“ Do you mind my hovering?”
“ Truthfully, you're making me nervous, Doctor.”
“ Oh, I don't mean to. It's just that since 1 did the autopsy… Well, if I've missed anything, I'd like to be the first to know. I took the case out of Dr. Perkins' hands for… well, personal reasons.”
“ Personal reasons? Did you know the victim?”
“ No, no, no! You misunderstand. Dr. Perkins… well, he hasn't really been on the beam, so to speak. In fact, he walked out during the autopsy. So I… I took over, and given the kind of night we had… well, I did my best.”
She seemed to be hearing that phrase a lot around here.
“ I've been up all night, spent nine hours with Mrs. Hamner.”
She liked the fact he used the woman's name instead of calling her a body, corpse, cadaver, victim, subject or stiff. He seemed a sensitive man. “Nine hours is a lot of time.” He knew that she understood how grueling the hours spent over a murder victim, especially one so disfigured and dismembered, could be. Her eyes, the only visible feature left unmasked, met his again.
“ There was nothing easy about it, I can tell you,” he replied.
“ Let me have a look,” she said, snatching away the sheet that covered Mrs. Hamner's remains.
The sheet flew and curled away, sliding to the floor and beneath the table. She found that Mrs. Hamner had been reassembled with sutures across chest and abdomen and encircling the neck. The sutures and the cleaning could not hide the hideous original slashes to the woman's torso, three parallel but jagged rupture lines from breastbone to navel. The murder weapon was as crude as garden shears and as delicate as a surgeon's scalpel all at once, she instantly thought. This meant that it had more than one edge. She imagined a weapon that was double-edged, perhaps serrated, but how, then, the three perfectly formed zigzags at what appeared the same depth? Had the killer performed a kind of ritual pattern drawing across the skin, a New Age swastika?
“ The decapitation?” she asked.
“ After death.”
She nodded, saying, “Small comfort.”
Her eyes had at first avoided the ghastly, nauseating sight of the destroyed facial features. She examined them now, the wounds cleaned with an alcohol-based solution, the skin and puckering scars arid, barren of moist suppleness.
There were no eyes, only empty sockets, like all the other victims. It was surmised the cannibal thought the eyes a delicacy.
“ Initial blow to the head was not sufficient to kill?”
“ 'Fraid not; that would've been merciful. Just a skull fracture, caused by a blunt instrument, the shape confirming our suspicion of a hammer.”
“ Round-headed?”
“ Ball peen, yes. But she was alive when he tore into her torso.”
“ Splayed her open like she was a marlin,” she muttered, feeling sick at heart.
“ Are you all right, Doctor?”
She sighed heavily, pushing back the threatening nausea. “Yes, I'm all right.”
Archer loosened his collar below the gown. “My first Claw victim put me under one hell of a strain, let me tell you. I've seen all six, either as autopsiest or assisting. After that first one, I thought of running out of here, the way Perkins did, but now-”
“ Do you mean Perkins quit?”
“ It appears so, yes.”
“ Then you'll be handling the evidence he gathered at the scene?”
He shrugged. “Me, the tech team here, yes, unless Dr. Darius returns and wants to handle it himself, which is fine with me, but…” His voice trailed off. “Sorry, I'm boring you, I'm sure… talking too much.”
She sensed that loyalty to Darius had made him stop short of another word. “It must've been wonderful to train under a man like Luther Darius.”
“ None like him, and yes, it has been.”
She turned back to the work at hand, her own hands going gently to the wounds and the patchwork of stitches that made Mrs. Hamner look like a Frankenstein monster. In the empty eye sockets lived a deep, disturbing mystery.
“ I would've liked to see her before you put her back together and stitched her up,” she said.
“ I… I had no idea you were going to be here. If I had-”
“ Show me,” she said, “at what areas you found teeth marks.”
“ Several areas, actually, but the best were lifted from the throat, at the voice box. Here.” He pointed with a penlight.
She stared at the animal markings.
“ Where else?”
He pointed to marks on the thighs, rolled the body and pointed to tears in the buttocks. “Only partials lifted here; didn't photograph under the electron microscope too well. Computer enhancement helped little.”
She nodded. The bite marks were discolored abrasions, looking like bruises, easily seen while the blood remained in the body, but not quite so easily seen now, since samples had been carved away for use under the electron scope.
“ The bites,” she began. “Do they come before or after death?”
“ Both. Some showed vital color reaction, others no.”
“ Anything else I should know?”
“ He may've eaten the liver during the attack; chewed fragments were left behind, and he carried the heart and kidney off with him. Police believe he was surprised, left hurriedly.”
“ But still left nothing of himself behind?”
“ Nothing but the teeth imprints. He's cunning.”
“ Anything else?”
“ He may've been shocked to learn she had only one kidney, one of the items he made off with, we theorize.”
“ Only one kidney?”
“ Old suture wounds and her medical history reveal she'd donated her other one to a better cause, donor for her sister.”
“ Did Perkins diagram the crime scene? Where were the disemboweled organs and the head in relation to the body?”
“ Perkins didn't do much of anything, I'm afraid.”
“ That's a crime.”
“ Ought to be punishable, but-”
“ What did his report say about it?”
“ Intestines yanked out, coiled alongside the corpse rather neatly. No, no, that was an earlier victim. Perkins said the intestines were looped about the body and limbs.”
“ Looped.”
“ You know, like rope.”
“ Around the waist, legs, neck?”
“ Head was severed, remember?” A note of annoyance had filtered into his voice. He looked dead tired, up all night.
“ Bites taken out of the intestines again?”
“ Several.”
“ So what have you on the murder weapon?”
“ The twenty-four-thousand-dollar question?”
“ Come on, you've got to have made some conclusions.”
He nodded, stepped away from the body, and she pursued. “I believe it is some sort of serrated scissors or tool. Handheld, honed razor-sharp, to be sure.”
“ A common pair of scissors?”
“ Or something damned close, maybe garden-sized?”
