twenty-five miles? She’d slept in the fields before. She’d stolen peaches, plucked grapes in the dark. She could do it again.
She devoured her sandwich, swept every last crumb into her mouth. No telling when she’d eat again. By the time she stepped out of the coffee bar, night had fallen and she could move through dark streets with little fear of being recognized. There was one other option. It was risky, but it would save her from a twenty-five-mile hike.
And Giorgio would do it for her. He would drive her to Florence.
She walked and walked, giving the busy Campo a wide berth, sticking to the side streets. By the time she reached Giorgio’s residence, her calves were aching, her feet sore from the uneven cobblestones. She paused in the cover of darkness, gazing at the window. Giorgio’s wife had died years ago, and father and son now shared the flat. The lights were on inside, but she saw no movement on the first floor.
She was not foolhardy enough to knock at the front door. Instead she circled around to the small garden in back, let herself in through the gate, and brushed past fragrant thyme and lavender to knock at the kitchen door.
No one answered.
She strained to hear if the TV was on, thinking that perhaps they couldn’t hear her, but she heard only the muted sounds of traffic from the street.
She tried the knob; the door swung open.
One look was all it took. One glimpse of blood, of splayed arms and ruined faces. Of Giorgio and Paolo, tangled together in a last embrace.
She backed away, hand clapped to her mouth, her vision blurred in a wash of tears.
Stumbling backward through lavender, she collided with the wooden gate. The jolt snapped her back to her senses.
She scrambled out of the garden, not bothering to latch the gate behind her, and fled down the street, her sandals slapping against the cobblestones.
She did not slow her pace until she reached the outskirts of Siena.
NINE
“Are we absolutely certain there
“But we do have two different blood types,” said Jane. “The amputated hand belonged to someone with O positive blood. Lori-Ann Tucker is A positive. So Dr. Isles was absolutely correct.”
There was a long silence in the conference room.
Dr. Zucker said softly, “This is getting very interesting.”
Jane looked across the table at him. Forensic psychologist Dr. Lawrence Zucker’s intent stare had always made her uncomfortable. He looked at her now as though she were the sole focus of his curiosity, and she could almost feel his gaze tunneling into her brain. They had worked together during the Surgeon investigation two and a half years ago, and Zucker knew just how haunted she’d been in the aftermath. He knew about her nightmares, her panic attacks. He’d seen the way she used to rub incessantly at the scars on her palms, as though to massage away the memories. Since then, the nightmares of Warren Hoyt had faded. But when Zucker looked at her this way, she felt exposed, because he knew just how vulnerable she’d once been. And she resented him for it.
She broke off her gaze and focused instead on the other two detectives, Barry Frost and Eve Kassovitz. Adding Kassovitz to the team had been a mistake. The woman’s very public barfing into the snowbank was now common knowledge in the unit, and Jane could have predicted the practical jokes that followed. The day after Christmas, a giant plastic bucket, labeled with Kassovitz’s name, had mysteriously appeared on the unit’s reception desk. The woman should have just laughed it off, or maybe gotten pissed about it. Instead she looked as beaten down as a clubbed seal, and she sat slumped in her chair, too demoralized to say much. No way was Kassovitz going to survive this boys’ club if she didn’t learn to punch back.
“So we have a killer who not only dismembers his victims,” said Zucker, “but he also transfers body parts between his crime scenes. Do you have a photo of the hand?”
“We have lots of photos,” said Jane. She passed the autopsy file to Zucker. “By its appearance, we’re pretty sure the hand is a female’s.”
The images were gruesome enough to turn anyone’s stomach, but Zucker’s face betrayed no shock, no disgust, as he flipped through them. Only keen curiosity. Or was that eagerness she saw in his eyes? Did he enjoy the view of atrocities visited on a young woman’s body?
He paused over the photo of the hand. “No nail polish, but the fingers definitely look manicured. Yes, I agree it looks like a woman’s.” He glanced at Jane, his pale eyes peering at her over wire-rim glasses. “What do you have back on these fingerprints?”
“The owner of that hand has no criminal record. No military service. Nothing in NCIC.”
“She’s not in any database?”
“Not her fingerprints, anyway.”
“And this hand isn’t medical waste? A hospital amputation, maybe?”
Frost said, “I checked with every medical center in the greater Boston area. In the past two weeks, there’ve been two hand amps, one at Mass Gen, another at Pilgrim Hospital. Both were the result of trauma. The first was a chain saw accident. The second was a dog attack. In both cases, the hands were so badly mangled they couldn’t be reattached. And the first case was a man’s.”
“This hand was not dug up out of hospital waste,” said Jane. “And it wasn’t mangled. It was sliced off with a very sharp, serrated blade. Also, it wasn’t done with any particular surgical skill. The tip of the radius was sheared off, with no apparent attempt at controlling blood loss. No tied-off vessels, no dissection of skin layers. Just a clean cut.”
“Do we have any missing persons it might match?”
“Not in Massachusetts,” said Frost. “We’re widening the net. Any white female. She can’t have gone missing too long ago, since the hand looks pretty fresh.”
“It could have been frozen,” said Marquette.
“No,” said Jane. “There’s no cellular damage under the microscope. That’s what Dr. Isles said. When you freeze tissue, the expansion of water ruptures cells, and she didn’t find that. The hand may have been refrigerated, or packed in ice water, like they do to transport harvested organs. But it wasn’t frozen. So we think the owner of that hand was probably killed no more than a few days ago.”
“If she was killed,” said Zucker.
They all stared at him. The terrible implication of his words made them all pause.
“You think she could still be
“Amputations in and of themselves aren’t fatal.”
“Oh, man,” said Frost. “Cut off her hand without killing her…”
Zucker flipped through the rest of the autopsy photos, pausing over each one with the concentration of a jeweler peering through his loupe. At last he set them down. “There are two possible reasons why a killer would cut up a body. The first is purely practical. He needs to dispose of it. These are killers who are self-aware and goal-directed. They understand the need to dispose of forensic evidence and hide their crimes.”
“Organized killers,” said Frost.
“If dismemberment is followed by the scattering or concealment of body parts, that would imply planning. A cognitive killer.”
“These parts weren’t in any way concealed,” said Jane. “They were left around the house, in places where he knew they’d be found.” She handed another stack of photos to Zucker. “Those are from the crime scene.”
He opened the folder and paused, staring at the first image. “This gets even more interesting,” he murmured.
