“That's already being taken care of, thank you.”
There was no hope of removing the victim's clothing without taking skin with it. Stone and her assistant snipped and peeled, coaxing the melted fibers gently away with forceps, Stone swearing under her breath every few minutes.
Anticipation tightened in Kovac's gut as the destroyed blouse and a layer of flesh were worked away from the left side of the chest.
Stone looked across the body at him. “Here it is.”
“What?” Quinn asked, moving to the head of the table.
Kovac stepped in close and surveyed the killer's handiwork. “The detail we've managed to keep away from the stinking reporters. This pattern of stab wounds—see?”
A tight cluster of eight marks, half an inch to an inch in length, perforated the dead woman's chest roughly in the vicinity of the heart.
“The first two had this,” Kovac said, glancing at Quinn. “They were each strangled and the stabbing was done after the fact.”
“In that exact pattern?”
“Yep. Like a star. See?” Holding his hand three inches above the corpse, he traced the pattern in the air with his index finger. “The longer marks form one X. The shorter marks form another. Smokey Joe strikes again.”
“Other similarities too,” Stone said. “See here: amputation of the nipples and areola.”
“Postmortem?” Quinn asked.
“No.”
Stone looked to her assistant. “Lars, let's turn her over. See what we find on the other side.”
The body had been positioned on its back before being set ablaze. Consequently, the fire damage was contained to the front side. Stone removed the undamaged pieces of clothing and bagged them for the lab. A piece of red spandex skirt. A scrap of chartreuse blouse. No underwear.
“Uh-huh,” Stone murmured to herself, then glanced up at Kovac. “A section of flesh missing from the right buttock.”
“He did this with the others too?” Quinn asked.
“Yes. With the first victim he took a chunk from the right breast. With the second, it was also the right buttock.”
“Eliminating a bite mark?” Hamill speculated aloud.
“Could be,” Quinn said. “Biting certainly isn't unusual with this kind of killer. Any indication of bruising in the tissue? When these guys sink their teeth in, it isn't any love nip.”
Stone took up her little ruler to measure the wounds precisely. “If there was any bruising, he's cut it out. There's considerable muscle gone.”
“Jesus,” Kovac muttered with disgust as he stared at the shiny dark red square on the victim's body, the flesh cut out precisely with a small sharp knife. “Who does this guy think he is? Hannibal Fucking Lecter?”
Quinn gave him a look from the headless end of the body. “Everybody's got a hero.”
CASE NUMBER 11–7820, Jane Doe, Caucasian female, had no organic reason to die. She had been healthy in all respects. Well fed, carrying the extra ten or fifteen pounds most people did. Although what her last meal had been, Dr. Stone had not been able to determine. If this was Jillian, she had digested the dinner she'd eaten with her father before her death. Her body was free of disease and natural defect. Stone had judged her to be between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. A young woman with most of her life ahead of her—until she crossed the path of the wrong man.
This type of killer rarely chose a victim who was ready to die.
Quinn reviewed this fact as he stood on the wet tarmac of the morgue's delivery bay. The damp cold of the night seeped into his clothes, into his muscles. Fog hung like a fine white shroud over the city.
There were too damn many victims who were young women: pretty young women, ordinary young women, women with everything going for them, and women with nothing in their lives but a sliver of hope for something better. All of them broken and wasted like dolls, abused and thrown away as if their lives had meant nothing at all.
“Hope you're not attached to that suit,” Kovac said as he walked up, fishing a cigarette out of a pack of Salem Menthols.
Quinn looked down at himself, knowing the stench of violent death had permeated every fiber of his clothing. “Professional hazard. I didn't have time to change.”
“Me neither. Used to drive my wives crazy.”
“Wives—plural?”
“Consecutive, not concurrent. Two. You know how it is—the job and all. . . . Anyway, my second wife used to call them corpse clothes—whatever I had to wear to a really putrid death scene or an autopsy or something. She made me undress in the garage, and then you'd think she'd maybe burn the clothes or stick 'em in the trash or something, 'cause she sure as hell wouldn't let me wear them again. But no. She'd box the stuff up and take it to the Goodwill—on account of it still had wear in it, she'd say.” He shook his head in amazement. “Underprivi-leged people all over Minneapolis were walking around smelling like dead bodies, thanks to her. You married?”
Quinn shook his head.
“Divorced?”
“Once. A long time ago.”
So long ago, the brief attempt at marriage seemed more like a half-remembered bad dream than a memory. Bringing it up was like kicking a pile of ashes, stirring old flecks of emotional debris inside him—feelings of frustration and failure and regret that had long since gone cold. Feelings that came stronger when he thought of Kate.
“Everybody's got one,” Kovac said. “It's the job.”
He held the cigarettes out, Quinn declined.
“God, I gotta get that smell out of my mouth.” Kovac filled his lungs and absorbed the maximum amount of tar and nicotine before exhaling, letting the smoke roll over his tongue. It drifted away to blend into the fog. “So, you think that's Jillian Bondurant in there?”
“Could be, but I think there's a chance it's not. The UNSUB went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure we couldn't get prints.”
“But he leaves Bondurant's DL at the scene. So maybe he nabbed Bondurant, then figured out who she was and decided to hang on to her, hold her for ransom,” Kovac speculated. “Meanwhile, he picks up another woman and offs her, leaves Bondurant's DL with the body to show what might happen if Daddy doesn't cough up.”
Kovac narrowed his eyes as if he were playing the theory through again for review. “No ransom demand we know of, and she's been missing since Friday. Still, maybe . . . But you don't think so.”
“I've never seen it happen that way, that's all,” Quinn said. “As a rule, with this type of murder you get a killer with one thing on his mind: playing out his fantasy. It's got nothing to do with money—usually.”
Quinn turned a little more toward Kovac, knowing this was the member of the task force he most needed to win over. Kovac was the investigative lead. His knowledge of these cases, of this town, and of the kind of criminals who lived in its underbelly would be invaluable. Trouble was, Quinn didn't think he had the energy left to pull out the old I'm-just-a-cop-like-you routine. He settled for some truth, instead.
“The thing about profiling is that it's a proactive tool based on the reactive use of knowledge gained from past events. Not a perfect science. Every case could potentially present something we've never seen before.”
“I hear you're pretty good though,” the detective conceded. “You nailed that child-killer out in Colorado right down to his stutter.”
Quinn shrugged. “Sometimes all the pieces fit. How long before you can get your hands on Bondurant's medical records for comparison with the body?”
Kovac rolled his eyes. “I oughta change my name to Murphy. Murphy's Law: Nothing's ever easy. Turns out, most of her medical records are in
“The Bureau can help get the records via our legal attache offices in Paris.”
