Posted by Barbanne on August 11, 2000 at 23:54:03:
LOST LOVE.
He slid his key in the door and opened it.
Tonight he had a real surprise for Jane.
The door swung open. "Janey," he called, "guess who?" The man in the grubby trench coat had turned to look at him. The woman in white overalls was brushing the lounge. The guy in white with the camera was photographing the lounge.
Jane was lying on the lounge. No, she was more sprawled out across it.
Even from here he could see she was dead.
He just stood there, the parcels in his hands, staring, stunned, trying to take it all in.
Jane had on the little, strappy, blue, rather unfashionable mini dress that he loved so much. She had always looked so sexy in it. The way it rode over her thighs and showed her buttocks when she walked in it. The way the low neckline had emphasised her bust and the spaghetti straps had revealed her lovely sloping shoulders. The way her slender, curvy legs had been unfettered by it.
Now it rode up revealing her thighs and because of the way she lay half on her back with one arm by her side, the hand curled in her groin and the other arm hanging straight out off of the lounge, fingers curled almost as if she were beckoning him, one leg bent at the knee up against the back of the lounge, the other leg splayed out off of the lounge, her legs spread at the waist and the dress pulled up, rucked around her hips, her panties were peeking out and the slight ridging of thigh fat she had been so sensitive about was clearly visible.
"My damned cellulite," she had said.
He had loved it, loved to explore her womanly upper thighs with his tongue as she gasped and panted and alternately protested and then urged him on.
Jane was never a great beauty. Pretty in a convential way, her loveliness had come from her bubbly character and bright mind.
Now her face looked peacefully asleep, her eyes closed, her brown hair fanned out around her face and her lips parted, revealing her small white teeth.
She looked perfectly normal, just resting, except for the slight bruising on her forehead above her left eye where she had been hit. Not even the skin was broken. The blow had left her almost unmarked but it had caused fatal swelling and haemorraging inside her brain.
This he was to learn later.
"Jane," he said in a small voice.
The man in the trench coat introduced himself as a Detective Inspector and made comforting noises. He wanted to go forward, tug down Jane's dress, conceal her inner thighs and hide her floral panties. She would hate lying here exposed like this, hate strangers seeing her flaws. She had tought of them as flaws, he had loved them as he had loved every part of her.
A doctor, a woman at least, was allowed forward now and she checked Jane's body. Lifted an eyelid to expose a glassy eyeball, felt inside her mouth and with two of the white coated people assisting rolled her and slipped down her panties and slid a thermometer into the crack of her ass.
He had to turn away.
The policeman was talking to him but he heard nothing, the doctor was declaring Jane dead sometime between three and five hours ago.
If only he had been earlier.
Jane had been attacked. She had skin under her fingernails and her shoes, one of which had a broken strap, were hanging half off. The dress had been torn and one of the shoulder straps had been ripped loose and lay drooping over her upper arm. Her hair was disarrayed and her lipstick smeared across her mouth.
She had put up a fight.
No good. She had been killed anyway.
The policeman took him aside and asked him questions about their relationship, where he had been, anyone he knew who may have wanted to harm Jane.
He answered automatically, watching as the doctor finished with Jane's body and the Coroner's crew came forward and got her onto a stretcher and covered her with a green sheet and strapped it down and then she was taken away.
The policeman asked him to come down to the station and give a more detailed statement.
He nodded.
*
He sat through the police interview in a state of disbelief.
His answers came out in a monotonous and flat way. He registered that it was Jane they were discussing but he couldn't get his head around the fact that the fun loving, passionate girl he had known and loved was now still and dead. Just another cold corpse waiting to be examined.
*
It was the day he had always dreaded ever since he had taken the job as a forensic pathologist with the Medical Examiner's Office. The day the anonymous body on the cold steel table would be someone he recognised. Someone he knew, someone he loved.
He shrugged into his coat and walked over to where his assistant and the student aide waited beside the autopsy table under the bright halo of light. His assistant had the camera today. The policeman, still in his grubby trench coat together with a uniformed officer watched from behind the observers screen.
Jane lay on the table.
Slowly and very carefully, he removed her clothing, item by item, asking for photographs occasionally, recording each well known garment carefully and conscientiously.
Finally she lay face down and nude on the table, her waxy skin unreal, lifeless, like someone else, a stranger, under the powerful downlight.
He started his examination.
Mechanically his voice spoke into the recorder as he enumerated the blemishes and marks on the body before him. How, he thought, could anyone else see the ridge of her spine, the dimples above her buttocks, the buttocks themselves, as the well known and loved areas where his hands had roamed, where his tongue had dragged, where he had kissed and sucked and stroked.
With his assistant they rolled her onto her back.
His throat constricted as he looked at her dead face.
That hair he had run fingers through, those lips, full, pouting, inviting, now thin and bloodless. Those eyes once sparkling and mischievous, now flat, dull, totally lifeless, glazed and unfocussed. He asked for several shots of the forehead bruise, described it in detail and turning looked at the police as he identified it as the visible evidence of the most likely cause of death.
Her breasts, crushed from being pressed against the table when she lay face down, were still recovering. Gone completely was the springy elasticity they had possessed in life. His hands tingled as he remembered the way he had stroked them, those big pinkish brown areoles and the little nipple nub had afforded him so much pleasure, had made her groan in delight, in hot, sweaty, sexy arousal. He examined her arms, her hands. Recalled with a flush of remembering how those hands had rubbed along his cock, how they had felt out and spread her own labial lips, how they had come away wet with her own desire and how she had coyly sucked it off while daring him to use her, to fuck her.
He realised he had groaned aloud.
Was he alright? his assistant asked.
He nodded.
He continued down her tummy, spread her inner thighs, combed through her pubics, saw the tired, thin slit of her sex. Those soft skin flaps that had glowed pink and pulsed with her arousal, now just another fold in her dead flesh.
He examined her gorgeous legs and her neat feet. How well he remembered that nail polish colour, how often had he sucked those toes.
Feeling like a violator he cut her open in bold, swift strokes.
As he removed and recorded her organs and their state of necrosis he realised that everything pointed to the head trauma having finished her.
Finally when he removed the top of her skull as her beloved features drooped sadly over her chin and neck, he saw the evidence of the sub dural haematoma that had killed her.
His examination over, he looked at the two policemen.
They were talking together.
He left his assistant and the student to reassemble Jane.
Later today she would be released to the mortuary that would prepare her for her mother and father to see. To grieve over.
He went and cleaned up.
*
There was one last thing.
The police arrested the kid who did it three weeks later.
He was in court when the kid was arraigned.
Seventeen years old, but looked older with his nervous, drug ravaged eyes darting back and forth, he needed a hit so badly he could hardly follow the Magistrate's words. He confessed. He had gotten fifteen dollars and her pendant and two rings, it had vanished into his arm.
He was nothing. Just the scum on the edge of life.
Jane had been so beautiful. A truly lovely human being.
But Jane was dead.
Her life finished.
He read later where the kid got a three year sentence, minimum twelve months before parole.