Eve pushed through the double doors of Morris’s theater.
She’d have called the music he had playing peppy. Something with a bouncy beat and a couple of girl voices playing with harmony.
Leesa Culver lay on the slab, and Morris stood beside it.
He wore a kind of rusty red suit today, one with a faint metallic sheen. His shirt had tiny stripes of the same color against white. He’d added a tie of deep sapphire blue with cords of that blue winding through a complicated braid he’d looped in a circle at the back of his head.
As he reached into the Y-cut to lift out Leesa’s heart and weigh it, Peabody looked carefully away.
“Lower music volume by half,” Morris ordered. “I thought she’d enjoy something young and energetic. She had a very short life.”
“Somebody ended it after dressing her up like a girl in a painting.”
“So I’m told. The slight injuries from the wiring, the glue, all postmortem. Your call of manual strangulation is correct. You’re looking for someone with wide-palmed, long-fingered hands. Strong ones. Her larynx was crushed. I’ll give you measurements on the hands—and they’ll be close—in my report.”
“A chance for prints?”
“No, He was careful enough to seal them before he killed her. No other injuries on the body. Internally, she’d consumed a very nice Pouilly-Fuissé,about eight ounces, approximately three hours prior to her death, and another six within minutes of death. In that six ounces? Enough barbiturates—powder form, I believe—to knock out someone double her weight.”
“He drugged her, then he killed her.” Considering, Eve walked around the slab. “Didn’t want her to fight back. He gave her something to put her out so he could strangle her, and with his hands. Personal, intimate. He doesn’t just bash her over the head, stab her in the heart. Can’t do that and have her intact for the final pose.”
She looked down at the body.
“So that’s important, that final pose. And he’s a coward who needed her unconscious before he killed her. He doesn’t need the rush of the struggle.”
“Um.” Eyes still averted, Peabody added, “A struggle could mess up the costume, or maybe end up putting a bruise on her face.”
“That’s right. But he could’ve given her a heavier dose, or injected her with a lethal dose. She’d die nice and neat that way. But he wanted the intimacy, his hands around her throat. It takes effort to squeeze the life out of somebody using your own hands.”
Morris walked over to wash up. “She’d have felt nothing, which is a blessing for her if there can be one. Her body would have fought for air, but she wouldn’t have been aware of it, wouldn’t have felt the panic and pain over the three or four minutes it took him to kill her.”
He pulled a tube of Pepsi, and Peabody’s choice of Diet, out of his friggie.
“Thanks. Illegals or alcohol abuse?”
“No. Her last meal, about six hours before death, a soy dog and fries, a Coke. While a healthy weight, she was borderline on malnutrition. She needed more iron, fiber, and green vegetables in her diet.
“She used a six-month injection for birth control, was naturally a brunette who’d recently refreshed the blond and added the streaks. Harvo has a sample and, being the Queen of Hair and Fiber, will tell you what she used there—home or salon grade. Harvo also has the clothes.”
Eve nodded. “He had to get them from somewhere. They’re not exactly today. What about the wire, the glue?”
“I can tell you the wire’s one and a half millimeters, and strong. Metal with a protective jacket. The lab will take it from there. And the glue, also very strong. I needed acetone to remove it.”
Morris laid a hand on Leesa’s head. “Her eyelids already had a slight rash by the time she got to me, as had the other areas where he’d used glue to secure the wire, to keep her head in that exact position.”
Morris looked down, then eased the body’s head over to show Eve the spotty redness. “It’s a different kind of cruelty, but cruelty nonetheless.”
“She was nothing more than a droid to him by that point—maybe all along. Less, really. Like some doll he could dress up, use, destroy. Sex?”
“She’d had intercourse, yes, but hours before her death. At least four, closer, I think, to five hours before. And she followed the regulations, douched thoroughly.”
“Why would he give her time for that? He’d’ve used a sperm killer. It probably wasn’t him. If it wasn’t, he didn’t care about sex. Or we’re wrong, and it’s a woman.”
Pacing, she cracked the tube. “No, not a woman. She’s not registered for females, and she wanted to work up to top level. That means following regulations.”
She took a drink from the tube, nodded. “Okay. We know what we know now. Thanks, Morris. You added to it.”
“Family?”
