Lena counted the breaks where the body had been severed. Three in each leg, then cuts above the wrists, elbows, and shoulder sockets. After keying in on the decapitation wound, her eyes rose to the victim’s face. Jane Doe No. 99 had been beaten, her face disfigured. Her soft brown eyes had been spared, but not much else. She was hard to look at, yet she seemed so vulnerable that it was difficult for Lena to turn away.
“Did you measure her?”
“Five-foot-seven,” Madina said. “A hundred and twenty-two pounds. She’s had a boob job and her belly button is pierced. The ring’s over there on the table. I’m gonna guess that if we reconstructed her nose and cheekbones, she’d be beautiful. All the way gorgeous. And that whoever did this to her is very strong.”
Lena stepped aside as Madina selected a scalpel and began opening the woman’s chest. She remembered the first time she attended an autopsy. It had been in this room, and she found the process so difficult that she spent most of the time counting ceiling tiles. There were 729 before the lighting fixtures were changed last year. After that, the count dropped to 715.
Madina gave her a look, laying out the victim’s lungs in an extra-large plastic container.
“She grew up in the city,” he said. “Jane Doe’s not a country girl.”
“How can you tell?”
“The black spots on her lungs. Look at these carbon deposits. They’re not from cigarettes. They’re from air pollution. Thirty years ago, only a coal miner’s lungs would’ve looked like this.”
Lena examined the tissue. Jane Doe’s lungs were peppered with dark gray spots that had the look and apparent texture of cinders.
“But she’s young.”
The pathologist laughed. “She’s been breathing every day for twenty years, Lena. Twenty years without a break. Why do you think so many kids have asthma? It’s not like it’s a mystery. Just follow the freeways.”
Madina moved back to the body. Lena watched him complete the operation, then helped as he rolled Jane Doe’s hands with ink and made a copy of her palm and fingerprints. Oddly enough, Lena thought that she could smell the clean scent of the woman’s perfume somehow rising above the stench of the room. But the fragrance seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. When they were finished-and the house photographer made his final pass-the body was no longer whole. No longer the sum of its parts. No longer a pretty girl with her entire life ahead of her. As Lena gazed at the victim’s remains, she couldn’t help but think of the murderer.
He had committed the ultimate violation and shown no mercy.
“What about time of death?” she asked.
Madina shrugged off the question, then jotted something down on his clipboard. “Yesterday,” he said. “Right now that’s as close as I can get. But we’ve got a problem, Lena.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“No, I mean we’ve got a real problem. This wasn’t a sex crime. And this wasn’t done by some slime bag living on the streets.”
“What are you saying?”
Madina didn’t answer her. Instead, he started piecing the body back together until the breaks were almost invisible and Jane Doe looked whole again.
“Let’s start with the cause of death,” he said. “There’s a laceration here on her neck. It’s not just in any spot. The cut was made in exactly the right spot.”
Lena moved in for a closer look. “The right spot for what?”
“He didn’t slice open the jugular vein. He went for the carotid artery. And he knew exactly where to find it.”
“What’s the significance?”
“You tell me.”
“Arteries move blood away from the heart,” she said. “Veins carry it back.”
“Exactly. The man you’re looking for cut the carotid artery because he wanted to move blood away from the heart. He wanted to drain the blood out of her body. You see the ligature marks around her legs and ankles. He hung her upside down and kept her alive, Lena. He kept her heart beating until she bled out. That’s why I’m saying we’ve got a real problem.”
Lena turned to the worktable and eyed Jane Doe’s organs laid out in those oversized plastic containers. In every other autopsy she had attended the internal organs were rich in color. Jane Doe’s organs were a pale brown. It wasn’t time that had changed the color. It was the lack of blood.
“You see it, don’t you?” Madina said in an urgent voice. “Look at her liver. It should be a deep purple.”
Lena glanced at the container, then turned back to the body. The killer bled her out while she was alive. She tried not to picture the moment, but the horror was sharp enough to cut through. This was a special kind of madness. A new brand drawn from the other side of the road.
“What can you tell me about who did this?” she said.
“I can tell you a lot. I can tell you almost everything you need to know except for his name and address.”
She met his eyes, steady and even.
“Then you definitely think we’re looking for a male.”
“No question about it,” he said, pointing to the ligature marks. “And he’s strong. He was able to lift her by her ankles.”
“What else?”
Madina pulled away his face mask. “He’s a surgeon, Lena.”
A moment passed-deep, and long, and rising out of the darkness. When Madina finally spoke again, his voice was tainted with bitterness and a mix of fear and disappointment. The killer was one of his own. Someone who attended medical school and took the Hippocratic oath.
“He’s a skilled surgeon,” Madina said.
Lena remained quiet, watching the pathologist pull Jane Doe’s body apart again as if the victim had become a mannequin.
“It’s not easy cutting up a body, Lena. A lot of people try. More than you’d think. And most of them don’t have a clue. They leave evidence behind. Hack marks. Saw marks. Ragged edges from the knife. Rips and tears that anyone could spot from a mile away.”
Lena remembered her first impression of the body as she entered the operating room. Jane Doe’s arms and legs fit together so well, she thought the pathologist had brought out the wrong corpse.
Madina pointed to the cut above the victim’s left wrist, then the elbow. “This was done by someone who cared about what it looked like when he was finished. Only a surgeon would care about that because only a surgeon would be thinking about the scar.”
“But she ended up in the trash. No one was supposed to find her. No one was supposed to see.”
“That’s irrelevant. The location for each cut is made exactly where it requires the least effort. He’s a professional. There aren’t any hesitation marks. See how straight they are. How clean. These are incisions, Lena. Incisions made by a skilled surgeon.”
“So, what you’re saying is that where she ended up doesn’t matter. He wasn’t thinking about it when he dismembered the body.”
“Exactly. The two acts are unrelated. When he severed her hand away from the wrist, he was thinking about the incision and possible scar. He was keeping it clean and neat. It’s in a surgeon’s nature. His DNA. It’s instinctual. He wouldn’t know any other way.”
“Because of his training,” she said. “His experience. He’s done amputations before.”
“So many that I can’t believe he didn’t spend time overseas. Iraq or Afghanistan. You don’t get this good without practice. And this guy’s had a lot of practice.”
Lena took a step closer, gazing at the victim. The evidence was overwhelming. Jane Doe’s body had been drained of blood and dismembered by someone who knew how to do it, and for whatever reason, had done it many times before. As she thought it over, a chill moved up her spine. Jane Doe’s murder was performed by someone who liked it. Someone with a medical degree who cared about the quality of his work. .
6
Lena ordered an extra-large cup of Colombian, spotted an empty table by the far window, and cut across the room. Digging her laptop out of her briefcase, she found an outlet under the table, hit the power switch, and waited for the computer to boot up.