The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [32]
“Pellegrino told me she was all dressed up for a night out, as neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Those were his words. Is that a fair summary?”
Deveraux nodded. “That’s exactly what I saw. Pellegrino is an idiot, but a reliable one.”
“That’s more proof she wasn’t killed there. She would have fallen forward on her face, not on her back.”
“Yes, I missed that too. Don’t rub it in.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A dark blue sheath dress with a low white collar. Underwear and pantyhose. Dark blue shoes with spike heels.”
“Clothes in disarray?”
“No. They looked neat as a pin. Like Pellegrino told you.”
“So she wasn’t put into those clothes postmortem. You can always tell. Clothes never go on a corpse just right. Especially not pantyhose. So she was still dressed when she was killed.”
“I accept that.”
“Was there blood on the white collar? At the front?”
Deveraux closed her eyes, presumably to recall the scene. She said, “No, it was immaculate.”
“Was there blood anywhere on her front?”
“No.”
“OK,” I said. “So her throat was cut in an unknown location, while she was dressed in those clothes. But she had gotten no blood on her, until she was dumped on her back in a pool that was separately transported. Tell me how that isn’t a hunter.”
“Tell me how it is. If you can. You can help the army all you want, but you don’t have to believe your own bullshit.”
“I’m not helping the army. Soldiers can be hunters too. Many of them are.”
“Why is it a hunter at all?”
“Tell me how you cut a woman’s throat without getting a drop of blood on her front.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You string her up on a deer trestle. That’s how. By her ankles. Upside down. You tie her hands behind her. You haul her arms up until her back is arched and her throat is presented as the lowest point.”
We sat in the shadowed silence for a minute, not saying a word. I guessed Deveraux was picturing the scene. I sure was. A clearing in the woods somewhere, remote and lonely, or a room far from anywhere, with improvised equipment, or a hut or a shack with roof beams, Janice May Chapman hanging upside down, her hands hauled up behind her back, toward her feet, her shoulders straining, her back curving painfully. She was probably gagged, too, the gag tied to a third rope looped over the trestle’s top rail. That third rope must have been pulled tight, arching her head up and back, keeping it well out of the way, leaving her throat completely accessible.
I asked, “How did she wear her hair?”
“Short,” Deveraux said. “It wouldn’t have gotten in the way.”
I said nothing.
Deveraux asked, “Do you really think that’s how it was done?”
I nodded. “Any other method, she wouldn’t have bled out all the way. Not white as a sheet. She would have died, and her heart would have stopped pumping, and there would have been something left inside her. Two, three pints, maybe. It was being upside down that finished the job. Gravity, plain and simple.”
“The ropes would have left marks, wouldn’t they?”
“What did the medical examiner say? Have you had his report?”
“We don’t have a medical examiner. Just the local doctor. One step up from when all we had was the local undertaker, but not a very big step.”
Not a democracy. I said, “You should go take a look for yourself.”
She said, “Will you come with me?”
We walked back to the diner and took Deveraux’s car from the curb and U-turned and headed back down Main Street, past the hotel again, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, and onward to where Main Street turned into a wandering rural route. The doctor’s place was half a mile south of the town. It was a regular clapboard house, painted white, set in a large untidy yard, with a shingle next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The name on the shingle was Merriam, and it was lettered crisply in black over a rectangle of white paint that was brighter and newer than