'What about the angels? Can they fathom God's plan?'
Schiltz expelled a cloud of highly aromatic smoke. 'You see how logic binds you to the earth, Jack? It ensures you dismiss with a joke anything you can't understand.'
'Like angels on unicycles, for instance.'
'Yes, Jack.' Egon refused to rise to the joke. 'Just like angels on unicycles.'
'Then Emma, up in heaven, must know God's plan for her.'
'Certainly.'
'She's content then.'
Schiltz's eyes narrowed slightly behind the aromatic blue smoke. 'All who are in heaven are content.'
'Says who?'
'We have the Word of God.'
'In a book written by men.'
Egon gave Jack a look he might have reserved for the devil. 'I suppose there's only one way to get rid of you tonight,' he sighed.
WHAT DO you want me to tell you about the hand?'
'Whether or not it belongs to Alli Carson.'
That got Schiltz's attention. His white eyebrows shot up, cartoon-style. 'The president-elect's daughter?'
'The same.'
Jack and Schiltz faced each other in the autopsy room, lights low to cut down on the glare from all the stainless steel and tile.
Schiltz snapped on rubber gloves, placed a magnifying lens over his right eye. Then he adjusted a spotlight, the beam illuminating the hand. He bent over, his shoulders rolled forward, a hunchback in his ill-lit garret beside the stone belfry. 'Waterlogged as hell,' he said gloomily, 'so you can forget about anything like DNA testing.' His finger-tips moved the hand. 'Interesting.'
'What is?' Jack prompted.
'The hand was sawn off, expertly.'
'With a chain saw?'
'That would be a logical assumption.' Was there a touch of irony in his voice? He held up the hand, stump first. 'But the markings indicate otherwise. Something rotary, certainly. But delicate.' He shrugged. 'My best guess would be a medical saw.'
Jack leaned in. The stench of formaldehyde and acetone was nauseating. 'We looking at a surgeon as the perp?'
'Possibly.'
'Well, that narrows it down to a couple hundred million.'
'Amusing.' Schiltz glanced up. 'Here's what I do know: This was done with a sure hand, no remorse in the cut, no hesitation whatsoever. Plus, the immersion in water has made the pruning permanent. He's betting we won't be able to get fingerprints to make an ID.'
'So-what? — the perp's done this sort of thing before?'
'Uh-huh.'
Jack held up the gold-and-platinum ring in its plastic evidence bag. 'I took this off the third finger. It belongs to Alli Carson.'
'Which doesn't speak to her state of health.' Seeing Jack blanch, he hastened to add, 'All it means is your perp has access to her.' Schiltz used a dental pick to scrape under and around the nails, one at a time. 'Look.' Holding aloft the implement so that the working end was directly in the light, he said, 'What do you see here?'
'Something pink,' Jack said.
'And shiny.' Schiltz put the end of the pick close to his eye. 'This is undoubtedly nail polish. Plus, the nails are newly cut, so my guess is that for whatever reason-'
'The perp cut this girl's nails and removed the polish,' Jack finished for him. He stood up. 'Alli Carson never wore polish; her nails were square-cut, like a boy's. This isn't her hand.'
'You may be sure, Jack, but I'm a forensic pathologist. I need proof before I say yea or nay.' He went to a sink, filled a pan with warm water. Immersing the hand in it, he gently loosened the skin, worked it off, starting at the wrist. The gray, amorphous jellyfish swam in the water. With the care of a lepidopterist working on a butterfly's wing, Schiltz unrolled the translucent material.
'Ami!' he called.
A moment later, the AME poked her head into the room. 'Yes, sir.'
'Got a fingerprint job for you.'
Ami nodded, took a place beside him.
'Left hand,' he said.
Ami put her left hand into the water. Schiltz rolled the skin over her hand like a glove. Ami air-dried the skin by holding her left hand aloft. Then he fingerprinted the human glove.
'You see,' he said, rolling each finger on the ink pad, 'wearing the skin smooths out the pruning.' He held up the fingerprint card, nodded to Ami, who removed the skin, took the card, and went away. 'We'll soon know whether or not this hand belongs to Alli Carson.'
He took the severed hand out of its warm-water bath, laid it back on the metal examining tray, studying it once again. 'Care to make a bet?' he said dryly.
'I know it's not hers,' Jack said.
Several moments later, Ami popped back into the room. 'No match in any system for the Jane Doe,' she said. 'One thing is certain, she isn't Alli Carson.'
Jack breathed a huge sigh of relief, dialed Nina's cell, told her the good news. Pocketing his cell, he tapped a forefinger against his lips. 'Alli's ring, the nails cut to Alli's length, the water pruning of the fingertips-clearly, someone wants us to believe this is her hand. Why play this grisly game? Why go to all the trouble?' Why had he taken her? What did Alli's abductor want? 'What sick mind has maimed a girl Alli's age just to play a trick on us?'
'A very sick mind, indeed, Jack.' Schiltz turned the hand over. 'He cut the hand off while the girl was still alive.'
RAIN MADE a stage set of the parking lot, beaded silver curtains slid down the beams of the arc lights. Jack walked through the glimmer of the near-deserted asphalt. After jerking open the car door, he slid in behind the wheel, fired the ignition. But he didn't pull out. The events of this morning overran him. His head pounded; every muscle in his body seemed to be screaming at once. Leaning over, he opened the glove box, shook out four ibuprofen, crunched down on them, wincing at the harsh, acidic taste.
He thought about the girl's hand. The abductor had immersed it in water so they wouldn't be able to ID her through fingerprints. But Egon had used it to prove that the hand didn't belong to Alli Carson. And yet the abductor had sawn the hand off while the girl was still alive? Why had he done that? Everything else that Jack had seen led him to believe that this man was methodical, not maniacal. What if he wanted them to know that Alli was still alive? He'd made certain of that by cutting off the hand of a living girl. But he hadn't cut Alli's hand off. Why not? Jack's thoughts chased each other like flashes of lightning. He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands.
Beyond the lot, out on the interstate, an unending Morse code of lights flashed across his face, strobed against his eyes, doubling his headache. Neon signs flashed pink and green like bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean's heart. A horn blared, carrying the diminishing sound behind it like a tail. The rhythmic thrash of the windshield wipers was like his father's admonishing finger. With a convulsive lunge of his hand, he turned off the ignition, watched the rain slalom down the glass.
He was powerless to stop his thoughts moving toward Emma. His longing to talk with his daughter, so that she could spread the balm of forgiveness over him, brought tears to his eyes. His hands shook.
