Claire raised a hand. “It’s Lindsay. I rode back from Napa with her yesterday. She told me the most awful news. She’s very sick. She’s got a rare blood disorder, a form of anemia. It’s called Negli’s aplastic.”
“It’s severe, this Negli’s anemia?”
Claire nodded, her eyes dim. “Damned severe.”
“Oh, God,” Edmund murmured. “Poor Lindsay.” He took her hand, and they sat there for a moment in stunned silence.
Claire finally spoke. “I’m a doctor. I see death every day. I know the causes and symptoms, the science inside out. But I can’t heal.”
“You heal us all the time,” Edmund said. “You heal me every day of my life. But there are times when even all your love and even your amazing intelligence can’t change things.”
She nestled her body in his strong arms and smiled. “You’re pretty smart for a guy who plays the drums. So what the hell can we do?”
“Just this,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.
He held Claire tight for a long time, and she knew he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. That helped.
Chapter 43
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I got my first glimpse of the killer’s face.
Chris Raleigh was talking to the people who had handled the victims’ travel arrangements. I was checking into who had planned their weddings.
Two different companies. For the DeGeorges, White Lace. For the Brandts, a fancy consultant, Miriam Campbell. That wasn’t the link.
I was at my desk when the duty clerk put through a call.
It was Claire. She had just returned from examining the bodies of the victims with the county coroner in Napa.
She sounded excited.
“Get over here,” she said. “Hurry.”
“You found a link. Becky DeGeorge was sexually disturbed?”
“Lindsay, we’re dealing with one sick dude.”
“They were definitely in the act when they were killed,” Claire told me minutes later when I met her in the lab. “Semen traces found in Rebecca DeGeorge matched those I scraped off her husband. And the angle of the wounds confirmed what I suspected. She was shot from behind. Rebecca’s blood was all over her husband’s clothes. She was straddling him…. But that’s not why I asked you here.”
She fixed her large, wide eyes on me, and I could tell it was something important.
“I thought it best to keep this quiet,” she said. “Only the local M.E. and I know.”
“Know what, Claire? Tell me, for God’s sake.”
In the lab, I spotted a microscope on a counter and one of those airtight petri dishes I remembered from high school biology.
“As with the first victims,” she said excitedly, “there was additional sexual disturbance of the corpse. Only this time, it wasn’t so obvious. The labia was normal, what you would assume postintercourse, and there were no internal abrasions like with the first bride. Toll missed it…but I was looking for signs of additional abuse. And there it was, inside the vagina, sort of shouting, ‘Come and get me, Claire.’”
She picked up the petri dish and a tweezer, and gently removed the top. Her eyes lit up with importance.
Out of the clear dish she lifted out a single, half-inch red hair.
“It’s not the husband’s?”
Claire shook her head. “Look for yourself.”
She flicked on the microscope. I leaned in, and against the brilliant white background of the lens, I saw two hairs: one thin, shiny, black brown; the other short, curly, sickle shaped.