Lamar, a lean funeral home assistant with a whiskey bloom in the middle of his face, came in while she was doing it. “You must of been a manicurist one time,” he said.
They were glad to see the young woman had no fingernail marks in her palms—an indication that, like the others, she had died before anything else was done to her.
“You want to print her facedown, Starling?” Crawford said.
“Be easier.”
“Let’s do teeth first, and then Lamar can help us turn her over.”
“Just pictures, or a chart?” Starling attached the dental kit to the front of the fingerprint camera, privately relieved that all the parts were in the bag.
“Just pictures,” Crawford said. “A chart can throw you off without X rays. We can eliminate a couple of missing women with the pictures.”
Lamar was very gentle with his organist’s hands, opening the young woman’s mouth at Starling’s direction and retracting her lips while Starling placed the one-to-one Polaroid against the face to get details of the front teeth. That part was easy, but she had to shoot the molars with a palatal reflector, watching from the side for the glow through the cheek to be sure the strobe around the lens was lighting the inside of the mouth. She had only seen it done in a forensics class.
Starling watched the first Polaroid print of the molars develop, adjusted the lightness control and tried again. This print was better. This one was very good.
“She’s got something in her throat,” Starling said.
Crawford looked at the picture. It showed a dark cylindrical object just behind the soft palate. “Give me the flashlight.”
“When a body comes out of the water, a lot of times there’s like leaves and things in the mouth,” Lamar said, helping Crawford to look.
Starling took some forceps out of her bag. She looked at Crawford across the body. He nodded. It only took her a second to get it.
“What is it, some kind of seed pod?” Crawford said.
“Nawsir, that’s a bug cocoon,” Lamar said. He was right.
Starling put it in a jar.
“You might want the county agent to look at that,” Lamar said.
Facedown, the body was easy to fingerprint. Starling had been prepared for the worst—but none of the tedious and delicate injection methods or finger stalls were necessary. She took the prints on thin card stock held in a device shaped like a shoehorn. She did a set of plantar prints as well, in case they had only baby footprints from a hospital for reference.
Two triangular pieces of skin were missing from high on the shoulders. Starling took pictures.
“Measure too,” Crawford said. “He cut the girl from Akron when he slit her clothes off, not much more than a scratch, but it matched the cut up the back of her blouse when they found it beside the road. This is something new, though. I haven’t seen this.”
“Looks like a burn across the back of her calf,” Starling said.
“Old people gets those a lot,” Lamar said.
“What?” Crawford said.
“I SAID OLD PEOPLE GETS THOSE A LOT.”
“I heard you fine, I want you to explain it. What about old people?”
“Old people pass away with a heating pad on them, and when they’re dead it burns them, even when it’s not all that hot. You burn under a heating pad when you’re dead. No circulation under it.”
“We’ll ask the pathologist at Claxton to test it, and see if it’s postmortem,” Crawford said to Starling.
“Car muffler, most likely,” Lamar said.
“What?”
“CAR MUFFL—car muffler. One time Billy Petrie got shot to death and they dumped him in the trunk of his car? His wife drove the car around two or three days looking for him. When they brought him in here, the muffler had got hot under the car trunk and burned him just like that,