Free The Butcher's Theatre by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

him anyway. Laufer’s orders.”
    Hanna looked at him, dark eyes magnified by the lenses of her glasses. He nodded in confirmation.
    “What do you need?” she asked.
    He repeated the description of the murdered girl and her eyes widened in recognition.
    “What?”
    “Sounds like a kid I processed two weeks ago. Only this one was only thirteen.”
    “Thirteen is possible,” said Daniel. “What’s her name?”
    “Cohen. Yael Cohen. One second.” She went into her
    files, talking as she sorted. “Musrara girl. Fooling around with twenty-two-year-old pooshtak. Papa found out and beat her. Next day she didn’t come home from school. Papa went looking for her, tried to beat up the boyfriend, too, got thrashed for his efforts. Ah, here it is.”
    Daniel took the file, homed in on the photograph, felt his spirits sink. Yael Cohen was curly-haired, bovine, and dull-looking. A missing tooth, but that was the extent of the resemblance.
    “Not the one,” he said, giving it back to Hanna. “The rest are in the computer?”
    “In the process of being entered,” said Alice.
    “How many cases are we talking about?”
    “Missing girls in that age range? About four hundred nationally, sixty or so from Jerusalem. But the files are classified alphabetically, not by age or sex, so you’d have to go through all of them—about sixteen hundred.”
    Tedious but workable.
    “How can I get hold of them?”
    “Go down to Data Processing and pull rank.”
    He spent the next two hours on the phone, phoning Dr. Levi at Abu Kabir and being told by an assistant that the pathologist was out of the office; requesting a copy of Schlesinger’s service record from Civil Guard Headquarters; getting a records clerk to search for any sort of priors on the Amelia Catherine staff; attempting, without success, to find out if any of the three detectives had received his message. Letting Data Processing know that someone would be down to examine the missing-juvenile files. Filling out the mountain of requisition forms that legitimized each of the requests. Hampered at every step by his inability to satisfy the curiosity of the people whose cooperation he needed.
    At twelve-fifteen, Levi called.
    “Shalom, Pakad. I’ve finished the preliminary on the young one from this morning. I know it’s priority so I’ll read from my notes: Well-developed, well-nourished mid-adolescent female of Eastern descent. Multiple stab wounds, shock from voluminous loss of blood—she was drained.”
    “How?”
    “Gravity, probably. Tipped over so that it flowed through the throat wound.”
    Like a butchered animal, thought Daniel. One hand tightened around the receiver. The other scrawled hastily as the pathologist continued to recite his findings:
    “The ear pierces were old. Inside the hole was some blackening, which turned out to be steel oxide on the specto-graph—non-gold wire, which means the earrings themselves probably weren’t gold and they may have been removed recently.”
    “Could the wire have been gold-plated?”
    “Possibly, or gold paint. Let me continue. There were no defense cuts or ligature marks, so she didn’t resist and she wasn’t tied up. Which would indicate lack of consciousness during the actual cutting, but there was no evidence of head trauma. However, I did find two fresh needle marks on the arms and the gas chromatography came up with opiates. Heroin. Not enough to kill her unless she had an idiopathic sensitivity, but enough to sedate her.”
    “Was she cut up before or after sedation?”
    “From the lack of resistance, I’d say after. For her sake, I hope so.”
    “Anesthesia,” said Daniel. “Considerate of the bastard, eh?”
    “Any sign that she was an addict?”
    “On the contrary: The organs were clean, mucosa clear. No other marks besides the two fresh ones. All in all, a healthy young lady.”
    “What about sexual assault?”
    “The whole damned thing was a sexual assault,” said Levi. “You saw the