"Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe."
— Walt Whitman
»»—- —-««
The morgue is cool and quiet, gleaming metal polished to a shine that sends little daggers of light into Lir's eyes. She gives herself a moment to adjust, listening to the faint tic tic tic of the freezers, fingering the bottle of aspirin in her pocket while she waits to see if the subtle pressure in her skull is going to shift from discomfort to agony. Next to the door is a desk, with a state of the art computer, a few files, a cup full of pens, and a half-drunk cup of coffee with lipstick on the rim; beyond that, there is another door, one that probably leads to a storage room, two walls of cold lockers in four rows of four, and two x-ray displays on the final wall. In the center of the room are three slabs. On one of them is the Jane Doe, covered respectfully with a sheet, her eyes closed to give her an expression of peace. At her side is Trish, her blonde hair pulled into a knot at the top of her head and her face partially obscured by a sterile mask that she tugs down on Lir's approach.
"Thorne," she greets cheerfully. "You here for the autopsy report?" Lir nods, and Trish beckons her closer. "You're right on time. Just got done with our guest."
Lir isn't sure what to make of having a corpse called a guest. Gallows humor, she supposes. "What can you tell me about her?"
"She suffered, that's for certain." Trish turns on the light over the slab and pulls it down, illuminating the Jane Doe with a grisly, fluorescent white that turns her already dead pallor a sickly blue-gray. Then she pulls the sheet down, and Lir is suddenly, incredibly grateful that she hasn't eaten yet, the bile in her throat bitter but weak. "The throat and abdominal trauma was all perimortem. She was alive, but not struggling, when our killer cut her open. Judging from the tissue damage, looks like the throat happened first, but it was ultimately shock and blood loss that killed her."
"She was alive for the whole thing?"
"Mm-hm. Though I don't know how aware of it she was. I don't have the toxicology report yet—that will take a little longer to run, sorry—but pupil dilation is indicative of intoxication. Judging from the depth of the gash here," Trish points to Jane Doe's throat, "it was more to keep her quiet than kill her. She would have bled out from that alone eventually if no one found her first, but it doesn't go through bone. The hesitation marks at the edges make me think he was more . . . Well, there's no easy way to say this. Probably sawed through her."
Lir tries to picture it, being too strung out or drunk to defend herself, being helpless while some maniac slashed her throat and cut her open like a butcher. From the corner of her eye, she catches sight of a red dress and pale hair and holds her breath, counting to ten until it fades, then asks, "You said at the scene there weren't any defensive wounds."
"That's right. And there aren't. No blood or tissue under her nails, no bruising or scrapes or cuts to show that she tried to fight back." Trish sighs, lifting the sheet back over Jane Doe before tugging off her gloves. "Whoever this is, they're one sick puppy."
"Yeah." Photographs on the wall catch her attention, and Lir walks over to study them closely. They're all from the crime scene, some of little bits of evidence next to their markers, others of the victim, and it's the latter she really looks at. "Does that pendant have any religious connotations?"
"You'd have to check. Why?"
"I just thought she looks kind of like an angel."
Trish comes to stand next to her, her expression grave. "You know, I had the same idea."
They stand in a heavy silence, the clock on the wall ticking loudly until Lir sighs. She bids farewell to Trish, who promises to have the full report to her by the end of the day, and takes the elevator back up to the bullpen. Dante will no doubt want to know what she's learned, but she finds that she doesn't quite want to tell him. Something about this all is nagging her, tugging the thin strands of her memory with an urgency, look, look, you've seen this before, even though she's fairly certain that she never has. Was there a similar case in Fortuna? So lost in wracking her thoughts she nearly runs right into Simmons as she steps off the elevator, and she mumbles an apology and returns to her desk, where she boots up the computer, hunting for a notepad and a pen while she waits for it to finish loading.
A cup of coffee thudding next to her elbow has her peering up. Dante sits back down, a cup of his own in his hand that he raises to her before he takes a sip. His face screws up in disgust. "Fuck. No matter how long I'm here, coffee still tastes like shit. What'd Trish say?"
"That we'd have the full report soon," Lir replies. She finds what she was looking for and logs into the terminal. "Victim was slaughtered like livestock and left to die. Too something to even try to save her own life."
