“Filippov appears to be a woman approx age thirty, five foot five inches tall, athletic build, about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
I’m careful about what I say, because the recording may be entered into evidence, but before being beaten to a pulp, she must have been damned good-looking. Tanned. Long black hair cut in bangs. One eye is burned through, I guess by a cigarette, but the other is open and also nearly black in color. Great figure, something like 36-23-36.
“She’s nude and lying face-up on the bed. Her feet are bound tight with several wraps of duct tape. Her hands are behind her back, underneath her. I kneel down and look. They’re bound in the same manner. The remainder of the roll of tape is on the nightstand. Her mouth is stuffed with women’s socks. Her clothes-jeans, sweater, panties and bra-are wadded up in a pile on the chair, but I don’t see her socks there, so I think the ones in her mouth belong to her.”
“Care to add anything?” I ask Milo.
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
Although this murder scene is gruesome, Milo doesn’t seem fazed by it, shows no sign of coming unglued, like he did last night when we investigated Rauha Anttila’s death.
“Filippov has been struck multiple times with a blunt instrument. Her forehead is split open. Her left arm is broken just above the elbow. Bone protrudes through the skin. Her chest, on the right side, is flattened, suggesting that multiple ribs are caved in. Nothing in the room seems heavy or hard enough to have inflicted this kind of damage.”
Milo takes a look around. The place hasn’t been dusted for fingerprints yet, so with one gloved finger, he opens the closet door. We look in. I see only men’s clothing and shoes on the floor. A stool is inside, a closet seems a strange place for it. “Nothing here either,” he says.
Then I notice equestrian clothing on the shelf overtop the clothes rack: shirts, breeches, a jacket and helmet. Interesting.
We go back to Iisa’s body. “Filippov has in the neighborhood of fifty burn marks on her body. Most are located on her abdomen, her genital area, her nipples, her face, and one through her left eye. The diameter and circular shape of the burns indicate she was burned with lit cigarettes. The wounds could have been inflicted after death, but I think they were probably used as a method of meting out pain. She voided her bowels either while being murdered, from fear or pain or both, or maybe upon death. Feces and urine are on the sheets between her legs.”
“It’s enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon,” Milo says.
I point at the audio recorder, press a warning finger to my lips and continue. “The blood pool pattern around the victim indicates that another body lay next to her while she bled. The outline of a head, arm and torso are clear. The resident of the apartment, Rein Saar, claims to have woken up next to the victim and found her dead. This lends some credence to his story. Most unusual is that Iisa Filippov has been struck dozens, perhaps more than a hundred times, with a light instrument at high velocity. It’s notable that her face around the lips was beaten with particular severity.”
The tone of my description is neutral, but the scene reeks of torture, horror and agony. Iisa’s face is nearly destroyed by cigarette burns, whipped to pieces, scored by marks and welts. Deep and wide-open wounds that ooze.
“She was struck on the same surface areas, mostly on the face and torso, multiple times. It appears that the first lash abraded flesh, and that subsequent strikes deepened the wounds. This resulted in significant blood spatter. The walls and ceiling are misted with patterns of thousands of blood droplets that I estimate are an average of two millimeters in size.”
I hear the front door open, then voices. The forensics team is here.
Milo points. “Look at this little spot on the wall,” Milo says. “Whatever the killer used to hit her smacked it and left a small tongue-shaped bloodstain. Given the clothes in his closet, I’d say Rein Saar beat her to death with a riding crop.”