Blood Daughters: A Romilia Chacon Novel

Chapter 15

76 Chapter 15 Today Dr. Dibbs was not his usual insecure yet smug self, the image that most cops and agents had of him. All agreed, Dibbs did his job well. But he had a shadow hanging over him, the ghost of a living man, his predecessor: Dr. Noguchi, known popularly as the Coroner to the Stars. Noguchi had made such a name for himself that whoever had come in after his retirement was sure to pass through years of comparisons. Some wondered why it had to be Dibbs. He was young for a Medical Examiner. I put him in his late thirties, maybe early forties. He was balanced overall, with a chip on each shoulder. He was good at his job; he just didn’t have Noguchi’s showmanship. Today, there was little emotion in his eyes or his voice. I wondered if Marisa’s body had gotten to him more deeply than the other cadavers that rolled through here. Perhaps his way of dealing with horror was to check all emotions altogether. He handed Nancy a file, then turned toward his freezer room. “That’s yours. It’s a copy. I suppose you’ll want to see her,” he said, “so I went ahead, pulledherout,preppedherontheslab.Thisisthelastdayforthat.”Meaning, after today, the body would be prepared for handing over to Marisa’s family. Marisa and the slab were the same temperature as the cold room. Dibbs pulled the sheet from her. Having already seen her wounds, I braced myself, yet still darted my sight away once the sheet was gone. Dibbs’ T-incision over her chest and down her abdomen was actually welcome— something familiar to focus on. A cut that meant to find answers. Then I looked down and saw her left wrist. “She was tied?” I said. Marcos M. Villatoro ~ 77 “Yes,” said Dibbs. “By her wrists and ankles.” The area around her nipples: the cuts were not as circular as I had first thought. Rather, they were more oblong, like the shadows of eggs. The oblongs each pointed toward her shoulders. Nancy saw this as well. “They tied her up first.” Nancy turned away, then looked at Dibbs. “But the cuts, they’re fairly clean, like she didn’t put up a fight. Was she drugged?” “Nothing came back from the blood tests. But I don’t doubt she did fight. Those bruises, on her upper arm, and her thighs. Hand prints. They held her down, tied her very tight. Stretched her out. You’ll see here, on the anterior compartment of the right leg, all this bruising just above the ligature mark. Internal tearing of the extensor hallucis longus. I don’t doubt she ripped some of the ligaments around the ankle as well. She was fighting.” Fighting. While they cut away. At some point, she must have stopped. Her body may have shot her up with some numbing adrenalin to alleviate the pain. I wanted to believe that. Dibbs scratched the back of his head, then brought us all down to the largest mutilation. “The wounds to the pelvic region: he began cutting low. He penetrated, with his blade, just above the anus, and cut under both the labium majus and minus. Both are gone. As is the clitoris and half the vaginal canal. Then the cut becomes more shallow. He left the bladder intact, no doubt because the frontal compartment of the pelvis was getting in his way. Shock set in after that. She had two heart attacks from the trauma. And he kept cutting and didn’t stop. It looks . . . it looks like he lifted out her entire organ, in one piece.” This body might be a changing point in Dr. Dibbs’ career, when he might consider hanging it up, becoming a house painter instead. Or he would go on in this world, but become numb so as to do his job, objectively, while deadening himself at home, later, with a bottle. At least, I knew those were my plans before sleep. Nancy had the file open in her palm. She looked at it, looked at the body, then asked Dibbs, “It says something about burn marks on her back?” “Yes. You can see from the photos. Here on her back, and on the soles of her feet.” Dull red marks on her buttocks, around her shoulder blades, the backs of her arms. Rounded areas of baked skin, rounded except for on her shoulders, [3.141.24.134] Project MUSE (2024-04...