|
Against the starless dark the first tinge of morning just faintly backlit heavy trees lining the gravel road to the east. Too early even for birds, too late for traffic, the only sound in this vast silence just before dawn was that of scattered raindrops irratically ticking on some hard, smooth surface nearby. Even they, the tag end of a midnight spring shower, soon lessened and virtually stopped. The body lay, supine, aligned with painstaking precision so the head was positioned six inches in from one end of the platform, the heels a like distance from the opposite.. The body’s presentation -- because that’s precisely what it appeared to be -- was quite neat, oddly modest and immaculate, save for the slowly congealing pool of blood that spread in several places to the outer edges of the stone slab before dripping sluggishly to the rain-soaked earth beneath it. The body itself bore no immediately obvious signs of injury from just a cursory glance, having been cleaned with meticulous care after death. Beads of moisture studded the narrow clear plastic sheet that covered the woman’s body, a cover apparently spread as a final step to forestall any possible disturbance of the impression of serenity and calm the killer was so intent on preserving. Under that covering no detail had gone unaddressed. The body was precisely straight with the edges of the block of granite on which it lay, legs firmly together, ankles neatly crossed. The well-groomed and heavily-ringed fingers of her hands were lightly laced together over her navel, her elbows close to her ribcage. The head, pillowed on a neat bundle of her own clothing, was canted sharply to her right, dark empty eyes wide open, chin lightly touching her own shoulder. A ghastly dropping lower jaw would not be acceptable in this display. There was a tiny tattoo of a ladybug on the inner curve of the breast on the left, low so as to be invisible save with the most revealing of clothing, a charming affectation under most circumstances. The jarring note, however, was that the breast, along with its matching twin, had been skillfully removed from the woman’s body and then replaced on the ravaged chest after the woman was dead. With one exception, nothing else was left at the murder site. That one deviation was a wonderfully crafted eight-inch obsidian blade mounted in an intricately carved zebra wood handle that had been placed with obvious care at the junction of the folded hands after it, too, had been assiduously cleaned of obvious blood from the work it had performed. Forensic examination would ultimately indeed find traces of blood where the finely-grained exotic wood haft and razor-sharp blade were joined; but to the unaided eye, there was no such evidence that this was anything other than an afterthought to an already bizzare murder scene. |