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The killed had slashed the woman’s mouth at either end, giving the appearance of a giant, distorted smile.
“Now that was done with a hand tool, most likely a scalpel. Inflicted postmortem.”
Simple. Ripley had one burning question, but if Ella was paying attention, she’d be thinking along the same lines right now. She held back, waiting for the once-rookie to take the lead.
Ella leaned in for a closer look at the corpse. She inspected the neck, the wrists, and the ankles.
“Notice anything, Dark?”
“No,” she said, “and that’s what concerns me.”
“Why?”
Ella turned to the coroner. “Do we know what the cause of death was?”
“The separation was what killed her,” Dr. Frost said.
Ella took a moment to dwell on the details. “There are no ligature marks in sight. This woman wasn’t restrained. How did he keep her in position to perform a bisection on a living person? There must have been drugs in her system, correct?”
“One hundred percent.” Dr. Frost went and checked her computer monitor. “I found traces of gamma hydroxybutyrate – or GHB – in her bloodstream. It’s a date rape drug. Not very common in North America, but…”
“Easily found in Europe,” finished Ripley.
“So, he drugged her, took her to an isolated location and bisected her while she was still alive. That’s… something else. I can’t even imagine how this woman felt when she woke up.”
It was certainly a bold move, Ripley thought. “If she woke up.”
Dr. Frost added, “She almost certainly did wake up. A shock to the nervous system from a mechanical sawblade would override any level of sedation.”
Ella sighed and glanced away from the body for a moment. Ripley couldn’t blame her. That wasn’t an easy thought to digest.
“There’s one other thing I should mention, agents,” Dr. Frost said. “This woman’s hair has been doused in oil.”
Ella spun around. “Oil? As in motor oil?”
“I believe so.”
She moved to the victim’s head and pinched a section of hair between her fingers. As she slid them off, a globule of thick black liquid followed.
“A byproduct of the murder?” Ripley asked.
Ella rubbed the liquid between her fingertips, smelled it and then rubbed it on the back of her hand. “No. He’s used motor oil to dye her hair. The original Dahlia had black hair, Eliza Matthews doesn’t. The Black Dahlia’s hair was one of her most striking features. It’s only natural he’d want to include it as part of this scene.”
Ripley thought about it. It made sense from a psycho’s point of view, and this little tidbit offered them a lot more insight into their perpetrator. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Dark?”
Ella took out her notepad and began scribbling. Ripley was pretty sure she did it just for effect. She’d never seen the rookie refer to her notes before.
“I’m thinking that motor oil is usually orange. This is black. Oil only goes black once it’s inside the engine and our unsub knows this. So he might be a car aficionado. He could be a farmer or tractor driver. Those guys get through a ton of oil.”
“Good observation. Note it down. Doctor, can you talk us through the first victim now?”
Dr. Frost turned her pointer to the second body. Another young woman, naked save for a sheet covering her bottom half. She had a configuration of stab wounds across her chest and abdomen.
“There’s much less to explain about this one. This is Cheryl King, 18 years old. Another local. Six stab wounds in total, made with a standard-issue carving knife.”
“Available anywhere, presumably,” said Ella.
“More or less. Not around here, but there are a ton of places to pick one up in Baltimore. Two lacerations to the sternum, two to the stomach, two to the face. This woman died from excessive blood loss. He ruptured the thoracic artery with what I believe was his initial strike. The other five strikes were surplus to requirement because she would have already bled out from the first wound alone.”
