29: Clair handed Nash a cup of coffee and fell down into the chair beside him. “This guy is like a ghost. You could have heard a pin drop in that gallery, and somehow he managed to pick the back-door locks—two of them, mind you—get into the storeroom, and position Lili’s body, all without making enough noise to get the attention of the manager, who wasn’t more than ten or fifteen feet down the hall.”
Nash took a drink of the coffee, his nose wrinkling. “This is horrible.”
“It may have been sitting in that pot a while. It looked a little crusty around the edges.”
He looked down into his cup, shrugged, and drank some more.
Eisley had agreed to perform an emergency autopsy on the body of Lili Davies; they’d been waiting in his office at the Medical Examiner’s Office for a little over an hour. Aside from Lili’s body, no evidence was found at the gallery. Not a single fingerprint or shoe track. The unsub most likely wiped everything down on his way out. There was only the girl.
Eisley had ordered she be brought straight here so he could get to work.
Clair and Nash agreed to wait for the results, while Klozowski checked in with his IT team. Sophie Rodriguez went straight to the Davies home. They didn’t want the family to learn about all this on the news, like the Reynoldses had.
“So Ella Reynolds was looking at cars?” Clair asked.
Nash had told her what they found in her browser history at Starbucks.
He took another drink of the coffee, forcing it down. “Cars R Us on Pulaski Road. For about two weeks she searched their inventory nearly every day. Then she seemed to find something she liked, a 2012 Mazda2 Sport for $7,495, bright green with cloth interior, 1.5-liter engine, automatic transmission, and seventy-five thousand miles.”
“That’s high mileage.”
“Yeah.” Nash forced a smile. “That was my first thought too.”
“You said the searches were encrypted, right? Why would she hide something like that from her parents?” Clair asked.
Nash shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t want her buying a car yet. She was only fifteen. Maybe they thought she was too young.”
“Seems weird to be looking at cars when you’re not even old enough to drive.”
“Hell, I was ready to buy when I was eight years old,” Nash replied.
“At fifteen, girls are usually interested in guys with cars, not buying their own car.”
“Not all girls.”
“Guess not.”
“Kloz and I planned to head there next, when you called about Lili,” he told her. “We’ll drive over when we’re done here.”
Clair remembered something Gabrielle Deegan said. “You know, Lili Davies’s best friend, Gabby, said that Lili was in the market for a car too. For the last few weeks, all she texted were pictures of cars, trying to figure out what she wanted. Her dad said he’d buy her one when she graduated.”
She watched Nash take another drink of his coffee, mulling this over.
“Any chance she visited this dealer? Maybe that’s our link.”
“Our unsub is a used-car salesman?”
Nash stood and slowly paced the office. “He’d have easy access. Think about how that process works. Somebody like Ella or Lili finds a car they like, they go down to the lot, and they’re met by our unsub. It’s unthreatening, they’re going to him instead of the other way around. He shows them the car they came to see, or shows them other cars on the lot. They spend some quality time together. When was the last time you got off a car lot in less than an hour? They rope you in. They ramble around with the salesperson, get to know each other, maybe go for a few test drives. All of these things are disarming. Girls like Lili and Ella may have their guard up when a guy approaches them on the street, but a scenario like this? Hell, they’d be trying to get on the unsub’s good side, so he puts in a word with the finance guy.”
Clair’s eyes went wide. “When you go for a test drive, they take a copy of your driver’s license, all your personal information. He’d have that when they left.”
Nash shook his head. “Neither girl had a license yet, remember?”
“Maybe they had to fill out a form or something.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s worth checking, for sure.”
“Yeah.”
Eisley pushed through the double doors, drying his hands with a paper towel. He tilted his head back toward the examination room. “Come on.”
Clair stood and followed him back inside, with Nash behind her. She popped a piece of gum into her mouth and offered one to Nash.
He shook his head. “I think I’m getting used to the smell.”
“In this office, the day you get used to the smell is the day you retire,” Eisley told him.
Lili Davies’s naked body was laid out on the table, her chest still open with a large Y incision that began at her shoulders and ended above her pubic bone. When she came into view, Nash went pale and reached out a hand to Clair. “I’ll take that gum now.”
Clair snickered and handed him a piece. She leaned over the body. Lili’s face looked so peaceful.
Eisley tilted the large light above the table, focusing the beam on the open chest cavity. “Normally, I would have closed her up, but I wanted you to see this.” He reached inside, pointing beneath her ribs. “See these marks on the lungs?”
