Forty-Two
Doctor Hove was standing by the far wall talking to her lead Forensics agent, Mike Brindle. They were both wearing white Tyvek coveralls. A stainless steel table occupied the center of the large room. The concrete floor was covered in sticky, coagulated blood. Not splashes and sprinkles, but thick, vampiric pools of it. A few small and delicate bloody handprints traced a short trajectory from the table to the ghostly pale, naked body of a brunette woman lying on her back just a few steps from the door. Her arms had been carefully placed by her side, her legs stretched out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Captain Blake murmured, bringing a hand to her mouth as she felt her stomach churn.
The woman’s lips had been stitched shut, and though her torso and legs were caked in blood, the black, thorn-like stitches to her lower body were clearly visible.
Doctor Hove approached them in silence and Hunter shot her a questioning look.
The doctor nodded in confirmation. ‘Judging by what we have in this room, I’d say it’s the same killer,’ she said in a hushed voice.
Hunter and Garcia did their best to avoid stepping into the pools of blood and approached the body on the floor. Captain Blake stayed by the door. Hunter crouched down and examined what he could of the woman without touching her. Garcia did the same but his eyes kept returning to her once attractive face, as if something was bothering him. A few seconds later he frowned at Hunter. ‘Jesus, she’s a carbon copy of Laura Mitchell. They could’ve been sisters.’
Hunter nodded. He’d noticed the uncanny resemblance from the door.
Captain Blake pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew exactly what that meant.
Hunter turned to Doctor Hove. ‘Is this how you found the body?’
‘No,’ Mike Brindle replied, stepping closer. ‘We photographed everything and then turned her over. Her body was facing down; right cheek against the floor, facing left towards the wall. Her left arm was extended as if she was reaching for something. Her position gave us the impression that she was probably crawling towards the door, but lacked the strength to get there.’
Hunter’s eyes wandered the room again, taking in more of the scene. ‘The handprints?’
‘They’re hers,’ Brindle confirmed. ‘The few bloody sneaker shoeprints you saw on the floor outside and on the steps going up haven’t been confirmed yet. But judging by the runaway smear pattern in some of them, I’d say they belong to the scared teenager who dialed 911 – anonymously, he left no name and no address.’ He paused and his stare returned to the woman on the floor. ‘Rigor mortis started not long ago, but the heat and humidity in this room could have delayed it for up to five hours, maybe a little more.’
‘So she definitely died today?’ the captain asked.
Brindle nodded.
Garcia’s attention went from the body to the large distribution of blood on the floor. ‘She’s got no wounds I can see other than her stitches. Where did all this blood come from?’
Doctor Hove and Mike Brindle exchanged an uneasy glance. ‘I’ll have proper confirmation with the autopsy,’ the doctor replied, ‘but right now, all this indicates some sort of internal hemorrhage.’
Captain Blake’s eyes widened.
‘All this blood . . .’ the doctor shook her head as if she was struggling to find the right words, ‘ . . . dripped out of her through the stitches.’
‘Holy shit.’ Garcia rubbed his face with his right hand.
‘She’s also got tiny abrasions on both of her hands and knees,’ Doctor Hove continued. ‘We think she came off that table and collapsed to the ground. Maybe because she was dizzy or in tremendous pain, but she was still alive. The abrasions were probably caused by the fall and her crawling towards the door. Her prints are on that table, so we concluded that she was left there by the killer, but there isn’t a speck of blood on it. She didn’t start bleeding until she was on the ground.’
‘And then there’s this,’ Brindle said, walking over to where Captain Blake was standing. ‘Excuse me, Captain.’
She frowned and took a step to her right.
Brindle pointed to the wall directly behind where the captain was standing. Only then did they see the set of small spray-painted black letters – IT’S INSIDE YOU.
Forty-Three
Captain Blake’s lips parted in disbelief. They were exactly the same words Hunter had found spray-painted on the ceiling in the butcher’s shop where Laura Mitchell’s body had been found. Her stare refocused onto the body on the floor for a moment before moving back to Doctor Hove.
‘OK, I thought what we had here was just suspicion and conjecture. I was obviously wrong. But if you knew this was the same killer, given that he placed a bomb inside his first victim that took the lives of two other people inside one of your autopsy rooms . . .’ she pointed to the letters on the wall, ‘ . . . and again he’s telling us he did the same here, what the hell are we doing in this room? Where’s the bomb squad? And why did you risk turning the body over?’
‘Because whatever it was the killer placed inside her this time,’ Hunter replied, gently rubbing between his eyebrows, ‘it’s already gone off inside her.’
‘Judging by where she bled from,’ the doctor added, ‘that’s exactly what we think. As we said, it all points to an internal hemorrhage, but not one we’ve ever seen before.’
‘What do you mean?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Internal hemorrhages usually occur from traumatic injuries, blood vessel rupture or certain specific diseases, carcinoma being one of them. But the blood accumulates inside the body, hence the term internal. And the amount is just a fraction of what you see here. This woman bled as if she had been mutilated. Whatever it was that caused it, it was inside her.’
No one said anything for a moment.
‘There was nothing else in this room other than what you can see,’ Brindle took over. ‘The body, those old shelves on the walls and that stainless steel table.’ He gestured towards it. ‘There are no chains, no ropes or any sort of restraints anywhere. A closer look at the victim’s wrists and ankles shows no abrasions or marks. She wasn’t tied down. She also couldn’t have been locked in here because there’s no lock on that door.’ He shook his head as he considered it. ‘The truth is: we can’t find anything that suggests why she wasn’t allowed to just walk out of here. So far there are no indications that anyone else was in here with her when she died. It looks like the killer simply dumped her on that table and left. And as we said, she wasn’t bleeding then. But the killer somehow knew she would never get out of this room alive.’
Hunter had already noticed that the table in the room had been raised higher off the ground than normal. ‘Does this look strange to anyone?’ He pointed to the wooden blocks under each of the four table legs.
Everyone frowned.
‘The first victim, Laura Mitchell,’ he continued, ‘was left on a stainless steel counter inside a butcher’s shop in East LA. That counter had also been raised higher off the ground by bricks. First I thought that maybe the old butcher there had been some sort of a giant, but no, I checked. He was five foot eight.’
‘So you think the killer did this deliberately?’ the captain asked. ‘Why?’