The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [30]
“They should have put paper bags on her hands,” she said. “I'll bag them when we're through.” Care?fully, overriding the automatic camera to bracket her exposures, Starling photographed the body.
The victim was a heavyhipped young woman sixty-?seven inches long by Starling's tape. The water had leached her gray where the skin was gone, but it had been cold water and she clearly hadn't been in it more than a few days. The body was flayed neatly from a clean line just below the breasts to the knees, about the area that would be covered by a bullfighter's pants and sash.
Her breasts were small and between them, over the sternum, was the apparent cause of death, a ragged, starshaped wound a hand's breadth across.
Her round head was peeled to the skull from just above the eyebrows and ears to the nape.
“Dr. Lecter said he'd start scalping,” Starling said.
Crawford stood with his arms folded while she took the pictures. “Get her ears with the Polaroid,” was all he said.
He went so far as to purse his lips as he walked around the body. Starling peeled off her glove to trail her finger up the calf of the leg. A section of the trotline and treble fishhooks that had entangled and held the body in the moving river was still wrapped around the lower leg.
“What do you see, Starling?”
“Well, she's not a local--- her ears are pierced three times each, and she wore glitter polish. Looks like town to me. She's got maybe two weeks or so hair growth on her legs. And see how soft it's grown in? I think she got her legs waxed. Armpits too. Look how she bleached the fuzz on her upper lip. She was pretty careful about herself, but she hasn't been able to take care of it for a while.”
"What about the wound?''
“I don't know,” Starling said. “I would have said an exit gunshot wound, except that looks like part of an abrasion collar and a muzzle stamp at the top there.”
“Good, Starling. It's a contact entrance wound over the sternum. The explosion gases expand between the bone and the skin and blow out the star around the hole.”
On the other side of the wall a pipe organ wheezed as the service got under way in the front of the funeral home.
“Wrongful death,” Dr. Akins contributed, nodding his head. “I've got to get in there for at least part of this service. The family always expects me to go the last mile. Lamar will be in here to help you as soon as he finishes playing the musical offering. I take you at your word on preserving evidence for the pathologist at Claxton, Mr. Crawford.”
“She's got two nails broken off here on the left hand,” Starling said when the doctor was gone. “They're broken back up in the quick and it looks like dirt or some hard particles driven up under some of the others. Can we take evidence?”
“Take samples of grit, take a couple of flakes of pol?ish,” Crawford said. “We'll tell 'em after we get the results.”
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?” Craw?ford 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 den?tal 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 direc?tion and retracting her lips while Starling placed the one-?toone Polaroid against the face to get details of the front teeth. That part was easy, but she had to shit the molars with a palatal reflector, watching from the side for