sailant and which had been a result of falling from the trunk of the car and being struck by the Hummer limo. Some of those answers were obvious; others were not.

Doc Holiday's victims had been severely beaten-a lot of blunt-force trauma to the head with a hammer or something similar. With this victim having struck her head with some force as she fell to the road, it would be all but impossible to tell if any of the skull or facial fractures had been inflicted manually.

Moller pointed out matching bruising on both arms, both above the elbows and around the wrists. Finger marks, not ligature marks. She had been grabbed hard and held on to, possibly held down.

Doc Holiday's victims had shown similar bruising, but ligature marks as well. His previous torture repertoire had included cigarette burns. This girl had no cigarette burns. There was no obvious evidence of forcible s.e.xual penetration and no s.e.m.e.n present, yet the fact that she had been naked from the waist down strongly suggested a s.e.xual component to the crime.

Moller and his a.s.sistant turned the body over with great care, mindful of the alignment of broken bones and the delicacy of torn flesh, handling the head like a basket of eggs. The most significant finding on this side of the victim was a small tattoo on the left shoulder, a couple of Chinese characters that meant nothing to anyone present. Liska took a photograph of the mark with her iPhone.

After the initial visual examination, Moller chose to go to the skull, to carefully dismantle the puzzle pieces of shattered bone in order to extract what was left of the brain to be weighed and examined. He then moved on to the torso and, with an artist's hand, drew the scalpel down the body, creating the Y incision: shoulders to sternum, sternum to groin.

Kovac tried unsuccessfully to tune out the sound of the garden loppers snapping the ribs from the breastbone, and the mechanical cranking of the rib spreader opening the chest cavity. After the literally hundreds of autopsies he had observed during his career, those sounds still got to him worse than anything else, except perhaps the smell of a burn victim or a floater. Something about cracking a chest made him see himself on the gurney and start rethinking that occasional cigarette.

Moller lifted out the internal organs one by one, weighed each, inspected each for signs of organic disease and physical injury. The information was logged and recorded.

The a.s.sailant's knife had remarkably missed the vital organs and major blood vessels. There had been significant bleeding into the body cavity, but the damage was not so much that she would have died quickly from it.

"So she could have been alive when she came out of that trunk," Liska said.

"It's not likely, but she probably wasn't dead due to the stab wounds," Moller qualified.

"If she didn't bleed out," Kovac said, "what killed her?"

Moller ignored the question. Homicide detectives were to medical examiners what four-year-old children were to overworked mothers.

He opened the victim's esophagus to find chemical burns. He lifted the lungs from her chest and placed them in the hanging scale, shaking his head.

"The lungs are heavy and wet," he said. "Inhalation of acid fumes damages the mucous membranes and causes pulmonary edema-a buildup of fluid."

"She was alive when the b.a.s.t.a.r.d poured the acid on her," Kovac said, anger burning through him just as the acid must have burned through this poor girl's flesh.

"Worse than that," Moller said as he continued his work. "She aspirated the acid itself. There is lung tissue here which has basically been digested."

"Jesus Christ," Kovac muttered.

He jammed his hands at his waist and walked away from the table, his own lungs hurting as he tried a few deep breaths. He had learned long ago never to mentally put himself in the victim's place. Therein lay the road to alcoholism. But it was difficult not to imagine the horror this girl had suffered in her final moments-held down, stabbed, acid raining down on her. It was difficult not to imagine her screams as her flesh burned and her panic as she gasped for a breath and sucked the caustic chemical into her airway.

Without a word to anyone, he walked out of the autopsy suite into the hall and just stood there.

He was by all descriptions, including his own, tough, hardened by long years looking at dead bodies and the wretched things people did to other people. He just needed a moment to regroup, to clear the anger from his head, to take the information of this autopsy and compartmentalize it into the relevant fact file in his brain.

He heard the door open behind him. Liska walked around in front of him and leaned back against the wall with her arms crossed. She didn't say anything. They both just stood there, breathing in and out, neither of them feeling the need to fill the silence.

Finally, Kovac heaved a sigh and said, "She probably wasn't conscious by the time the killer poured the acid on her. The stab wounds . . . She'd lost a lot of blood."

"Probably. I hope so."

"We've got the skin and blood under her fingernails. We'll get a DNA profile."

"Maybe he'll be in a database," Liska said.

"Yeah, maybe. We'll hope so," he said, deciding to at least pretend to grab on to that small hope.

At this point, small hope was as much hope as they had.

7.

Liska begged off going for a postautopsy drink in favor of going home to her domestic drama. Kovac begged off going home to avoid the fact that he had no domestic life.

The Minneapolis Police Department lived in city hall, a ma.s.sive Gothic-looking stone monstrosity of a building the color of liver crowned in steep verdigris-green roofs. Built around the turn of the twentieth century, with turrets and a clock tower and a five-story rotunda, it had originally been the county courthouse building. The courts now did business in the flashy, modern Hennepin County government complex on the other side of Fifth Street. The police department and Minneapolis city offices remained in the old munic.i.p.al building.

Kovac parked in a slot reserved for a deputy chief, knowing there was no danger of any deputy chief interrupting his New Year's Day to come to the office. The halls were empty, his footfalls echoing as he made his way toward the Criminal Investigative Division offices.

Maintenance had yet to solve the mystery of the rogue heating system. He started peeling off clothing as soon as he was in the door-gloves, coat, scarf, hat. He threw the pile on Liska's chair in the cubicle.

"Judas, it's like the gateway to h.e.l.l in here!" he declared to no one in particular.