“Nothing like posting Toasties,” Kovac said.
Liska pointed a finger at him and narrowed her eyes. “No internal-organ jokes or I puke on your shoes.”
“Wimp.”
“And I'll kick your ass later for calling me that.”
There were three tables in the room, the ones at either end occupied. They walked past one as an assistant eased a plastic bag full of organs back into the body cavity of a man with thick yellow toenails. A scale hung over each table, like the kind for weighing grapes and sweet peppers in the supermarket. These were for weighing hearts and brains.
“Did you want me to start the party without you?” the ME queried with an arch of her brow.
Maggie Stone was generally considered by her staff to have a few nuts rattling loose in the mental machine. She suspected everyone of everything, rode a Harley Hog in good weather, and had been known to carry weapons. But when it came to the job, she was the best.
People who had known her in her tamer years claimed her hair was naturally mouse brown. Sam had never been good at remembering such details for long, which was one of many reasons he had two ex-wives. He did notice Dr. Stone, on the far side of forty, had recently gone from flame-red to platinum. Her hair was chopped short and she wore it in a style that looked as if she'd just rolled out of bed and gotten a bad scare.
She stared at him as she adjusted the tiny clip-on microphone at the neck of her scrub suit. Her eyes were a spooky translucent green.
“Get this bastard,” she ordered, pointing a scalpel at him, the implication in her tone being that if he didn't, she would. She then turned her attention to the charred body that lay on the stainless steel table, curled up like a praying mantis. A deep calm settled over her.
“Okay, Lars, let's see if we can't straighten her out a bit.”
Moving to one end of the table, she took hold of the corpse firmly but gently while her assistant, a hulking Swede, took hold of the ankles and they began to pull slowly. The resulting sound was like snapping fried chicken wings.
Liska turned away with a hand over her mouth. Kovac stood his ground. On the other side of the table, Quinn's expression was granite, his eyes on the body that had yet to give up its secrets. Hamill, one of two agents from the BCA assigned to the task force, cast his gaze up at the ceiling. He was a small, tidy man with a runner's wire-thin body and a hairline that was rapidly falling back from a towering forehead.
Stone stood back from the table and picked up a chart.
“Dr. Maggie Stone,” she said quietly for the benefit of the tape, though she appeared to be addressing the deceased. “Case number 11–7820, Jane Doe. Caucasian female. The head has been severed from her body and is currently missing. The body measures 55 inches in length and weighs 122 pounds.”
The measurement and weight had been obtained earlier. A thorough set of X rays and photographs had been taken, and Stone had gone over the body carefully with a laser to illuminate and collect trace evidence. She now went over every inch of the body visually, describing in detail everything she saw, every wound, every mark.
The burned clothing remained on the corpse. Melted to the body by the heat of the fire. A cautionary tale against wearing synthetic fabrics.
Stone made note of the “severe trauma” to the victim's neck, speculating the damage had been done by a blade with a serrated edge.
“Postmortem?” Quinn asked.
Stone stared at the gaping wound as if she were trying to see down into the dead woman's heart. “Yes,” she said at last.
Lower down on the throat were several telltale ligature marks—not a single red furrow, but stripes that indicated the cord had been loosened and tightened over the course of the victim's ordeal. This was likely the manner of death—asphyxiation due to ligature strangulation—though it would be difficult to prove because of the decapitation. The most consistent indicator of a strangulation death was a crushed hyoid bone at the base of the tongue in the upper part of the trachea—above the point of decapitation. Nor was there any opportunity to check the eyes for petechial hemorrhaging, another sure sign of strangulation.
“He played with the others this way?” Quinn asked, referring to the multiple ligature marks on the throat.
Stone nodded and moved down the body.
“Is this roughly the same amount of fire damage as the other bodies?”
“Yes.”
“And the others were clothed.”
“Yes. After he killed them, we believe. There were wounds on the bodies with no corresponding damage to the clothing—what clothing wasn't destroyed by the fire.”
“And not in their own clothes,” Kovac said. “Stuff the killer picked out for them. Always synthetic fabrics. Fire melts the fabric. Screws trace evidence on the body.”
Undoubtedly it meant more to the mind hunter, he thought with a twinge of impatience. As valuable as he knew profiles of murderers could be, the flatfoot cop in him held the reservation that the brainiacs sometimes gave these monsters a little too much credit. Sometimes killers did things just for the hell of it. Sometimes they did things out of curiosity or pure evil or because they knew it would jam up the investigation.
“We gonna get any fingerprints?” he asked.
“Nope,” Stone said as she examined the back of the left hand. The top layer of skin had turned a dirty ivory color and was sloughing off. The underlayer was red. Knuckle bones gleamed white where the skin had seared away entirely.
“Not good ones anyway,” she said. “My guess is he positioned the body with the hands crossed over the chest or stomach. The fire instantly melted the blouse and the resulting goo melted into the fingertips before the tendons in the arms began to constrict and pull the hands away from the body.”
“Is there any chance of separating the fabric residue from the fingertips?” Quinn asked. “The fabric itself might bear an impression of the friction ridges.”
“We don't have the capability here,” she said. “Your people back in Washington might be game to try. We can detach the hands, bag them, and send them in.”
“I'll have Walsh call ahead.”
Coughing like he had tuberculosis, Walsh had begged off from the autopsy. There was no need for the whole task force to attend. They would all be briefed in the morning and would all have access to the reports and photographs.
Stone moved methodically down the length of the body. The victim's legs were bare, the skin seared and blistered in an irregular pattern where the accelerant had burned away in a flash.
“Ligature marks at the right and left ankles,” she said, her small, gloved hands moving tenderly, almost lovingly, over the tops of the victim's feet—as much emotion as she would show during the process.
Kovac took in the appearance of the wounds the bindings had made around the victim's ankles, trying hard not to picture this woman tied to a bed in some maniac's chamber of horrors, struggling so frantically to get free that the ligatures had cut grooves into her flesh.
“The fibers have already gone to the BCA lab,” Stone said. “They seemed consistent with the others—a white polypropylene twine,” she specified for the benefit of Quinn and Hamill. “Tough as hell. You can buy it in any office supply store. The county buys enough every month to wrap around the moon. It's impossible to trace.
“Deep lacerations in a double-X pattern to the bottoms of both feet.” She went on with the exam. She measured and catalogued each cut, then described what appeared to be cigarette burns to the pad of each toe.
“Torture or disfigurement to conceal her identity?” Hamill wondered aloud.
“Or both,” Liska said.
“Looks like all of this was done while she was alive,” Stone said.
“Sick bastard,” Kovac muttered.
“If she got free, she couldn't have run,” Quinn said. “There was a case in Canada a few years ago where the victim's Achilles tendons were severed for the same reason. Did the other victims have similar wounds?”
“They had each been tortured in a variety of ways,” Stone answered. “Neither exactly the same. I can get you copies of the reports.”
