D’Agosta felt himself go rigid. What was this? He hated needles.
Pizzetti bent over the head. The cranium was already open, the brain removed. Wasn’t it over? What the hell was she doing?
As he watched, she reached down, opened the corpse’s eye with her thumb, and inserted the needle.
D’Agosta should have looked away quicker, but he didn’t, and the sight of the needle sliding into that bright blue staring eye tightened his stomach in the most unpleasant way. Usually they took samples of ocular fluid for toxicology tests at the beginning of the autopsy—not at the end.
D’Agosta pretended to cough into his mask, still looking down and away.
“We’re almost done, Lieutenant,” said Pizzetti. “We just needed one more tox sample. Didn’t get enough the first time.”
“Right. Fine. No problem.”
She ejected the needle into a medical waste bag and handed the syringe, filled with a yellowish orange fluid, to her assistant. Then she stepped back and glanced around the room. She peeled off her fouled gloves, tossed them into the red-bag waste, pulled down her mask, and unhooked her headset. Her assistant handed her a clipboard.
She was tense. D’Agosta’s heart softened for her: young, a new resident, probably her first high-profile case. Worried about making a mistake. But from what he could see spread out in front of him, she’d done a fine piece of work.
She began the briefing with the usual litany: height, weight, age, cause of death, distinguishing marks, old scars, health, morbidities, pathologies. Her voice was pleasant although tight. The latents guy was taking notes. D’Agosta preferred to listen and retain by memory; note taking often caused him to miss things.
“Only one wound contributed to death: the one to the throat,” she said. “No tissue under the fingernails. Prelim tox tests all negative. No sign of struggle.”
She went on with a meticulous description of the depth, angle, and anatomy of the single stab wound. This was an organized, intelligent killer, D’Agosta thought, as he heard how efficient the fatal wound had been in exsanguinating the body, silencing the victim immediately and causing her to bleed out very quickly, all with one thrust with a razor-sharp, double-bladed knife about four inches long.
“Death,” she concluded, “occurred within thirty seconds. All the other cuts were made postmortem.”
A pause.
“The body was dismembered using a Stryker saw, perhaps one very much like the one beside me.” She pointed to a saw mounted on a rack next to the body. “The Stryker has a wedge-shaped blade that moves back and forth at high speed, driven by compressed air. It is specifically designed to cut through bone but to stop instantly when encountering soft tissue. It is also designed not to cause any spraying of bone or fluids as it cuts. The perpetrator’s use of it appears to be expert. Unusually expert.” She paused again.
D’Agosta cleared his throat. The bolus in his stomach hadn’t gone away, but at least it wasn’t threatening to erupt. “So the perp might be an M.E. or orthopedic surgeon?” he asked.
A long silence. “It’s not my place to speculate.”
“I just want an off-the-cuff opinion, Doctor. Not a scientific conclusion. I won’t hold you to it. How about it?” He tried to speak gently, so she wouldn’t feel threatened.
Another hesitation. D’Agosta started to get a clearer idea of why she was so tense: she might be wondering if the murderer was a colleague. “It seems to me the person who did this had professional training.” It came out in a rush.
“Thank you.”
“The perpetrator also used surgical tools to cut the flesh down to the bone—the precision is remarkable—retractors to draw away the flesh—we documented the marks—and, as I said, used the Stryker to cut the bone. All the cuts were done very precisely, with no slips, no mistakes, much as a surgeon would in an amputation. Except, of course, the vessels weren’t tied off or cauterized.”
She cleared her throat. “The body was dismembered symmetrically: one cut three inches below the knee, one three inches above, one two inches above the elbow and another two inches below. And then the ears, nose, lips, chin, and tongue were removed. All with surgical precision.”
She indicated the body parts, laid out on the second gurney positioned next to the corpse. The ears, nose, lips, and other small bits and pieces had been washed and looked like waxwork fakes, or parts from a clown kit.
D’Agosta felt the knot in his stomach tighten, a burning rise in his throat. Christ, even that glass of mineral water had been a mistake.
“And then there was this.” Pizzetti turned and indicated an eight-by-ten print tacked to a corkboard, along with many others taken at the crime scene. D’Agosta had already seen this at the scene, but still he braced himself.
Written on the stomach of the victim was a message traced in blood. It read:
Proud of me?
D’Agosta looked at the guy from latents. What was his name? It was now his turn, and D’Agosta could tell from the gleam in his eye that he had something to say.
“Yeah, ah, Mr.—”
“Kugelmeyer,” came the quick, eager response. “Thank you. Well. We got practically a full series off the body. Right and left thumb, right and left index, right ring, some partial palms. And we got two beauties right from that message there, in the victim’s blood, no less, written with the left index finger.”
“Very good,” said D’Agosta. This was more than good. The killer had been shockingly careless, allowing himself to be recorded by half a dozen security cameras, leaving his prints all over the crime scene. On the other hand, the crime-scene unit hadn’t been able to recover much from the scene itself: no saliva, semen, sweat, no blood or other bodily fluids from the perp. Naturally they had a lot of hair and fiber—it was a hotel room—but nothing that looked promising. No bite marks on the body, no scratches, nothing yet that would yield the killer’s DNA. They had swabbed many of the latents, however, hoping to pick up some stray DNA, and they were confident the lab would succeed in this.
Pizzetti went on. “There was no sign of sexual activity, penetration, sexual violence, or molestation. The victim had just taken a shower, which made recovery of potential evidence from the body easier.”
D’Agosta was about to ask a question when he heard, behind him, a familiar voice.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Lieutenant D’Agosta himself. How are you, Vinnie?”
D’Agosta turned to see the hugely imposing figure of Dr. Matilda Ziewicz herself, chief medical examiner for New York City. She stood there like a linebacker, a cynical smile on her red-lipsticked mouth, her bouffant blond hair covered by an oversize cap, her specially sized smock bulging. She was brilliant, imposing, physically repellent, sarcastic, feared by all, and extremely effective. New York had never had a more competent chief M.E.
Dr. Pizzetti tensed up even more.
Ziewicz flapped a hand. “Carry on, carry on, don’t mind me.”
It was impossible not to mind her, but Pizzetti made an effort, resuming her rundown of all the preliminary results, relevant or not. Ziewicz listened with great attention and then, as Pizzetti continued, clasped her hands behind her back and made an excruciatingly slow turn around the two gurneys, the one holding the body and the other all the parts, examining them with redly pursed lips.
After several minutes, she issued a low hmmmm. And then another, with a nod, a grunt, a mumble.
Pizzetti fell silent.
Ziewicz straightened up, turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, do you recall, these many years ago, the museum murders?”
“How could I forget?” It was the first time he had encountered the formidable woman, back in the days before she’d been appointed chief M.E.