Free Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) by Carol O'Connell Page A

thumbs—upside-down handprints. The bodies on the neighboring tables had similar discoloring. “They were dragged.”
    “Yes, I was getting to that.” Via a different avenue. “Three victims had abrasions in the leather at the back of their shoes. The fourth wore sandals. His abrasions were in the heels, and some broke the skin. So, for that one, you’ve got antemortem drag marks and postmortem.”
    “Still alive when he was dragged the first time. No defensive wounds.So he was drugged when the perp moved him to another location for the wetwork.”
    “Or only tied up hand and foot.” Edward Slope’s problem was with her logic. Did he not mention the tape residue on wrists and ankles? Her conclusions were too often right, as in this case, but for the wrong reasons. And he had yet to mention the—
    “You found needle marks, right?” Score for Kathy.
    “Except for the nun. The other three have scabbed injection sites. But no drugs showed up in any of the tox screens.”
    “You’ll have to redo them. Add a few things to check for.”
    The hell he would.
    She handed him a sheet of bloodwork with the letterhead of a New Jersey hospital lab. “Trace evidence from a live victim.”
    He scanned the text. “No point in retesting. These drugs wouldn’t survive my time frames for death and decomp. The first one’s used on livestock. That might suggest injection with a medi-dart. Very smart. Your killer could inject his victim from a distance of thirty feet—assuming he’s a good shot with a dart gun. I don’t see the point in the other drug, the Rohypnol . . . unless he wanted to induce blackouts.” But that would indicate a plan for catch and release—a plan that would hardly fit a serial killer. Well, that was confusing, and he could see by her smile that she was waiting for him to admit this—so she could humiliate him with a simple explanation.
    Tough luck.
    Instead, he fired off his best shot. “As I said, there were no needle marks on the nun . . . but then . . . she wasn’t killed with a knife wound. That was done postmortem. And she was the only one with head trauma.” Ah, something Kathy had missed. A clear win.
    The detective returned to the nun’s table to inspect the scalp, lifting the dark hair to expose the bruising of a bloodless wound.
    “The weapon was a hand or an arm with a good deal of force.” Hesmiled when she eyed him with suspicion, not buying this at all. And so, moving along to Kathy’s second miss, he said, “Check the other side of her head. More trauma. I found crumbles of hard, reddish material embedded in the cloth that covered her head.”
    “Red brick.” She walked to the other side of the steel table. “Crumbles? Old brick.”
    “CSU will have to confirm it.” But that had also been his guess. “It appears that the first blow knocked her into a wall.” Hence a hand or arm for the initial trauma.
    Kathy inspected the second wound. “You found a skull fracture on this side, right?”
    “No, not enough force for a fracture, but that’s your death blow. It ruptured her aneurism. The cloth of her veil protected the impact site. So . . . no broken skin, no blood to nail down time of death by coagulation. She might’ve died on the spot, but she could’ve easily lingered for hours. A stroke from hemorrhage—”
    “You told me she was dead when he cut her open.”
    “ Right. With the first three victims, the killer came up behind them for the injection.” He was inappropriately cheerful when he said this, for she had missed something else. “Look at the angle of the first blow to the nun’s head.”
    Kathy hunkered down, eyes level with the nun’s skull. “So Sister Michael was the only frontal assault. She knew the perp.”
    Oh, please. As a man of science, he preferred solid evidence over unsupportable inference. “Well, here’s something . . . factual,” he said. Not too caustic. He held up the New Jersey hospital’s tox screen for her