In Death 25 - Creation in Death

sure she recognized as vital fuel.
    Eve paused outside the double doors of an autopsy room. “Do you need to see her?” she asked him.
    “I do. I want to be of some help in this, and if I’m to be of any help, I need to understand. I’ve seen death before.”
    “Not like this.” She pushed through.
    Morris was inside. He’d changed, she noted, into gray sweats and black and silver skids she imagined he kept on the premises for working out. He sat, and continued to sit for a moment, in a steel chair drinking something thick and brown out of a tall glass.
    “Ah, company. Protein smoothy?”
    “So absolutely not,” Eve said.
    “Tastes marginally better than it looks. And does its job. Roarke, good to see you, even though.”
    “And you.”
    “Vic worked for Roarke,” Eve said.
    “I’m very sorry.”
    “I barely knew her. But…”
    “Yes, but…” Morris set the smoothy aside before he pushed to his feet. “I regret that we’ll all come to know her quite well now.”
    “She managed one of Roarke’s clubs. The Starlight down in Chelsea?”
    “Is that yours?” Morris smiled a little. “I took a friend there a few weeks ago. It’s an entertaining trip back to an intriguing time.”
    “Feeney’s on his way in.”
    Morris shifted his gaze to Eve. “I see. It was the three of us over the first of them the last time. Do you remember?”
    “Yeah, I remember.”
    “Her name was Corrine, Corrine Dagby.”
    “Age twenty-nine,” Eve confirmed. “Sold shoes in a boutique downtown. Liked to party. She lasted twenty-six hours, ten minutes, fifty-eight seconds.”
    Morris nodded. “Do you remember what you said when we stood here then?”
    “No, not exactly.”
    “I do. You said: ‘He’ll want more than that.’ And you were right. We learned he wanted more than that. Should we wait for Feeney?”
    “He’ll catch up.”
    “All right.” Morris crossed the room.
    Roarke looked over, then he stepped over.
    He’d seen death, bloody, vicious, violent, useless, and terrible death. But he saw, once more, Eve was right.
    He’d never seen the likes of this.

3
    SO MANY WOUNDS, HE THOUGHT, AND ALL washed clean. Somehow it might have been less horrid if there had been blood. Blood would be proof, wouldn’t it, that life had once been there.
    But this…this woman he remembered as vital and brimming with energy looked like some poor doll, mangled and sliced by a vicious child.
    “Tidy work,” Eve stated, and had Roarke’s gaze whipping toward her.
    He started to speak, to let loose some of the horror he felt. But he saw her face, saw the anger was closer to the surface now however calm her voice. Saw, too, the pity. She had such pity inside her he often wondered how she could bear the weight of it.
    So he said nothing.
    “He’s very methodical.” Morris engaged the computer before offering Eve microgoggles. “You see these wounds on the limbs? Long, thin, shallow.”
    “Scalpel maybe, or the tip of a sharp blade.” Though the wounds were displayed, optimized, on screen, Eve leaned down to study them through the goggles. “Precise, too. Either she was drugged or he had her restrained in such a way she couldn’t struggle enough to make a difference.”
    “Which gets your vote?” Morris asked.
    “Restraints. What’s the fun if she’s out of it, can’t feel fully? Burns are small along here.” Eve turned the victim’s left arm. “Here in the bend of the elbow, precise again, but the skin’s charred some at the edges. Flame? Not a laser, but live fire?”
    “I would agree. Some of the other burns look like laser to me. And there, on the inner thigh where it’s mottled? Extreme cold.”
    “Yeah. The bruising—no laceration, no scraping. Smooth implement.”
    “Sap.” Roarke studied the bruising himself. “An old-fashioned sap would bruise like that. Leather’s effective if you can afford the cost. Filled with ordinary sand, it does its job.”
    “Again, agree. And we have the punctures,” Morris continued. “Which are in circular patterns here, here, here.” The screen flashed with close-ups of the back of the right hand, the heel of the left foot, the left buttocks. “Twenty minute punctures, in this precise pattern.”
    “Like needles,” Eve mused. “Some kind of tool…He could…” She curved her right hand, laid it on the heel of the body, pressed. “That’s new. We don’t have this wound pattern on record.”
    “He’s an inventive bastard,” Peabody added.