Page 17 of Girl, Undone
Ella felt like she’d entered unchartered territory, a new world where the old rules didn’t apply.‘Weirder still?’
‘The amount of blood loss you'd expect from such a wound...it's not here.It's minimal, almost as if the blood was drained or...never there in the first place.’
‘You're saying she bled out elsewhere?’
'She didn't bleed at all.That's the issue.'Sanchez set down her pointer.'A wound this size should have emptied her circulatory system.But her blood volume is almost normal.Minimal loss.Which means-,'
'The wound happened after she died,' Ella finished.
‘Correct.’
The room felt smaller suddenly.Julia Dawson had been dead before something carved her open.Ripley asked, ‘So what’s the cause of death?’
‘Usually, in victims who pass out from pain or exhaustion, the official cause of death is a shutdown of the nervous system.’
‘But not here,’ Ella anticipated.
‘No.In fact, I’ve never seen a cause of death quite like this.’
Ella felt like she was getting more questions than answers.‘So what was it?’
‘Ventricular fibrillation, which is not just worth thirty-three points on a Scrabble board, but also induces an abnormal type of heart rhythm,’ Sanchez said.
Ella wiped sweat from her forehead.'Her heart just gave out?'
'Essentially.But it’showit gave out that’s the thing.I can tell you what Idon’tsee.No underlying heart conditions according to her medical history, no signs of electrocution, nothing physical that would make a healthy woman’s heart go into v-fib.But her adrenal glands were hemorrhaged.That happens when the body is flooded with stress hormones.’
‘What stress hormones?’
‘Epinephrine, cortisol.The panic cocktail.If you ask me, this woman was in extreme fight-or-flight when she died.Her heart couldn't sustain it.'
Ella assembled the timeline in her head: kidnapped, weakened somehow, tied down, died, then mutilated.No blood.No struggle.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘are you saying Julia Dawson was literally… scared to death?’
Sanchez looked between Ella and Ripley with a glimmer of mutual understanding.‘Bodily reactions can be as lethal as any physical wound.The heart is a strange tool.’
Ella paced three steps, turned, paced back.Ripley stayed frozen beside the table like she'd taken root.'So she died before the mutilation.Which means we need to know what frightened her badly enough to stop her heart.And why would someone bother creating this wound after.What happened in those missing hours?’
Ripley interjected, ‘And why go through the trouble of creating such a bizarre wound post-mortem?’
Ella let her mind go loose.She stopped trying to force connections and just let the pieces float.Rose Murphy's voice manifested in her head:She started online classes recently.Something to do with medieval times.She used to put peppermint and garlic near the front door and windows.Said it helped keep the vermin away..The secret weekly trips.The cabin in the woods.The hole in Julia's stomach.
The answer assembled itself slowly, then all at once.
'Ripley,' she said.‘I don’t think our killerdidcreate this wound post-mortem.In fact, I don’t think our killer created this wound at all.’
'What?Then who did?'
Ella stared at the cavity in Julia's abdomen.Scraped away, the doctor had said.Thousands of tiny abrasions.
'Not who.What.'She looked up.'Rats.She was eaten by rats.'
CHAPTER NINE
He'd been sitting here for twenty minutes, staring at the blank document, waiting for the right words.
They never came easily.Not the first line.He lit a cigarette and tried again.
