Adam threw up his hands before walking away from Mitch, out the apartment door, and into his car, without a word of good-bye.
Those were, in fact, the last words he’d spoken to Adam before getting the news from Caitlyn, giving Mitch more reason to feel anger and guilt. When he raised his voice to his son, demanding better of him—more effort, more conviction, more fight in his fight—he knew he was really castigating himself for not having intervened sooner.
Some doctor.
Some father.
All thoughts of Adam and regret faded when he got to his office and could settle in to study the ME’s report. The images in the file were gruesome. There were photos of Rachel on the floor, propped up against an unmade bed in an untidy bedroom. Behind her a table and lamp had been tipped over, indicating a struggle. Her dark blond hair was matted together in sticky clumps, limp and lifeless as the rest of her, and blood covered her shirt. She sat with her legs splayed out in front of her, head tilted back to reveal a long gash running from one side of her throat to the other in the shape of a gruesome smile. A cordless phone was clutched in her lifeless hand.
Mitch scanned through the report, keying in on certain passages that made him take special interest.
The deceased was a Caucasian female stated to be forty years old. The body weighed 134 pounds, measuring 65 inches from crown to sole.
Not a body, he thought, a person, a woman, a mother, someone with a past but now no future. Rachel.
There were pictures of Rachel’s eyes, milky with death, but he knew from the report that their true color was hazel. The pupils were fixed and dilated. The sclerae and surrounding tissue were unremarkable, with no evidence of petechial hemorrhages due to trauma on either. The ME observed no injuries to the gums or cheeks. Mitch read on.
Sharp force injury of the neck, left side, transecting left internal jugular vein. It appears to be a combination of a stabbing and cutting wound. The wound path is through the subcutaneous tissue and the sternocleidomastoid muscle, with transection of the left internal jugular vein. The coloring below the subcutaneous fat that was observed bulging from the open wound to the neck area was pale yellow and with significant blood collection around the edges, indicating this wound was most likely delivered while the victim was alive.
The image of Penny slicing open Rachel’s throat while she was alive was too much for him to process. Could it be? He visualized Penny clutching a large kitchen knife in her hand, dragging it across Rachel’s throat, severing the carotid artery, sending a spray of blood that soaked her like a fire hose. Mitch read on.
Seven stab wounds appear on the left side of the abdomen, about 35 inches above the left heel, measuring three-quarters of an inch in length. The wound path is through the skin, the subcutaneous tissue, and through the retroperitoneal tissue, terminating in the abdominal aorta, approximately one and one quarter inches proximal to the bifurcation.
In those wounds Mitch saw a dark, profound rage, a pure hatred, as though the cuts themselves projected the emotions preceding them. What else could have driven someone to such violence?
In his reading, he found what appeared to be the fatal wound, one of them at least.
The ninth stab wound, measuring 2.0 centimeters in length, went through the right side of the thorax between the sixth and seventh rib, puncturing the pericardial sac, allowing blood to flow freely into the thoracic cavity. This wound appears to have interrupted the normal action of the heart.
Final cause of death was listed as a homicide involving twenty-five sharp injuries: two wounds to the neck, eighteen to the chest and the abdomen, and five to the upper extremities. Two of the wounds—the one to the abdominal aorta and one to the chambers of the heart—were determined to be rapidly fatal. There were no slicing wounds to the hand, no effort made to grab the blade, suggesting the attack had come as a surprise.
Not an attack. A vicious, ruthless, bloodthirsty murder.
The question running through Mitch’s head was how a girl as thin and lacking in muscle as Penny could deliver so many devastating blows. The wound to the neck alone would have required tremendous force. Adrenaline was what the ME had cited. Could be possible. But he was thinking, too, of her odd claim: I wasn’t alone. Could someone else have been in the room with her at the time of the killing? Mitch didn’t see how. The only other DNA found at the crime scene belonged to Vincent Rapino, the secret lover, and he had an alibi.
The forensic report documenting the blood splatter found on Penny’s body and the accompanying images suggested that, indeed, Penny was a monster. The blood came not only from arterial spray, but was “painted on”—those were the exact words used in the report—after the fact, meaning Penny had dipped her hands into the victim’s blood, then smeared it in her own hair, on her face, her clothes, like she was applying war paint.