"That all?"
She's aware of his gaze, critical and assessing on her, and it makes her skin flush unpleasantly. "Until toxicology comes back."
With a nod, he leans back in his seat. "Alright. What are your thoughts?"
Now you want to know? she nearly asks. Rubbing her temples, she replies instead, "Our guy is bold. A nightclub on one side, a bar on the other, people coming and going at all hours? Not to mention, he had to have been familiar with the location to avoid the security camera, if he did. Speaking of, is that footage here yet?" Dante shakes his head. "Right. Okay. So, Jane Doe was probably at one of the two places. Why risk dragging her any farther than that? And he had to get her to go with him somehow. A knife or a gun would have been too obvious, even for a crowded bar."
"Could've posed as a hook-up," Dante suggests.
"Mm. If she wasn't drunk, he might have drugged her."
"Drugs?"
"Her pupils were blown."
"So," he says slowly, "we've got a bold, possibly attractive killer who goes to bars to pick up women. Think he knew the vic?"
Lir realizes suddenly that he's testing her, digging to see her worth, and it makes her angry all over again. "No, too risky. He's got balls, but he's not an idiot. All this planning, all the care he took, he wouldn't want to leave any trace of himself, and that means he was probably a stranger and he picked her out when he got there. If it hadn't been her, it would have been someone else."
"Opportunistic. Well, shit. Means he's gonna be a bitch to find." He offers her a crooked grin that doesn't reach his eyes. "Want to flip a coin to see who's givin' Morrison the news?"
"You do it. I need to look for something."
Dante frowns then, but the expression is quickly smothered as he stands. He takes his coffee with him into Morrison's office; once the door is closed firmly behind him, Lir releases a sigh and slumps in her chair, cradling her head in her hands. This was meant to be a new beginning for her. Get out of Fortuna, away from the good-intentioned but condescending men she worked with, leave the bitter break-up and the cramped apartment behind her to set out in the bigger city. Yet here she is, dealing with condescending men, living in an apartment that's large enough to feel empty, with a killer that she knows she has an infinitesimally small chance of catching on her hands. Maybe I'll get a cat, she thinks, and then discards it. She's going to be too busy to give any pet the love it would deserve.
Lir pulls up the database and enters her credentials, watching the wheel spin as the program decides whether or not she's allowed in. Once it opens, she navigates to the search bar, where she types evisceration, hoping the term will be narrow enough to ping any cases that might have been similar. All she gets are animal cruelty cases, youths torturing cats and dogs, and she groans. Next is religious, but that doesn't get her anything other than some fraud. Jane Doe is too broad, while trying by location only gets her arrests for petty theft, assault, and drunk and disorderlies. Her fingers drum on her desk as she thinks; maybe, if whatever it is that she thinks she remembers was before her time in the force, it would have been before they started digitizing their records.
Which would mean figuring out the location and then digging through that city's physical files.
She pinches the bridge of her nose. Most of what she said to Dante was speculation, and she knows that they're going to spend at least a week trying to identify their victim and looking for anyone who might have seen her, tracking down friends and acquaintances and ex-boyfriends to see if any of them had the fury and the cruelty needed to butcher someone like that. If they're lucky, she'll have gotten into some sort of trouble with the law and there will be prints they can match. If they're unlucky, it's beating the streets, shoving her photograph in people's faces to try and jar their memory.
"Detective?" Lir opens her eyes to find Simmons standing next to her, a USB stick in his hand. "The nightclub owner sent this over. Said it's all the footage from the last twenty-four hours and you wanted it?"
He sounds uncertain, and she forces herself to smile. "Yeah, thanks. While I've got you here, can I ask a favor?" Hesitantly, he nods. "Head down to the morgue to get the victim's prints from Trish and run 'em, will you? It's a long shot, but it might help us figure out who she is."
Simmons doesn't look like he finds the idea appealing, but he gives a weak salute and heads down the stairs. Lir watches him until he disappears into the elevator, and then she plugs the USB into her computer and opens the files to scroll through it. Twenty-four hours of hopefully unaltered footage stored in four hour chunks which, when she clicks on the first video to play it, turn out to be monochrome and grainy. She fights through the urge to yank her hair, instead getting up and going to grab a fresh cup of coffee from the canteen. After a moment of hesitation, she takes the entire pot, setting a second one to brew; this is going to be an all-nighter for sure, and the only thing that's going to get her through it is enough caffeine to make her jittery.
