The Murder Book

CHAPTER 6

This was worse than Asia.

No matter how brutal it got, war was impersonal, human chess pieces moving around the board, you fired at shadows, strafed huts you pretended were empty, lived every day hoping you wouldn't be the pawn that flipped. Reduce someone to The Enemy, and you could blow off his legs or slice open his belly or napalm his kids without knowing his name. As bad as war got, there was always the chance for making nice sometime in the future- look at Germany and the rest of Europe. To his father, an Omaha Beach alumnus, buddying up to the krauts was an abomination. Dad curled his lip every time he saw a "hippie-faggot in one of those Hitler beetle-cars." But Milo knew enough history to understand that peace was as inevitable as war and that as unlikely as it seemed, one day Americans might be vacationing in Hanoi.

War wounds had a chance of healing because they weren't personal. Not that the memory of guts slipping through his hands would fade, but maybe, somewhere off in the future…

But this. This was nothing but personal. Reduction of human form to meat and juice and refuse. Creating the antiperson.

He took a deep breath and buttoned his jacket and managed another look at the corpse. How old could she be, seventeen, eighteen? The hands, about the only parts of her not bloody, were smooth, pale, free of blemish. Long, tapering fingers, pink-polished nails. From what he could tell- and it was hard to tell anything because of the damage- she'd had delicate features, might've been pretty.

No blood on the hands. No defense wounds…

The girl was frozen in time, a heap of ruin. Aborted- like a shiny little wristwatch, stomped on, the crystal shattered.

Manipulated after death, too. The killer spreading her legs, tenting them, pointing the feet at a slight outward angle.

Leaving her out in the open, horrible statuary.

Overkill, the assistant coroner had pronounced, as if you needed a medical degree for that.

Schwi

He decided to include the ligatures in a separate column, continued making hash marks. Reviewed his count of the knife wounds. Both premortem and after death, the coroner was guessing. One, two, three, four… he confirmed fifty-six, began his tally of the cigarette burns.

Inflammation around the singed circles said the burns had been inflicted before death.

Very little spent blood at the scene. She'd been killed somewhere else, left here.

But lots of dried blood atop the head, forming a blackening cap that kept attracting the flies.

The finishing touch: scalping her. Should that be counted as one giant wound, or did he need to peer under the blood, see how many times the killer had hacked away the skin?

A cloud of night gnats circled above the body, and Milo scatted it away, noted "removal of cranial skin," as a separate item. Drawing the body and topping it with the cap, his lousy rendering making the blood look like a beanie, so inadequately offensive. He frowned, closed his pad, stepped back. Studied the body from a new perspective. Fought back yet another wave of nausea.

The old black guy who'd found her had heaved his cookies. From the moment Milo had seen the girl, he'd struggled not to do the same. Tightening his bowels and his gut, trying to come up with a mantra that would do the trick.

You're no virgin, you've seen worse.

Thinking of the worst: melon-sized holes in chests, hearts bursting- that kid, that Indian kid from New Mexico – Bradley Two Wolves- who'd stepped on a mine and lost everything below the navel but was still talking as Milo pretended to do something for him. Looking up at Milo with soft brown eyes- alive eyes, dear God- talking calmly, having a goddamn conversation with nothing left and everything leaking out. That was worse, right? Having to talk back to the upper half of Bradley Two Wolves, chitchatting about Bradley's pretty little girlfriend in Galisteo, Bradley's dreams- once he got back to the States, he was go