Intimate Relations, Rebecca Forster [best ereader for manga .txt] 📗

high and large for her delicate frame. They were also real. It was clear she did no hard labor. Her hands were small and unmarred. Her fingers were long, the nails manicured. Her feet were smooth. Her pedicure was the same as her manicure. It was hard to see her tan lines because her skin had taken on the ice-milked chalk of death. The girl's pubic area was shaved, and the swimsuit she wore to cover her nether regions would have barely saved her from an indecent exposure rap. Another few square inches of fabric had covered her nipples. There were narrow tan lines running over her neck and back where the straps would have tied.

Not even those tiny tan lines could distract from the new markings on her body. Between the wee hours of the morning and the early hours of the afternoon, the girl had been butchered. This was done in the nicest way possible given that Paul was doing the butchering. The M.E. had cut her from pelvis to breast. He pushed open her rib cage, sectioned her organs, and emptied her stomach. When all was said and done, Paul packaged up the leftovers and packed them back into the cavity and closed her up with coarse, even stitches.

Her arms were graceful, and her neck long. The head that sat upon it was elegantly shaped, but it too was disfigured.  While her long dark hair hadn't been cut, her skull had been opened and her brain removed. What was left of her face had been pulled down over the skull so that Paul could see first hand the damage done by whatever hit her. All of this was recorded and photographed before her mutilated face was stitched back in place.

"You should join a quilting bee, doc," Cori said. "Nice work."

"I like to send them on as close to one piece as possible. That way the angels won't stare when my patients stroll through the pearly gates."

"You're lucky you're taken, doc, or I'd have to make a play," Cori said as she leaned over the corpse. "Did she bite the big one right away?"

"Her heart was beating for a few minutes after the attack was over. The bruises around the temple area are light so there wasn't a lot of blood pumping, but she was alive."

Cori's eyes swept over the woman's face —across, up, and down and then back again. When she and Finn had found her it looked like her face wasn't there at all. Now that she had been cleaned up, Cori saw that it was still there,  pressed into the depression where her cheek and temporal lobe had collapsed.

"She took more than one hit?" Cori asked.

"Yes. Still, if you're asking if that is the cause of death, I can't say yet. I'm thinking suffocation."

"You're pulling my leg." Cori straightened and rested her hip against the table.

"There were bone fragments impacting her nasal passages. Given the damage she sustained to her nose and the maxilla..." he pointed to the spot where her upper lip would have been. "She probably couldn't breath through her nose or open her mouth. I found teeth in the pharynx. Between that and the bone fragments, she would have had a very hard time breathing. There's some petechial hemorrhaging, so suffocation isn't out of the realm of possibilities. She wasn't conscious, thank goodness."

"Would she have survived if we got to her sooner?" Cori asked, thinking of Officers Hunter and Douglas and their hesitation.  If they were responsible for this girl's death, the whole department was going to suffer.  It would be worse for all of them if she was some rich Asylum guy's woman.

"Don't worry about it. Between the traumatic brain injury and disfiguration, it was a blessing she didn't make it. Her quality of life would have been nonexistent. No one could have saved her."

Cori nodded. Her bottom lip disappeared between her upper teeth. She gave it a nice little bite to remind herself that this was all business.

"Look here." Paul pointed to the eye that was open— the one that was still fairly intact. Cori pushed away from the table.

"I don't know what you're looking at. The eye is flooded with blood. The other one is mush. I can't even see what color her eyes were," Cori said.

"Brown. Actually, more hazel. Very pretty," Paul said.

"If  you say."

"Take my word for it. Lovely eyes. She was a beautiful young woman based on my measurements. It must have been quite a party if they were all like her."

"It was unique," Cori said. "Four men and a bevy of lovely ladies. All in various stages of undress."

"The men too?"

"No," Cori laughed. "The women."

"Thank goodness for that. Nothing worse than a naked man parading about. Usually, we don't have anything to show off that's too impressive," Paul said, and Cori chuckled.  "A party like that reminds me of when I was in medical school and just married. My wife kept a tight hand on the finances. I worked so hard, such long hours, and I didn't understand why she didn't want me to have any fun.

"One evening we had a particularly heated discussion, and I stormed out of the house. I went to the North Beach. That's in San Francisco, you know. This was well before the city became unlivable. Anyway, I found myself in front of The Condor."

"Let me guess. That's an aviary where all the birds fly around a metal pole shaking their tail feathers," Cori said.

"Correct. But The Condor was a world famous strip joint," he said. "Carol Doda was the star. She had a forty-five inch bust, if you can you imagine. Well, I put my weekly lunch allowance down, bought entry and two watered down drinks just to show my wife who was boss."

"What did she say when you told her?" Cori asked.

"I never did. I was so mad at myself that I went a week bumming morsels off my fellow residents so she wouldn't know what I'd