Page 10 of Sharp Force
“Dana Diletti should be very concerned.”
“Yeah, she should be,” Lucy says. “So far, when someone’s been visited by the hologram, that person ends up dead. It would seem the Slasher is stalking Dana, starting in on her the way he has withhis other victims. And unfortunately, she’s enjoying all the attention from it instead of focusing on what it means.”
“She needs to get out of that house and stay someplace safe.” I’m moving window to window closing the shades. “But instead, she’s going to exploit the situation for publicity, for her damn ratings.”
“The Slasher’s addicted to the spectacles he causes,” Lucy says. “The more attention he gets, the more he wants it. And as Benton has pointed out repeatedly, the violence is escalating.”
I’ve paused in front of bookcases crowded with medical and legal tomes, many of them old and filled with my notations.
“And who better to give him more attention, right?” Lucy adds over speakerphone.
I pick up the spray bottle of distilled water from a shelf.
“He projects his hologram through the bedroom window,” she goes on, “and what do you think Dana’s going to do?”
“She’s going to talk about it on TV. And probably end up on all the big shows, maybe win another award or two.” I’m spritzing my orchids, the areca palm, the fiddle-leaf fig tree. “I hope the police are telling her not to stay in her house anymore until the Slasher is caught. I hope Marino and Fruge told her that.”
“She’s bragging about not letting a serial killer or anyone else chase her from her home. Especially not on Christmas Eve,” Lucy says as I pluck off dead blossoms and leaves, dropping them in the trash. “And of course, she’s making a big thing about the difficulties of being amajor celebrity,and how stressful it is to be stalked.”
“She’s acting just plain stupid.” I walk into my office bathroom and shut the door.
As I begin undressing, I tell Lucy what Cate Kingston was explaining to me a few minutes ago.
“A female in her twenties was murdered, but we don’t know when,” I explain. “Unlike the other graves from the old Mercy Island asylum, there’s no record of who this person might have been.”
“And it sounds like someone went to the trouble to move a grave marker,” Lucy says. “Giving the impression it was a hospital burial. When maybe it wasn’t.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” I drop my scrubs on the floor.
Lucy explains that she can use AI to search satellite images and those from open-source platforms. Possibly, we can find before and after images of the cemetery and determine when the marker was moved. That would tell us when the victim was buried there.
“Maybe her death wasn’t all that long ago,” Lucy suggests.
“It’s hard to tell,” I reply. “She wasn’t in a coffin and would have skeletonized quickly depending on the time of year and soil conditions. But based on what I just saw in the anthropology lab, the remains certainly weren’t in the ground a century or more. The bones are more recent. I hate to think how recent they might be.”
Lucy says she’ll let me know what she finds in data searches, and we end the call. I finish undressing, and as I move about, I catch a whiff of Rowdy O’Leary, my olfactory glands more sensitive than I often wish. The stench lingers deep in my sinuses, some of it remembered or imagined.
I spray my scrubs with Lysol, stuffing them into a big black garbage bag that I tightly tie. On my way out of the building, I’ll drop off my dirty laundry in the morgue for the industrial washer and dryer. Some things I’m not going to send to the cleaners. I learned long ago that odors are persistent.
I might not always notice what lingers like an invisible contrail, but other people will. During my forensic pathology residency when I performed my first medico-legal autopsies, I learned the hard waythat death is all too happy to follow me. I remember strangers moving away from me in the post office, the grocery store.
Stepping into the shower, I shut the glass door, and the hot water feels wonderful raining down as I wash and condition my hair. Brushing my teeth, I hold my face up to steamy spray that smells like lavender. I scrub every inch of me until I don’t imagine the stench anymore.
Drying off, I turn on the exhaust fan, the mirror patched with condensation, my reflection deconstructed like a Picasso painting. A blue eye. A clump of wet blond hair. An ear above the curve of a strong jaw. I find clean lingerie in my locker, dressing in the outfit I wore to work this morning.
The dark green pantsuit, red silk blouse and black suede boots with a sensible heel were my attempt at being festive. I treated my staff to a lunch of takeout barbecue and fresh lemonade. We exchanged small but thoughtful gifts. Candy, liquor, books that are recommended reading. I gave out unfiltered olive oil I order from Sicily.
As I leave the bathroom, I put on my computer-assisted “smart” ring that pesters me about everything I do wrong. High on the list is not sleeping or exercising enough. I’m also nagged about stress, and that causes more of it. Whenever the ring sends another audible alert, I appreciate it about as much as a cattle prod.
I turn on the flat-screen TV across from the bookcases to monitor the local news. I mute the sound, the captions showing as Dana Diletti’s video of the ghostlike hologram plays. She’s talking about it nonstop on TV, cutting to a clip of her interviewing me weeks ago after the most recent murder on Halloween.
“… Her cause of death was exsanguination due to sharp force injury…”
I glance at the caption crawling by as I go on to warn about “smart” homes where everything is wireless. Should an intruder knock out the Wi-Fi with a signal jammer as the Phantom Slasher does, the victim has no alarm system, no camera, no phone signal.
“… Critical to have at least one landline, especially for the security system,”I said.
My clip is followed by the news anchor talking about traffic and power outages. Also, after-Christmas sales, and a rash of burglaries in Falls Church. I glance up at an interview from earlier today when a scientist named Duke Mansoni talked about three monkeys escaping from the Primal Biodynamics research lab close to my house.
