Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
Peggy Stanton had a cluster of contusions on her upper right arm, what appear to be fingertip bruises, and I think of Luke’s speculation that they weren’t inflicted through clothing but rather by someone gripping her bare skin. He theorized that the killer terrorized and humiliated her by stripping her nude the same way prisoners of war are tortured, and I don’t think that’s it.
I don’t believe the killer wanted her naked. I think he wanted her dressed for the role he sadistically cast her in, and months after she was dead and desiccated he adjusted the wardrobe, the jewelry, so it didn’t fall off her mummified body when he pushed it overboard into the bay. I explain all this to Ernie Koppel as I continue making evidence rounds by phone.
“I need to rule out that she was dressed this way when she left her house,” I say to him. “If at all possible, I’d like to answer that. This is a bad one, Ernie.”
“I know.”
“And I’m pushing everyone.”
“Imagine that,” he says sportingly.
I ask him about fibers he recovered from inside Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes, explaining that I saw no clothing inside her house remotely similar to what she had on when I recovered her body from the water.
“I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look,” I then say, and it’s my way of acknowledging I’m persistent and always in a hurry. “Any chance the fibers you collected from her car could have come from the clothing she had on? If she was dressed that way for some unusual reason when she went out last, most likely this past April twenty-seventh?”
Specifically, I want to know if fibers recovered from the floor, the seats, and the trunk might have come from the dark blue wool Tallulah jacket, the gray wool skirt, the purple silk blouse, and Ernie says no.
“Carpet fibers, synthetics,” he says, and then he gets to the wood fibers he thought were mulch.
“They’re not,” he lets me know. “I’m not saying I know what this stuff is used for, but it wasn’t made by feeding wood or bark through a tub grinder and spraying it with a dye.”
He says he used gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, GC–MS, to analyze what he recovered from the driver’s area of the Mercedes, and the red-stained wood debris has a specific cyclic polyalcohol profile consistent with American oak.