The Silent Wife. Karin Slaughter
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Название: The Silent Wife
Автор: Karin Slaughter
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: Will Trent Series
isbn: 9780008303464
isbn:
By contrast, the nerves looked as if they had been cleanly sliced by a blade.
“Sara?” Amanda was finally looking up from her phone.
Sara shook her head, asking Ingle, “What about the scrape on her back?”
“The wound?”
“You called it a scrape in your notes.”
“Wound. Cut,” he said. “I guess she scratched the back of her neck on something? Perhaps a rock? The clothes weren’t torn, but I’ve seen it happen. Basic friction.”
He was using wound, cut and scratch interchangeably, which was like saying a dog was a chicken was an apple. Sara asked, “Can we turn her onto her side?”
Ingle replaced the plastic over the abdomen before rolling the shoulders. Sara rotated the hips and legs. She used the narrow beam of the penlight to examine the woman’s back. Livor mortis blackened the area like a bruise slashing down the spine. The skin had stretched and cracked from decomposition.
Sara counted the cervical vertebrae down from the base of the skull. She remembered a mnemonic from medical school—
C 3, 4, 5, keeps the diaphragm alive.
The phrenic nerve, which controls the rise and fall of the diaphragm, branches off from spinal nerves at the third, fourth and fifth cervical vertebra. When assessing spinal cord injuries, if those nerves are left intact, then the patient did not need a ventilator. Any damage below C5 would paralyze the legs. Damage above C5 would paralyze the legs and the arms, but it would also cut off the ability of the patient to breathe on her own.
Sara found the injury from Ingle’s notes directly below C5.
The scrape, because the skin had been scraped, was roughly the size of a thumbnail, deeper at one end, trailing off like a comet at the other. She understood why Ingle had dismissed the mark. It looked like the sort of accidental injury that happened all of the time. You rubbed your neck against something sharp. You scratched an itch a little too deeply. There would be pain, but not much. Later on, you would ask your husband or wife to look at it because you had no idea why your neck was hurting.
But there was more to this particular injury than an itch. The scrape was clearly meant to obscure a wound. And not just a wound, but a puncture. The circumference of the hole was roughly a quarter the size of a drinking straw. Sara immediately thought of the awl in a Swiss army knife. The round, pointed tool was ideal for punching holes in leather. Her father used a similar device called a counterpunch to sink the heads of nails in fine carpentry work.
When Sara pressed against the puncture, a watery, dark brown liquid wept out.
Ingle asked, “Is that fat?”
“Fat would be more rubbery and white. This is cerebrospinal fluid,” Sara said. “If I’m right, the killer used a metal tool to rupture her spinal cord. He sliced the nerves of the brachial plexus to immobilize the arms.”
“Hold on a minute.” The practiced calm had left Ingle’s tone. “Why would anybody wanna paralyze this poor little girl?”
Sara knew exactly why, because she had seen this kind of damage before. “So she couldn’t fight back while he raped her.”
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