Dante is back at his desk when she returns. He arches a brow at the sight of her with the pot, but that turns into a loud groan as she says, "Footage got here. All twenty-four hours worth. Want to grab a seat?"
"There's a meeting room we can use," he mutters. "Bigger screen. Grab it and let's go. Is that all the coffee?"
"For now."
His long-suffering sigh draws an unwilling smile from her. Dante leads her down a hallway to a room mostly taken up by a large oval table surrounded by plush leather chairs, and he sinks into one as she sets up the monitor on the wall and gets the USB situated. "Ready?"
"Not really."
"Tough shit." She chuckles and presses play.
Hours pass as they work through both the footage and the coffee, pausing only when they catch sight of a pale-haired woman before slumping back in disappointment and carrying on. Morrison stops by once to check on them, then Simmons with the news that the prints were a dead end, and finally Trish with her full report, toxicology included. None of them linger for more than a few minutes at most. Dante and Lir alternate bathroom breaks and coffee runs, neither of them willing to stop the tape until it's done. Like ripping a bandaid off, she thinks at one point, stifling a yawn before taking a large swig of her lukewarm coffee. Get it over with in one go, no hesitation.
It's just passed four in the morning when Dante lurches in his seat. "Pause it, pause it!" Lir jumps, pressing quickly on the remote, and he squints. "Rewind it a bit. There, stop, stop. Press play."
"What is—oh!" She scrambles for the file on the table, flipping it open so she can see the picture of Jane Doe clipped to the inside. Pulling it free, she holds it up, glancing between it and the screen. "It's her."
"Mm. Looks like . . ." He leans forward, his eyes narrowed as his lips move silently. "Two?"
Lir blinks, then turns her laugh into a rough cough. "No. It's, uh . . . It's 3:37."
Dante scowls at her as he reaches into the pocket of his vest to pull out a pair of square glasses, the style just as noir as his clothing. He perches them on his nose, then nods. "Yeah. Alright. So our victim walked into the club at 3:37 am. Since her body was found at quarter to eight, means there's a five hour window for our killer to have found her and pulled her into the alley."
"That's if you don't remove however long she was in the bar and the killer leaving," Lir points out.
He clicks his tongue. "Don't be a wiseass, Thorne. It's not cute."
"I'm not here to be cute," she replies irritably.
"Shame." Just as she's debating dumping her coffee on him, he asks, "There a way to print this? We'll take it with her autopsy photo and show it to the staff at the club, see if any of 'em remember her. Maybe she paid with a credit card, which'd give us a name."
"You plannin' to sleep tonight?" she asks dryly.
"Sleep when you're dead, Thorne. Print and let's go."
Biting her tongue, she heads back to the computer attached to the monitor and screenshots the frozen video. Once it's in her hands, the two of them head out back, where the employee lot is, and Dante leads her to a car that she recognizes from her childhood. Her mouth drops open as she takes in the '58 Corvette, the same type her father had often talked dreamily of owning when he retired, the black paint and white cut-outs glossy in the early dawn light. The top is closed against the dew, but she can still make the red leather interior, and she laughs incredulously when Dante unlocks it. "Seriously?"
"You can take a cab if you like," he replies tightly.
Lir closes her mouth and climbs in, looking around curiously. The seats are incredibly comfortable, and it doesn't seem like Dante has done any upgrading to it at all: the gearshift is still topped by a clean white knob, and the only source of sound is the radio, the knob of which Dante turns until classical rock filters softly through the speakers. A good car is like a good woman, her father had told her two months before his death, holding her in his lap as he pointed to the yellowed magazine, treat her right and she'll stick with you for life. She'd put the damned ad in his casket before they buried him, and Lir closes her eyes against both the unwelcome sting of tears and the sight of him with his misshapen head on the silk pillow. Botched robbery, her mother said tearfully. Throat closed with sudden grief, just as sharp as it had been then, Lir hardly notices when they pull away from the curb.
"She's beautiful," she whispers.
Dante's startled silence is the only reply she gets.