By Blood Written Read Online Free PDF Page B

one, there was some aspect to the crime that was so unique and repeated so much that it became a signature aspect to the crimes. It was, so to speak, the guy’s calling card.”
    “So what’s our guy’s calling card?” Murray asked.
    Powell stepped away from the podium and over to the wall. “Detective Gilley,” he said, flipping the switch to turn off the overhead lights. “Why don’t we just show them our guy’s signature?”
    Gilley nodded, then stood and walked to the small table holding a slide projector at the back of the room. As he turned on the projector—the fan clattering as its ancient motor sputtered to life—Powell slowly lowered the screen from its holder on the wall above the podium. Gilley pressed the control button, and the first slide came into view on the dingy gray screen.
    Low moans erupted as the slide came into focus. In the first view, the massage table that served as a butcher’s block revealed the bloody corpse of Allison Matthews, her arms and legs still bound, her straining facial muscles still frozen as testament to the nature of her death.
    “What we have here,” Powell explained, “is the work of what we believe to be a primarily organized killer with some random elements of disorganized behavior.”
    Powell paused as Gilley moved to the next slide. This was another view of the murder scene, this time from the opposite side of the room, focusing over the young girl’s body to the large block M painted in her blood on the opposite wall.
    “You’ll notice,” Powell said, “that even with all the blood and carnage of this scene, everything is relatively neat.”
    “Relatively …” a voice whispered in the dark.
    He pointed to one side of the slide. “For instance, you’ll notice on this table that none of the bottles of massage oil are knocked over or even out of place. The large battery-operated vibrator in the corner here is still standing up. If our killer bumped the table and knocked it over, he was fussy enough to pick it back up and put it in its place.”
    Powell stepped into the light and pointed to the middle of the victim’s torso. “You can’t really tell from this slide because of all the blood, but in autopsy it was discovered that a series of shallow cutting wounds were made throughout the chest, torso, and abdomen of the victim, Allison May Matthews. These wounds were superficial and parallel to the lines of cleavage, which meant the sides of the incisions remained together, in some cases almost closing. The incisions were within a quarter-inch of being uniformly spaced apart all the way down the anterior side of the ventral cavity and were within a half-inch of being the same length.”
    Powell turned to face the room and stepped out of the light. “What this means is that our killer is anatomically savvy and very precise. He might even have some kind of medical training.”
    A hand went up in back, from just ahead of the projector.
    “What’s a line of cleavage?” a voice asked from the darkness.
    “The ME could explain it better than I can, but essentially muscle tissue in the body runs in groups that continue in certain directions. These directions are called ‘lines of cleavage.’ If you cut along, or parallel to these lines, then the wounds tend to remain closed, depending on the depth of the incision, of course. If you cut across these lines of cleavage, then the incised wound will be gaping or open and generally much nastier.”
    “So our boy wasn’t trying to chop these girls up?” Bransford asked.
    “Quite the opposite,” Powell said, turning again to the slide and pointing. “Try to look past the gore. What we’ve got here is a situation where Allison was tied up and then patiently, carefully—and extremely painfully—bled to death.
    She also experienced violent sex as well, with both moderate to severe anal and vaginal tearing. However, I’ll have more on that aspect of the scene later.”
    “Was she raped?” Maria Chavez