“In what way?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand this wound. It was done postmortem, and—”
“Is it a cut to the common carotid artery?”
Zoe blinked. “I have no idea.”
He sighed. “Is there an image you can send me?”
“Uh . . . sure. What’s your email?”
He gave her his email. As she sent him the photo of the victim’s throat, Scott walked into the room and waved hi. She smiled at him.
“Okay,” Abramson said. “Got it. Yes, this looks like a cut to the carotid artery.”
“So . . . what does that mean for the embalming process?”
“Well, I assume it was made during the embalming process,” Abramson said.
“What?”
“The common carotid artery is one of the preferred places to cut when embalming to inject the embalming fluid. Though he seems to have messed it up—the drainage spurted all over the throat.”
“What does that mean?”
“Like I told you before, it means you are dealing with an amateur.”
“But the body isn’t embalmed.”
“Then he probably stopped before he was done.”
“I see.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No . . . thank you, Mr. Abramson. You’ve been very helpful.”
She put down her phone, her mind trying to assemble the sequence of events.
The killer had walked in, seeing Lily trying to get the police to help her. He had disconnected the call and strangled Lily to death. Then . . . he had decided to embalm her.
Why didn’t he simply get rid of the body and get another prostitute? Surely he realized how risky this was. Embalming a body took about two hours. The police, as far as he knew, were on their way . . .
This body was very important to him; that was the only explanation she could think of. He really wanted it embalmed.
He had begun, then stopped during the process, which he had mucked up. He had taken the body with him . . . but then discarded it in an alley when he had seen the roadblocks.
It was erratic behavior. He became erratic when he was under pressure. She made a note of that.
She returned to the first time stamp. The muffled word.
“Hey, Scott, can you come here for a sec?” she said.
He got up and walked over. “What’s up?”
“Can you listen to this and tell me if you can understand what she’s trying to say?”
She played the sound bite.
Scott frowned. “Can you play that one more time?”
She did. He asked again. She played it a third time. Then, when he still frowned, she played it on repeat, and they listened to the dead prostitute trying to identify her killer over and over again. One word. It seemed as if it slowly became more intelligible the more they heard it, instead of the other way around.
“You know,” Scott said, “I think she might be saying trucker.”
Zoe nodded. “I was actually about to say she said Hummer, like the car.”
She played it again.
“Yeah, I can hear Hummer too,” Scott said.
“I just thought that it sounds a bit more like trucker.” Zoe smiled.
“So . . . he’s either driving a Hummer or some sort of truck?”
Zoe nodded. “Thanks.” She made a note.
“You think this profile will help us nail this guy?” Scott asked, glancing over her shoulder at the paper.
“I really do,” Zoe said, hoping he couldn’t hear the doubt in her voice.
CHAPTER 43
Harry’s editor, Daniel, was occasionally a man of inspiration. A good example was his inspiration when Harry had hinted that he wasn’t doing his job properly. He had responded by requesting an article from Harry titled “Nine Reasons America Loves to Hate Justin Bieber.”
Harry did the only thing he could. He went looking for a story that would overcome Daniel’s need for revenge—namely, what he had asked to do in the first place. He would write about the Strangling Undertaker.
But he needed a good angle. Daniel was very clear about not wanting Oprah’s opinion about the murders. And Oprah probably wouldn’t talk to Harry anyway after the viral article he had written two years before, “Ten Great Celebrities Who Would Make the Worst Presidents.”
He decided to go to the site where the body of Monique Silva had been found. He remembered he had heard about a memorial shrine erected for her at that spot. That could be his angle—talk about the everyday citizens’ reactions to the killings, instead of the murderer and the police hunt. People wanted to read about themselves.
He approached the bridge, looking at the water lilies by the shore. It was a beautiful spot, doubly so on a sunny day like this one. A young couple walked by, the man pushing a baby stroller, the woman leaning against him. Harry immediately thought of a paragraph that would star them, a couple in love, struggling to make sense of the terrible violence enacted on this spot.
The memorial shrine was on the other side of the stream. Pleased, he crossed the bridge, hoping for some tear-inducing descriptions of baby pictures, handwritten letters, and candles.
The shrine was actually a mound of rocks on which people laid flowers. Harry wondered if they had picked them in the park, when he spotted a man selling them, not far from the shrine. Harry grinned and approached the flower salesman. He was dressed in black, surrounded by several buckets in which somber roses were wilting. His face wore an expression of deep, endless grief.
“Good day, sir,” the man said. “Would you like a flower to lay on the shrine for Monica Silva?”
“What a thoughtful idea,” Harry said. “The poor girl, her life plucked away at such a young age.”
“Terrible,” the flower vendor agreed. “Just one dollar. Five dollars for a respectable bouquet.”
Harry took out his wallet, thinking the man’s cynicism was worth ten dollars at least. “Her name was Monique Silva, by the way,” he said as he handed the bill to the vendor.
The vendor nodded distractedly as he fished one of the sorry-looking bouquets from the bucket. As he wrapped it in paper, Harry looked for his cigarettes, placed one in his mouth, and lit it. He held the pack toward the flower vendor.
“Cigarette?”
“Thank you, sir,” the vendor said, plucking a cigarette. Harry gave him the lighter.
They stood in silence for a moment, each enjoying the feeling of the tobacco filling their throats and lungs. Harry watched the tendril of smoke rising from his cigarette until a gust of wind blew it away. “Would you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he asked.
Fifteen minutes later he had a spirit-lifting article about the way people were brought closer together by the tragedy. It was not Pulitzer Prize material, but it had a measure of accessibility that Harry felt made it shine. Readers of the article would be proud to be part of the Chicago community. They would, possibly, like and share the article so that their friends could see what a great city they lived in. Embedded in the article were a few tweets about the horrendous murders, by people with many followers. Maybe those people would tweet about the article, generating even more readers.
Pleased with his progress, he walked away from the flower vendor, planning the headline for the article. He would either go with a cliffhanger clickbait—“Third Victim of the Strangling Undertaker Found, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”—or he would go with the list clickbait, “Five Courageous Ways Chicago Is Resisting the Strangling Undertaker.” He would have to work on it some more. He knew better than most that the article’s headline was usually make or break.
He approached the shrine, looking at it with renewed interest, wondering if he should get a photographer to take a picture of it. He was about to put his respectable bouquet on it when he spotted an envelope on the ground. It was a simple brown envelope, and the wind had knocked it off the shrine. Harry picked it up, wondering if he could open it before placing it back on the mound of rocks. He was a cynic but sometimes felt as if there were some lines he shouldn’t cross. Unless he had a really good reason.