The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page B

jaws open, “on the tongue—the tongue appears to have been bitten quite badly.”
    Kovac said nothing but ground his back teeth together. He had once worked the homicide of a hooker whose pimp had poured Drano down her throat. It had been a horrific death. The caustic chemical had seared her esophagus all the way to her stomach, and all the way back up as the woman’s body tried to reject it.
    Liska asked the question they were all thinking. “Was she alive when that happened?”
    “We’ll know soon enough,” Möller said.
    He continued his visual examination, counting the stab wounds to the chest and throat. He made note of the length and depth of each wound. Seventeen in all.
    “This knife was smaller than with the other girl I autopsied,” he commented. “This looks more like a paring knife or a pocketknife. The wounds are not as wide nor as deep.”
    The knife wounds to all three of the previous cases attributed to Doc Holiday—Rose Reiser, Independence Doe, and Labor Day Doe—had been deep and vicious, made with intent.
    Möller pointed out several lesser marks on the victim’s chest. “Hesitation marks, perhaps? Or perhaps the assailant was not so physically powerful after the initial attack.”
    “Hesitation or torture?” Kovac asked. “The killer didn’t hesitate to pour acid on her face. Why be shy to stab her?”
    “That, my friend, is for you to discover, yes? If I were to guess—and of course, it is not my place to do so—I would guess the acid came after the stabbing,” Möller said. “If the intent was to hinder identification, yes? The worst deed was already done.”
    “Stabbing is hands-on,” Liska said. “It doesn’t get much more personal and real than physically shoving a knife through another person’s flesh.”
    Möller raised an eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought, have you?”
    “More than you’d care to know. As for the acid . . . It’s not so hard to open a bottle and pour out the contents.”
    “Onto someone’s face?”
    She shrugged. “If you’re pissed enough or sick enough to stab somebody seventeen times, why not? It’s a hell of a lot easier than dismemberment.”
    “That’s true,” Kovac conceded. “All the satisfaction of depersonalizing the victim, and none of the hard labor.”
    Möller’s young assistant piped up. “The three of you are freaking me out.”
    “You must be new,” Liska said. “Wait until we’re in here eating egg salad sandwiches while Doc scrapes the maggots off a severed head.”
    The assistant tried very hard not to react. The first rule of dealing with cops, Kovac thought: Show no fear.
    Möller continued his examination of the body. The damage done to their unknown young woman was devastating—the broken bones, the shattered skull, the stab wounds, the acid burns. Kovac wanted to know which had been inflicted by the assailant and which had been a result of falling from the trunk of the car and being struck by the Hummer limo. Some of those answers were obvious; others were not.
    Doc Holiday’s victims had been severely beaten—a lot of blunt-force trauma to the head with a hammer or something similar. With this victim having struck her head with some force as she fell to the road, it would be all but impossible to tell if any of the skull or facial fractures had been inflicted manually.
    Möller pointed out matching bruising on both arms, both above the elbows and around the wrists. Finger marks, not ligature marks. She had been grabbed hard and held on to, possibly held down.
    Doc Holiday’s victims had shown similar bruising, but ligature marks as well. His previous torture repertoire had included cigarette burns. This girl had no cigarette burns. There was no obvious evidence of forcible sexual penetration and no semen present, yet the fact that she had been naked from the waist down strongly suggested a sexual component to the crime.
    Möller and his assistant turned the body over with great care, mindful