“The Phoenix House, I'm told. She belongs in a juvie facility, but there you go. I've got to put her somewhere, and her ID says she's an adult. Did you get a Polaroid of her?”
“Yeah. I'll show it around juvenile division. See if anyone knows her. I'll give a copy to Vice too.”
“I'll do the same on my end of things if you get me a copy.”
“Will do. Keep me posted. I want a short leash on that chick.” He raised his voice briefly as water pounded into a stainless steel sink. “I gotta go. Dr. Death is about to crack open our crispy critter.”
“Jesus, Sam, you're so sensitive.”
“Hey, I gotta cope. You know what I'm saying.”
“Yeah, I know. Just don't let the wrong people hear you doing it. Is the task force set up?”
“Yeah. As soon as we get the brass out of our hair, we'll be good to go.” He looked across the room to where Quinn stood in discussion with the ME and Hamill, the agent from the BCA, all of them in surgical gowns and booties. “So what's the story with you and the Quantico hotshot?”
There was the briefest of hesitations on the other end of the line. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? What's the deal? What's the story? What's the history?”
Another pause, just a heartbeat. “I knew him, that's all. I was working on the research side in Behavioral Sciences. The people in BSU and Investigative Support regularly cross paths. And he used to be a friend of Steven's—my ex.”
This tossed in at the end, as if he might believe it was an afterthought. Kovac filed it all away for future rumination. Used to be a friend of Steven's. There was more to that story, he thought as Liska came toward him from the crowd around the corpse, looking impatient and nauseated. He gave Kate his pager number and instructions to call, and hung up.
“They're ready to rock and roll,” Liska said, pulling a travel-size jar of Vicks VapoRub from the pocket of her boxy blazer. She stuck her nose over the rim and breathed deep.
“God, the smell!” she whispered as she turned and fell in step with him, heading back toward the table. “I've had floaters. I've had drunks in Dumpsters. I once had a guy left in the trunk of a Chrysler over the Fourth of July weekend. I never smelled anything like this.”
The stench was an entity, a presence. It was an invisible fist that forced its way into the mouths of all present, rolled over their tongues, and jammed at the backs of their throats. The room was cold, but not even the constant blast of clean, frigid air from the ventilation system or the cloying perfume of chemical air fresheners could kill the smell of roasted human flesh and organs.
“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.