Read Online Faithless by Karin Slaughter - Free Book Online Page A

bit of recurring eczema. Winter was always harder on the fair-skinned.
    Before Jeffrey took Polaroids for identification, Sara tried to press the girl’s lips together and close her eyes in order to soften her expression. When she had done all she could, she used a thin blade to scrape the mold from the girl’s upper lip. There wasn’t much, but she put it in a specimen jar to send to the lab anyway.
    Jeffrey leaned over the body, holding the camera close to her face. The flashbulb sparked, sending a loud pop through the room. Sara blinked to clear her vision, the smell of burning plastic from the cheap camera temporarily masking the other odors that filled the morgue.
    “One more,” Jeffrey said, leaning over the girl again. There was another pop and the camera whirred, spitting out a second photograph.
    Lena said, “She doesn’t look homeless.”
    “No,” Jeffrey agreed, his tone indicating he was anxious for answers. He waved the Polaroid in the air as if that would make it develop faster.
    “Let’s take prints,” Sara said, testing the tension in the girl’s raised arm.
    There was not as much resistance as Sara had expected, and her surprise must have been evident, because Jeffrey asked, “How long do you think she’s been dead?”
    Sara pressed down the arm to the girl’s side so that Carlos could ink and print her fingers. She said, “Full rigor would happen anywhere between six to twelve hours after death. From the way it’s breaking up, I’d say she’s been dead a day, two days, tops.” She indicated the lividity on the back of the body, pressing her fingers into the purplish marks. “Liver mortis is set up. She’s starting to decompose. It must’ve been cold in there. The body was well preserved.”
    “What about the mold around her mouth?”
    Sara looked at the card Carlos handed her, checking to make sure he had gotten a good set from what remained of the girl’s fingertips. She nodded to him, giving back the card, and told Jeffrey, “There are molds that can grow quickly, especially in that environment. She could have vomited and the mold set up on that.” Another thought occurred to her. “Some types of fungus can deplete oxygen in an enclosed space.”
    “There was stuff growing on the inside of the box,” Jeffrey recalled, looking at the picture of the girl. He showed it to Sara. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
    Sara nodded, though she could not imagine what it would be like to have known the girl in life and see this picture of her now. Even with all Sara had tried to do to the face, there was no mistaking that the death had been an excruciating one.
    Jeffrey held the photo out for Lena to see, but she shook her head. He asked, “Do you think she’s been molested?”
    “We’ll do that next,” Sara said, realizing she had been postponing the inevitable.
    Carlos handed her the speculum and rolled over a portable lamp. Sara felt they were all holding their breath as she did the pelvic exam, and when she told them, “There’s no sign of sexual assault,” there seemed to be a group exhalation. She did not know why rape made cases like this that much more horrific, but there was no getting around the fact that she was relieved the girl hadn’t had to suffer one more degradation before she’d died.
    Next, Sara checked the eyes, noting the scattershot broken blood vessels. The girl’s lips were blue, her slightly protruding tongue a deep purple. “You don’t usually see petechiae in this kind of asphyxiation,” she said.
    Jeffrey asked, “You think something else could have killed her?”
    Sara answered truthfully, “I don’t know.”
    She used an eighteen-gauge needle to pierce the center of the eye, drawing out vitreous humor from the globe. Carlos filled another syringe with saline and she used this to replace what she had taken so that the orb would not collapse.
    When Sara had done all she could as far as the external exam, she asked, “Ready?”
    Jeffrey and