He leaned around a woman signing in with security. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked the guard, ‘did you see an attractive, well-dressed woman, brownish hair, maybe forty? Kind of in a hurry?’ The security man looked bewildered. ‘Did you see her come in here? A minute ago?’ The guard shrugged and wordlessly shook his head.
‘Chasing a suspect, McCabe?’ The voice came from the stairwell beyond the security station. It was Preston Summerville, one of the paper’s editorial writers. ‘Looks like you lost her. A well-dressed woman, brownish hair?’ Summerville’s well-honed reporter’s instincts were kicking in. ‘What’s she done? Maybe I can help –’
‘Did you see her go out the back?’ he asked just as Josie Tenant burst in the front door, cameraman in tow.
‘Hey, McCabe, what’s going on?’ she called out.
McCabe sighed. Hunter chases fox. Hounds chase hunter. Hounds catch hunter. Fox gets away. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, was it?
‘Sorry,’ said Summerville. ‘Didn’t really notice.’ McCabe went out the door that led to the parking lot. He scanned the cars in the lot but knew it was over. If she came out here, she was gone. If she didn’t, if she continued down Exchange Street, she was still gone.
8
Saturday. 3:00 P.M.
It was 3:00 P.M. and McCabe and Maggie Savage were both present in the autopsy room at the Maine State pathology lab on Hospital Road in Augusta. Terri Mirabito entered, clad in her blue scrubs, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. ‘Good afternoon, everybody,’ she called out. ‘Shall we begin?’ Terri was short, perhaps five-one or five-two, a trifle plump but definitely cute, with a round, sunny face and a mop of curly black hair. Before he met Kyra, McCabe seriously considered asking her out on a date. Though he did imagine dinner-table conversation between a homicide cop and a forensic pathologist might tend toward the ghoulish.
McCabe watched in silence as she took the case chart from Assistant Pathologist Jose Guerrera and began reading aloud. ‘Today is September 17, 2005. This is case number 106-97-4482. Katherine Dubois. Caucasian female. Sixteen years old. Date of birth, July 14, 1989. The body has been positively identified by the deceased’s mother, Joanne Ceglia of 324 Dexter Street, Portland, Maine. Height 5′ 3?″. Weight 106 pounds, 45.2 kilograms.’ She continued reviewing the preliminaries, recording additional findings on the file as she proceeded. She checked the photographs Guerrera had taken earlier and found them acceptable.
Terri then began a close examination of the body that had once been Katie Dubois. She identified nine second-degree circular burns, each about half an inch in diameter, that had been randomly inflicted, six on Katie’s chest, three on her inner thighs.
‘Was she burned postmortem or ante?’ asked McCabe.
‘Ante,’ said Terri. ‘Postmortem tissue doesn’t redden like this.’
Why on earth did he burn her? McCabe wondered. Why did he have to do that, too? Was it punishment for defiance? Lying there on the autopsy table, Katie seemed so slight, her barely developed body so childlike, so vulnerable in death, McCabe found it hard to imagine that she’d been anything but terrified, anything but compliant.
McCabe watched Terri closely as she worked. She was humming an old Beatles song, ‘Hey Jude,’ tunelessly, probably mindlessly, to herself. She painstakingly checked every millimeter, looking for hairs or fibers that weren’t Katie’s, for anything that might provide a clue to where the girl had been and whom she’d been with. She found nothing. Terri checked both fingernails and toenails for traces of skin or hair that might have been scratched from an attacker during a struggle. As he watched, McCabe noticed Katie’s toenails were painted an assortment of bright colors, each toe a different color, a smiley face drawn on the big toe where someone, probably Guerrera, had earlier hung an ID tag identifying Katie as case number 106-97-4482. McCabe hadn’t seen the nail polish in the gloom of the scrap yard and chided himself for carelessness. Again Terri found nothing. ‘Clean as a whistle,’ she murmured more to herself than to the cops.
Terri then swabbed Katie’s vaginal and anal cavities for traces of semen. Though he’d attended dozens of autopsies of women who had been sexually attacked, this time, for the first time, McCabe felt he was intruding in a place he shouldn’t go. He imagined Casey’s body laid out like this on a stainless steel autopsy table, exposed under bright lights to faceless cops and probing pathologists, and he wished he were somewhere else. He forced the image from his mind. He knew he had to be here both for himself and for the girl – in a way, for Casey, too. Terri spoke for the record. ‘There is severe vaginal and anal bruising indicating rough sex or possibly insertion of a dildo or other foreign object. The subject may have been raped multiple times prior to death.’
Guerrera reported that the swabs came up negative for semen. ‘Either he used a condom or maybe he was just as happy playing with toys.’ He spoke with a soft Castilian accent that seemed somehow out of place in this cold sterile room.