The Silent Wife. Karin Slaughter

inside. Nothing. She stuck her index finger down the throat as far as it would reach.

      Ingle asked, “Do you feel an obstruction?”

      “I don’t feel one, no.” The only definitive way to tell would be to dissect the tracheal block. Again, there was no reason to do so. Sara was not going to put this family through one more second of grief based on the theories of a pedophile with an ax to grind.

      She told Ingle, “Ready.”

      He slowly peeled back the plastic covering the torso.

      The sucking sound lurched against the low ceiling. The abdomen looked as if a grenade had gone off inside. The smell was so noxious that Sara coughed. Her eyes watered. She looked back at Amanda. The top of her head still showed, but she was typing with one hand. She’d put the other hand under her nose to block the smell.

      Sara did not have that luxury. She took a few deep breaths, forcing her body to accept that this was how it was going to be. Ingle seemed unfazed. The corners of his lips turned up in a well-earned smile.

      Sara returned to the body.

      The line of demarcation between where the waterproof materials had protected sections of the body and where the thin, cotton shirt had covered the torso could have been made with a ruler. Everything above the clavicles and below the hips was pristine. The belly and chest were a different matter.

      The intestines had been gutted. The breasts had been ripped away. Most of the organs were missing. The ribs had been licked clean. Sara could see teeth marks where bone had been gnawed. She pulled the left arm away from the body to follow the trail of carnage from the shredded breast around to the side. The armpit had been eviscerated. The nerves, arteries and veins stuck out like strands of broken electrical cords. She opened the right arm and found the same type of destruction.

      She asked Ingle, “What do you make of the axilla?”

      “You mean the armpits?” he asked. “Foxes can be extremely vicious, especially when they fight. They’ve got claws as sharp as razors. They would’ve been frenzied.”

      Sara nodded, though she didn’t quite agree with his assessment.

      “Here.” Ingle went back to the desk. He found a magnifying glass in the top drawer. “You’ll see bits of blue material from the cotton shirt. I didn’t have time to pick it all out.”

      “Thank you.” Sara took the magnifying glass. She knelt down beside the gurney. The teeth and claw marks were clearly visible. She had no doubt that several small animals had fed on the body. What she wanted to examine was the damage to the armpits.

      Predators were drawn to the blood in organ meat and muscle. There wasn’t a lot of reward in the axilla. The nerves, veins and arteries of the brachial plexus extend from the spinal cord, through the neck, over the first rib and into the armpit. There were more complicated ways to describe the structures, but basically, the brachial plexus controlled the muscles of the arms. The various strands were distinguishable by their color. Veins and arteries were red. Nerves were pearly white to yellow.

      Under the magnifying glass, Sara could see that the veins and arteries had been ripped open by teeth drawn to the blood.

      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.”