Though the Heartsdale Medical Center anchored the end of Main Street, it was not capable of looking nearly as important as its name would imply. Just two stories tall, the small hospital was equipped to do little more than handle whatever scrapes and upset stomachs couldn’t wait for doctors’ hours. There was a larger hospital about thirty minutes away in Augusta that handled the serious cases. If not for the county morgue being housed in the basement, the medical center would have been torn down to make way for student housing a long time ago.
Like the rest of the town, the hospital had been built during the town’s upswing in the 1930s. The main floors had been renovated since then, but the morgue was obviously not important to the hospital board. The walls were lined with light blue tile that was so old it was coming back into style. The floors were a mixed check pattern of green and tan linoleum. The ceiling overhead had seen its share of water damage, but most of it had been patched. The equipment was dated but functional.
Sara’s office was in the back, separated from the rest of the morgue by a large glass window. She sat behind her desk, looking out the window, trying to collect her thoughts. She concentrated on the white noise of the morgue: the air compressor on the freezer, the swish-swish of the water hose as Carlos washed down the floor. Since they were below ground, the walls of the morgue absorbed rather than deflected the sounds, and Sara felt oddly comforted by the familiar hums and swishes. The shrill ring of the phone interrupted the silence.
“Sara Linton,” she said, expecting Jeffrey. Instead, it was her father.
“Hey, baby.”
Sara smiled, feeling a lightness overcome her at the sound of Eddie Linton’s voice. “Hey, Daddy.”
“I’ve got a joke for you.”
“Yeah?” She tried to keep her tone light, knowing humor was her father’s way of dealing with stress. “What’s that?”
“A pediatrician, a lawyer, and a priest were on the Titanic when it started to go down,” he began. “The pediatrician says, ‘Save the children.’ The lawyer says, ‘Fuck the children!’ And the priest says, ‘Do we have time?’ ”
Sara laughed, more for her father’s benefit than anything else. He was quiet, waiting for her to talk. She asked, “How’s Tessie?”
“Taking a nap,” he reported. “How about you?”
“Oh, I’m okay.” Sara started drawing circles on her desk calendar. She wasn’t normally a doodler, but she needed something to do with her hands. Part of her wanted to check her briefcase, to see if Tessa had thought to put the postcard in there. Part of her did not want to know where it was.
Eddie interrupted her thoughts. “Mom says you have to come to breakfast tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” Sara asked, drawing squares over the circles.
His voice took on a singsong quality. “Waffles and grits and toast and bacon.”
“Hey,” Jeffrey said.
Sara jerked her head up, dropping the pen. “You scared me,” she said, then, to her father, “Daddy, Jeffrey’s here—”
Eddie Linton made a series of unintelligible noises. In his opinion, there was nothing wrong with Jeffrey Tolliver that a solid brick to the head would not fix.
“All right,” Sara said into the phone, giving Jeffrey a tight smile. He was looking at the etched sign on the glass, where her father had slapped a piece of masking tape over the last name TOLLIVER and written in LINTON with a black marker. Since Jeffrey had cheated on Sara with the only sign maker in town, it was doubtful that the lettering would be more professionally fixed anytime soon.
“Daddy,” Sara interrupted, “I’ll see you in the morning.” She hung up the phone before he could get another word in.
Jeffrey asked, “Let me guess, he sends his love.”
Sara ignored the question, not wanting to get into a personal conversation with Jeffrey. This was how he sucked her back in, making her think that he was a normal person capable of being honest and supportive, when in actuality the minute Jeffrey felt like he was back in Sara’s good graces he’d probably run for cover. Or, under the covers, to be more exact.
He said, “How’s Tessa doing?”
“Fine,” Sara said, taking her glasses out of their case. She slid them on, asking, “Where’s Lena?”
He glanced at the clock on the wall. “About an hour away. Frank’s going to page me when she’s ten minutes out.”
Sara stood, adjusting the waist of her scrubs. She had showered in the hospital lounge, storing her bloodied clothes in an evidence bag in case they were needed for trial.
She asked, “Have you thought about what you’re going to tell her?”
He shook his head no. “I’m hoping we can get something concrete before I talk to her. Lena’s a cop. She’s going to want answers.”
Sara leaned over the desk, knocking on the glass. Carlos looked up. “You can go now,” she said. Then, explaining to Jeffrey, “He’s going to run blood and urine up to the crime lab. They’re going to put it through tonight.”
“Good.”
Sara sat back in her chair. “Did you get anything from the bathroom?”
“We found her cane and glasses behind the toilet. They were wiped clean.”
“What about the stall door?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I mean, not nothing, but every woman in town’s been in and out of that place. Last count Matt had over fifty different prints.” He took some Polaroids out of his pocket and tossed them onto the desk. There were close-ups of the body lying on the floor alongside pictures of Sara’s bloody shoe and hand prints.
Sara picked up one of these, saying, “I guess it didn’t help matters that I contaminated the scene.”
“It’s not like you had a choice.”
She kept her thoughts to herself, putting the pictures in logical sequence.
He repeated her earlier evaluation. “Whoever did this knew what he was doing. He knew she would go to the restaurant alone. He knew she couldn’t see. He knew the place would be deserted that time of day.”
“You think he was waiting for her?”
Jeffrey gave a shrug. “Seems that way. He probably came in and out the back door. Pete had disconnected the alarm so they could leave it open to air the place out.”
“Yeah,” she said, remembering the back door to the diner was propped open more times than not.
