This would be the one.
Or was he only queasy because he had looked at the corpse’s face and seen another? A face he knew intimately. Stared not into Lori’s eyes but into Gen’s. Eyes that he couldn’t help thinking were staring back at him accusingly.
He found himself thinking back to a passage he had read online that morning.
July 28th, 1841. A group of young men out for a casual walk along the shoreline of the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side, in an area of Hoboken known as Sybil’s Cave, a place where people often come to escape the busy, hectic crowding of New York City, came across what appeared to be a mass of clothing in the water. When the young men hurriedly took a boat from a nearby dock and went to investigate, they discovered that what they had taken for clothing was really the body of a young woman. Her face seemed to have been severely battered. She was a terrible spectacle to behold.
They would never have associated the decomposing corpse drawn from the river with the missing girl who had been regaled by an entire city for her sheer loveliness.
Joe swallowed hard and forced himself to stare at Lori’s ravaged face.
No one would readily associate this corpse with someone who had once been young and pretty.
There was no way that Lori Star was looking at him. It was difficult even to see where her eyes should be.
Ben Sears spoke in a clear, emotionless voice, directing his words to the microphone that hung down above the body as he worked on it. The corpse had already been photographed, washed and laid out for him. Additional pictures were being taken by a police photographer as Sears pointed out injuries done to the flesh, asking for close-ups.
“Marks at the neck suggest manual strangulation. There is also a strip of lace, apparently from the young woman’s blouse, that was tied around the neck so tightly that it sank into the flesh, even before postmortem swelling due to immersion. The pattern of bruising suggests that the killer is right-handed.”
His voice droned on as he commented on the fact that the physical damage inflicted by her assailant appeared to be mainly to her face and head. The decomposition and damage done elsewhere on the body appeared to have been from her days in the river.
Joe stood by silently while the chest was opened and Sears stated firmly that strangulation was the cause of death, not drowning.
Organs were weighed.
Specimens were taken.
In the back of his mind, Joe was aware of the constant gurgle of running water washing away the fluids that leaked from the body as the medical examiner went about his work.
Scrapings taken from under the nails suggested that the victim had lacked the chance to fight back against her attacker, and ligature marks on the wrists suggested that her hands had been bound. Damage to the sexual organs was postmortem and possibly due to the depradations of the river creatures.
Sears ended the autopsy by asking his assistants to sew the body back up, and telling the microphone above the corpse that further comments on the death would come after he received the lab work on various samples he had taken.
Joe realized, looking at the cops assembled around the stainless-steel autopsy table, that the procedure had seemed to affect them all the same way it had affected him.
Every man there seemed frozen.
Finally they all roused themselves to walk out. There was no goodbye to the man at the front desk, nothing.
“Jesus,” Vic said when they got outside, looking up at the sky and taking a huge gulp of fresh air.
“That was a bad one,” Tom Dooley said.
“So do you think this murder’s related to your guy?” Vic asked the New York detectives.
“I think we have to operate on that assumption,” Raif said.
That assumption became fact a moment later, when one of the coroner’s assistants came running out after them, holding a sealed evidence bag containing a torn piece of typing paper.
“Detective Nelson?”
Vic turned around.
“Doctor Sears thought you should take this to the lab right away. It was in her pocket. We’re sending the clothes over for analysis ourselves, but he thought you’d want this first.”
Vic held the bag up to the sun, so they could all see the contents.
It was just a ripped piece of what appeared to be run-of-the-mill printer paper, but there was something written on it that had all but faded away. Joe read the typed words aloud.
Quoth the raven: die.
There was a media frenzy.
Dr. Sears denied mentioning the scrap of paper to anyone, so maybe it had been one of his assistants. But it didn’t really matter how word got out, only that it was out.