‘Yes, he has.’ The veil is drawn back. It’s really just a white headband with some tulle attached.
‘There’s the flowers.’
They droop loosely in the girl’s hands. Her wrists are tied together to keep them in the correct holding position. Carter makes a mental note to ask Scientific Analysis about the ligatures.
He watches Lewis. The control in her is intense. He speaks quietly, calmly. ‘Just tell me exactly what’s on your mind, Emma.’
‘She’s got … He’s taken out her earrings. Or maybe he got her to remove them.’
‘I see it.’ The girl has two holes in each lobe.
‘Pink nail polish. Makeup, too. It’s worn off, mostly, but there’s a little eyeshadow still at her brow. Mascara streak, there on her cheekbone.’
‘She was going out, maybe, when he caught her?’
Emma opens her mouth, closes it. A little head shake. Impossible to perform the detached mental scan necessary for deductive reasoning while she’s looking at this.
‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘That dress don’t fit her right.’ Lewis’s accent coming through. It happens sometimes, when folks are in distress. ‘He’s not buying made to measure. He’s getting them from a charity shop, maybe.’
‘Mm-hmm.’ That’s consistent with what they surmised from the other two victims. Something else to file.
‘She was strangled, wasn’t she?’
Carter checks with Friedrich. The man nods, solemn. ‘I won’t say categorically, but it looks like manual strangulation, yes. There’s no blunt-force trauma I can make out.’
Carter indicates with his chin. ‘The bruising. And the cyanosis on the lips.’
‘And you can see the petechiae in her eyes. We’ll have a cause of death determination once we do a proper exam. There’s another obvious injury here, consistent with the other two victims.’
Friedrich lifts the girl’s hands gently to show them. Carter sees the pink polish on her nails, then beneath the covering bouquet, a neat chop below the biggest knuckle of the left ring finger, where the digit has been removed. Carter thinks of his wife, how she prunes the rose bushes out front with shears.
Beside him, the sound of Emma Lewis’s breath stoppering. She turns sharply sideways and walks out of the room.
Dr Friedrich says nothing until the door closes. ‘Hard on a young woman, to see this kind of—’
‘Excuse me, Doctor,’ Carter says, and he goes after Emma.
The corridor outside is warmer than the autopsy room. A framed print of the Precious Blood of Jesus faces the doors. Emma is leaned back against the wall, not looking at the Savior’s heart ringed with thorns, staring up instead at the ventilation pipes near the ceiling.
‘Are you all right, Miss Lewis?’
‘He cut off her finger.’ If Carter thought she looked pale before, now she looks like a ghost.
‘Is that significant?’
‘To take off the ring.’
‘The ring?’
‘The wedding ring.’ She takes low, deep breaths to stabilize. Now she’s focused on the stack of boxes near the floor. ‘We … we each got a wedding ring.’
‘Huxton used to do that?’
‘Did you even read the file?’ She looks at him now like he’s stupid. He knows this deflected anger is keeping her together.
‘Not in enough detail, apparently.’ He addresses the obvious issue. ‘You don’t have a missing finger.’
