In the lab, Art Bohanan sat at a long metal lab table, peering through a magnifying lens at the blood-smeared shaft of a hunting arrow. On a metal tray to one side were the other headless shafts, decapitated with bolt cutters to allow the dead woman’s body to be taken down from the tree. A second tray held the sharp-tipped, razor-edged arrowheads—all except for the one that had lodged deep in the femur. “Hey, Art,” I said. “Any prints?” Without looking up, he shook his head. “In that case, you probably won’t find any on this one, either.” Reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, I pulled out a clear plastic jar, two inches wide and three inches tall, containing the arrowhead I’d extracted from the femur. “Dr. Hamilton did as much autopsy as he could this morning,” I said, “and he pulled this out. But she was too far gone for him to tell much, so he’s turned her and the man over to me. We’ll start cleaning her bones tomorrow; right now we’re still processing the woman that was splayed against the tree.”
“You think she’ll be done today?” asked Art. I’d worked with him on enough cases to feel sure that his use of the word “done” was a deliberate double entendre. Art had commented, on more than one visit to the Anthropology Annex, that we processed bones exactly the way his wife made beef stock: cut off most of the meat, then put the bones into a big pot to simmer. After my costly lesson about the penchant of unwatched pots to boil, I’d taken steps to ensure that I wouldn’t ruin any more of Kathleen’s stoves: I’d sworn never again to process skeletal material at home, and I’d dipped deeply into the department’s budget to buy the Annex a twenty-gallon steam-jacketed kettle—the kind commercial kitchens used to cook meals for the masses. With the thermostat set at 150 degrees and a bit of meat tenderizer, Biz, and Downy added to the water, the soft tissue—even the brain—softened and dissolved, leaving the bone clean, undamaged, and smelling more like laundry than roadkill.
“Might be done today; more likely tomorrow. She had a fair amount of tissue left.”
He nodded at me, then shook his head glumly at the arrow shaft he’d been examining, laying it on the tray alongside the others. “This guy was careful,” he said. “Either he wore gloves, or he wiped everything down pretty well.”
“You said you had something to show me?”
“Couple things, actually. Hang on a sec.” He switched off the lamp and rolled to the other end of the table, where he picked up a phone and punched in an extension number. “Hey, it’s Art,” he said. “I just finished going over the arrows. . . . Nah, nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip.” He glanced at me. “Dr. Brockton just walked in. I’m gonna show him the stuff I showed you this morning. . . . Okay. Bye.” He replaced the handset. “That was Kittredge. He’s on his way down.”
Art rolled his chair back toward the center of the table and picked up a square white card, slightly smaller than the width of a sheet of printer paper. The card was covered with oblong smudges, as if it had been pawed by a jam-fingered child. Even from a distance, I recognized the whorls and loops of fingerprints. There were two horizontal rows of small square boxes—ten boxes in all. Nine of the boxes contained prints; the tenth box was as empty as the space that had once been occupied by the woman’s amputated finger. “I printed her at the scene,” he said, “before you got there.” I nodded; I’d already figured that. “Pretty good, if I do say so myself.”
“Her hands were in great shape, compared to the guy’s,” I said. “His were almost down to the bone.”
Art handed me another card, this one with a complete set of prints from both hands. Holding them side by side, I compared the two cards. The prints on the second card, the complete card, were sharper and crisper than those taken from the woman’s corpse; no surprise there. But even I could tell that both sets of prints—the crisp antemortem prints and the blurred postmortem prints—had been made by the same hand. “You got a match already?” He nodded. “That’s great.” I read the name at the top of the complete card. “Pamela Stone. Who is she? Was she?”
“Thirty-two-year-old hooker. Street name was Desirée. Kittredge is checking with vice and patrol to see what else they know, and when she was last seen.”
As if summoned by the mention of his name, Kittredge entered the crime lab. He nodded to Art and reached out to shake my hand. “Doc. How’s it going?”
“Okay. I brought y’all the arrowhead from the thigh. Dr. Hamilton examined her first thing this morning. I was just telling Art, we’ll start cleaning off the bones tomorrow, soon as the prior victim’s done.”
“Forgive my ignorance,” he said, “but do you have to get the family’s permission for that?”
I shook my head. “As a forensic case, it—she—is now in the medical examiner’s system. Processing the remains, getting them down to bone, is standard investigative protocol.”
He nodded. “What’d the M.E. find? Anything helpful?”
“I’m not sure how helpful this is,” I said, “but it’s interesting. She lost a lot of blood, but not enough to kill her. He thinks she died of a coronary.”
“A heart attack?” Kittredge looked puzzled.
“Yeah. The M.E. thinks she died of fright.”
He whistled softly. “That’s a first, for me. But I can believe it, considering what the guy was doing to her. Anything else?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I want to take a closer look at the right hand once it’s cleaned up. Something about that missing digit bugs me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. No pun intended.”
Kittredge nodded slowly. “I’d like you to take a look at what was in her mouth,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe you’ll have an idea.”