Clair followed his finger to dark streaks across the pink surface. There were dozens of them on both lungs. “What are they?”
“When the lungs fill with fluid and strain against the pressure, it can sometimes cause bruising,” Eisley told her.
“So, she drowned? Like Ella?” Nash said.
Eisley nodded. “In salt water, just like Ella.”
Clair leaned in closer. “I thought our bodies don’t bruise after the heart stops pumping. If she died from drowning, should there be bruising?”
“It’s normal to find both pre- and postmortem bruising on the lungs from drowning,” Eisley told her.
“Then why are you showing this to us?”
Eisley leaned back in, his finger tracing the girl’s lungs. “See how some of the marks are much darker than others, like these here?”
Clair nodded.
“This indicates multiple traumas. Some are older than others.”
“You mean, she drowned more than once?” Nash said.
“From what I am observing, this girl drowned six, maybe seven times over a twenty-four-hour period.”
Clair frowned. “How is that possible?”
“I think your unsub drowned her, then revived her,” he said. “If you look closely at her ribs, you’ll see micro fractures. I think he performed CPR on her. I also found multiple electrical burns from a stun gun, so he used one either to subdue her or to revive her.”
“Would that work?”
Eisley shook his head. “No. The electricity would dissipate across her skin. It would need to be directed to the heart. Maybe if he placed a metal plate under her when he did it, but I’m skeptical even that would work. CPR, though, he could have brought her back with CPR.”
“Multiple times,” Clair said.
“Six or seven, at least.”
“My God.”
Nash lowered his head, scratched at his eyebrow. “So he drowned her repeatedly until he was unable to revive her.”
“That would be my conclusion as well, yes,” Eisley said.
Clair stepped back from the table. “Why . . . why would . . .” she said, more to herself than anyone else.
Eisley frowned. “I’m afraid there’s more.”
Clair watched as he crossed the room and pulled back the sheet covering a body against the wall.
Ella Reynolds.
“I reexamined 14982F and found the same marks. The near-freezing and thawing of the body damaged her cells, making this condition less pronounced. I should have noticed regardless. I have no excuse—it slipped by me. I focused primarily on the drowning aspect itself, and my attempts to minimize damage from the conditions in which you found the body.”
“Ella,” Nash said softly. “Her name is Ella.”
Eisley raised his left palm. “Well, yes. Ella. Of course.”
“He drowned and revived her over and over again too?” Nash asked.
Eisley nodded grimly. “In her case, it appears this took place over a much longer period of time. Sometimes days between each event, whereas with 149 . . . with Lili, only an hour or less elapsed between each. There is a clear escalation in your unsub’s behavior. Had Lili been permitted more time to recover, she may have been able to survive. Unfortunately, the human body can only take so much. She wasn’t given a chance.”
“What about Ella’s father?” Clair asked. “What did you find there?”
Eisley gently replaced the white sheet covering Ella’s body, then crossed the room to the metal drawers built into the wall. He tugged one open and gestured for them to come closer. “I’ve been trying to call Porter, but I’m getting voice mail.”
“Sam had to take a step back for a little while,” Nash said.
“Everything okay?”
“Just a personal matter.”
Eisley looked like he was about to press further, then changed his mind. The body of Floyd Reynolds was encased in a thick black body bag. He slid the zipper down from the head to midsection, then spread the plastic so they could see inside. The skin was pale white save for the thick purple and black cut at his neck. It was worst at the center, above the Adam’s apple, and grew thinner and lighter as it spread out across his neck, ending at about the ears.
Eisley followed the line, with his finger hovering about an inch above the surface. “This is from a very thin wire, piano or electric guitar string, most likely. They sell thin cable at most hardware stores, but to me this appears thinner than what you would find there. Like I said, resembling string from a musical instrument. Porter had mentioned finding a footprint on the back of the car seat. That fits with what I’m seeing here. The unsub got the string around this man’s neck, then pulled at it with tremendous force. Because the back of his head was cradled against the headrest, the unsub had tremendous leverage. If you look closely at the center here, you’ll see the string cut nearly to the windpipe. The trauma lessens at the sides, consistent with strangulation from behind.”
“So, definitely the cause of death?” Nash asked.
Eisley nodded. “I’m confident of that. I found nothing else.”
Clair’s cell phone vibrated. She plucked it from her belt and read the text. “Randal Davies just suffered a major stroke.”