“So, we’re looking for someone who knew her activities, right? Somebody who was familiar with the layout of the diner.”
Sara did not want to answer this question, which implied that the killer was someone living in Grant, someone who knew the people and places the way only a resident could. Instead, she stood and walked back to the metal filing cabinet on the other side of her desk. She took out a fresh lab coat and slipped it on, saying, “I’ve already taken X rays and checked her clothing. Other than that, she’s ready.”
Jeffrey turned, staring out at the table in the center of the morgue. Sara looked, too, thinking that Sibyl Adams was a lot smaller in death than she seemed in life. Even Sara couldn’t get used to the way death reduced people.
Jeffrey asked, “Did you know her well?”
Sara mulled over his question. Finally she said, “I guess. We both did career day at the middle school last year. Then, you know, I ran into her at the library sometimes.”
“The library?” Jeffrey asked. “I thought she was blind.”
“They have books on tape there, I guess.” She stopped in front of him, crossing her arms. “Listen, I have to tell you this. Lena and I kind of had a fight a few weeks back.”
Obviously, he was surprised. Sara was surprised, too. There were not a lot of people in town she did not get along with. But Lena Adams was certainly one of them.
Sara explained, “She called Nick Shelton at the GBI asking for a tox report on a case.”
Jeffrey shook his head side to side, not understanding. “Why?”
Sara shrugged. She still didn’t know why Lena had tried to go over her head, especially considering it was well known that Sara had a very good working relationship with Nick Shelton, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s field agent for Grant County.
“And?” Jeffrey prompted.
“I don’t know what Lena thought she could accomplish by calling Nick directly. We had it out. No blood was shed, but I wouldn’t say we parted on friendly terms.”
Jeffrey shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? Lena had made a career out of ticking people off. Back when Sara and Jeffrey were married, Jeffrey had often voiced his concern over Lena’s impetuous behavior.
“If she was”—he stopped, then—“if she was raped, Sara. I don’t know.”
“Let’s get started,” Sara answered quickly, walking past him into the morgue. She stood in front of the supply cabinet, looking for a surgical gown. She paused, her hands on the doors as she played back their conversation in her mind, wondering how it had turned from a forensic evaluation into a discussion about Jeffrey’s potential outrage had Sibyl Adams not just been killed but raped as well.
“Sara?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
Sara felt her anger spark at his stupid question. “What’s wrong?” She found the gown and slammed the doors shut. The metal frame rattled from the force. Sara turned, ripping the sterile pack open. “What’s wrong is I’m tired of you asking me what’s wrong when it’s pretty damn obvious what’s wrong.” She paused, snapping out the gown. “Think about it, Jeffrey. A woman literally died in my arms today. Not just a stranger, someone I knew. I should be at home right now taking a long shower or walking the dogs and instead I’ve got to go in there and cut her up, worse than she already is, so I can tell you whether or not you need to start pulling in all the perverts in town.”
Her hands shook with anger as she tried to get into the gown. The sleeve was just out of her reach, and she was turning to get a better angle when Jeffrey moved to help her.
Her tone was nasty when she snapped, “I’ve got it.”
He held his hands up, palms toward her as if in surrender. “Sorry.”
Sara fumbled with the ties on the gown, ending up knotting the strings together. “Shit,” she hissed, trying to work them back out.
Jeffrey offered, “I could get Brad to go walk the dogs.”
Sara dropped her hands, giving up. “That’s not the point, Jeffrey.”
“I know it’s not,” he returned, approaching her the way he might a rabid dog. He took the strings and she looked down, watching him work out the knot. Sara let her gaze travel to the top of his head, noting a few gray strands in with the black. She wanted to will into him the ability to comfort her instead of trying to make a joke of everything. She wanted for him to magically develop the capacity for empathy. After ten years, she should have known better.
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.
“What is it?” Jeffrey asked.
She could not speak for a few seconds. Her throat felt as if it was closing in on her.
“Sara?”
A beeping filled the morgue. Jeffrey checked his pager. “That can’t be Lena,” he said. “Mind if I use the phone?”
“Sure.” Sara crossed her arms, feeling the need to protect herself from her own thoughts. She waited until Jeffrey was sitting behind her desk before she continued the examination.
Sara reached above her head, turning the light so that she could get a better look at the pelvic area. Adjusting the metal speculum, she mumbled a prayer to herself, to God, to anybody who would listen, to no avail. By the time Jeffrey returned, she was sure.
“Well?” he asked.
Sara’s hands shook as she peeled off her gloves. “She was sexually assaulted early on in the attack.” She paused, dropping the soiled gloves on the table, imagining in her mind Sibyl Adams sitting on the toilet, putting her hands to the open wound in her abdomen, then bracing herself against the bars on either side of the stall, completely blind to what was happening to her.
He waited a few beats before prompting, “And?”
Sara put her hands on the edges of the table. “There was fecal matter in her vagina.”
Jeffrey did not seem to follow. “She was sodomized first?”
“There’s no sign of anal penetration.”
“But you found fecal matter,” he said, still not getting it.
“Deep in her vagina,” Sara said, not wanting to spell it out, knowing she would have to. She heard an uncharacteristic waver in her voice when she said, “The incision in her belly was deep on purpose, Jeffrey.” She stopped, searching for words to describe the horror she had found.
“He raped her,” Jeffrey said, not a question. “There was vaginal penetration.”
“Yes,” Sara answered, still searching for a way to clarify. Finally she said, “There was vaginal penetration after he raped the wound.”