Snow Angels: An addictive serial killer thriller. James Thompson
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Snow Angels: An addictive serial killer thriller - James Thompson страница 14
Название: Snow Angels: An addictive serial killer thriller
Автор: James Thompson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007388257
isbn:
I overlooked the scar tissue because Sufia’s vagina is smeared with dried blood and damaged by the beer bottle. I’m shocked, but I shouldn’t be. Back in the nineties, when we took thousands of Somali refugees into Finland to help them escape genocide, I made an effort to learn a little bit about Somali culture. The vast majority of Somali women have undergone clitoridectomy as a rite of womanhood.
“You ever see one of these before?” I ask.
“Only in pictures. This is what they call a Type II clitoridectomy. Because of the absence of the labia minora and clitoris, the anterior perineal structures have an unusual contour.”
“It looks ungodly painful.”
“In my medical opinion, it hurt like screaming fucking hell. They dug her clitoris out at the root, down to the bone.”
I think about her cottage and the semen-stained sheets and panties. “Could she have derived enjoyment from sex?”
“Not the kind of physical pleasure usually associated with it.”
“Learn anything about the sexual assault with the bottle?”
“Not much, he pushed it into her while twisting and cutting. There’s semen present, but that doesn’t prove anything. The killer did so much damage with it that I can’t tell if she was raped or not. Makes me wonder if he’s as smart as he is brutal. She could have had intercourse a day or two before her murder.”
The external examination is complete. The diener finishes an apple, throws the core in the trash and puts down his magazine. He weighs and measures the body. “Five feet and eight inches, ninety-six pounds,” he says.
Dieners are an odd lot, tend to stay in their low-paying jobs for decades. They live in the cool quiet of the morgue, moving and washing bodies. Makes me wonder about them. The diener moves Sufia’s corpse while Esko takes a break. He and I drink more coffee. He looks lost in thought, so I stay quiet to let him sort things out.
The diener moves Sufia to a slanted aluminum autopsy table. It has raised edges, faucets, gutters and drains to rinse away blood and drek. The diener washes the body. If there was any evidence left on her, it’s gone down the drain. He places a body block, a rubber brick, under her back, to make her chest protrude. It will make it easier to cut her open.
I remember the first time I went deer hunting. My oldest brother, Juha, and some of his friends took me. Hunting dogs cornered the deer, a six-point whitetail buck, and since it was my first time, they let me take the shot. The bullet went behind the shoulder and through the heart, a clean kill. Juha handed me a knife and told me what to do. I zipped the buck open from the sternum to the genitals and plunged my hands in to pull out the organs. The morning was bitter cold, and the heat inside the dead animal made me sigh with pleasure.
“Isn’t working with chilled bodies uncomfortable?” I’ve attended quite a few autopsies, but never thought of this before.
“You get used to it, like anything. Refrigerated flesh is easier to work with. Warm flesh is squishy, harder to cut.”
Esko goes back to work. He makes a Y-shaped incision from each shoulder to the bottom of her breastbone, then from the breast-bone to her pubic bone. He pulls her skin away in flaps. The chest flap hangs over her face so that I can see her bones and muscles.
He removes her rib cage and detaches her esophagus and larynx by cutting arteries and ligaments. He cuts the attachments to the bladder, spinal cord and rectum, then flops out her internal organs in one go. He takes his bread knife and slices organs for tissue samples.
“How does her liver look?” I ask.
“Pure as the driven snow.”
“What about her lungs?”
“Pink as the day she was born.”
I try to see Sufia as she was. “I processed her cottage today, there were booze bottles and cigarette butts everywhere.”
“Unless she has new vices, they weren’t hers.”
“We get twenty-four-hour turnaround on DNA. The evidence bags from her room are in the trunk of my car. When you get done, we’ll send them and your samples to Helsinki on the next plane. We might know whose they are in a day or two.”
Esko opens her stomach. The smell is less than pleasant. He dumps the contents into a container. Then he zips a scalpel around Sufia’s head, across her forehead and from ear to ear. He pulls her skin away in two flaps. “Blows to the head from the blunt instrument caused a fracture in the frontal cranium,” he says.
He cuts into her skull with an electric Stryker saw, then pulls off the top like he’s taking off her hat. He cuts her brain’s connection to the spinal cord and lifts it out, slices it with the bread knife for samples. When he’s done, Esko flops into a chair, exhausted. The diener starts sewing her back together.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.