Serpents in the Cold Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dante asked.
    “Couldn’t be sure anyone would claim her. I guess if it wasn’t for Owen, she’d be lying in the potter’s field at Fairview.”
    “Then change the tag.”
    Fierro, wearing a black rubber apron and yellow lab boots, kept touching and patting at Sheila’s body to break up the pooling effect. “We’ll get to it.”
    Dante stared at Sheila’s face, then down her purple bruised breasts and stomach to the thin fan of fair hair over her pubic mound. When he looked up, Cal’s eyes were on him and he had to look at the ground. “Jesus, Cal,” he said. “She was twenty-three. Twenty-three.”
    “What’s the cause of death?” Cal asked.
    Fierro looked up from his heavy massage of Sheila’s thigh muscle, the ash of his cigarette powdering her leg. The skin across her lower stomach and hips trembled and shuddered. “Well,” he said, and eyed Cal as if he was teasing him, “that seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?”
    Dante shuffled in his coat and stepped closer to the table. “She’s family, not a fucking ashtray.” Fierro looked down at her leg, shook his head apologetically, and quickly rubbed at the ash.
    Cal laid a hand on Dante’s shoulder to keep him calm. Beneath the coat, he felt the tremors of anger. “She ain’t a nobody,” Dante continued, muttering to himself. “She’s family.” He turned and walked toward the back of the room, and Cal watched him trying to light a cigarette. Suddenly he was hacking into his fist, and Cal could tell that he was going to be sick. Dante scrambled to the heavy steel door, flung it open, and left. They listened to his footfalls clattering up the basement corridor, waited a moment in silence.
    “What about sex?” Cal said. “Was there sexual assault?”
    Fierro shrugged, smiled vacantly. “I can’t tell. She was found naked and that usually suggests a sexual attack of some kind. All of his other victims have been violated, sodomized. We’ve found semen in some, but not all.”
    “Why can’t you tell if she’d been sexually assaulted?”
    “There’s no trauma and no semen. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t sexually assaulted. With a body in this state, out in the elements for hours, and damage to the tissue from the cold—that destroys a lot of evidence, Cal. It’s hard to know what happened.”
    “Or she might have been stripped naked for other reasons, maybe to shame her or make a point, a statement.”
    Cal walked around to the head of the dissecting table. “What about these,” he said, “the marks on her wrists?”
    “They’re ligature marks. Most likely from a rope.”
    Fierro held his hands together above his head. “She would have been hanging from something as he tortured her.” He put down his hands and sighed. “It’s the same as the other girls.”
    “Did she die where they found her, or was she moved postmortem?”
    “Well,” Fierro began, and with a gloved hand rubbed at the back of his thick neck, “I’m only the coroner, Cal, not the detective at the crime scene, but there’s no sand on the body. Now, that may not be all that significant as the beach is under ice and snow, and the cold would have prevented anything clinging to her—once the epidermis had become frozen—but that there would be no sand at all, especially on her lower sections, is surprising.”
    “I still don’t get it. Why would the son of a bitch plant her in such a ritualistic way—what the hell does that mean?”
    “You said it yourself. To shame her, to make an example of her.” Fierro shrugged and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he’d just finished. “I think this guy, the Butcher, he gets off on it—making an example of the particular woman he kills.”
    “The killer,” Cal said, “he’s been murdering prostitutes, right?”
    “So far, yes.”
    “Sheila wasn’t a prostitute.”
    “Okay, but how long has it been since you saw her last?”
    “What are you saying?”
    “Maybe the guy has changed his MO