"You earned the right to be here," the pathologist said, helping her slip the skin from her hand.
Gillian had felt Mary's eyes on her the entire time. Now she looked up to see that her sister appeared impressed by her coolness.
The ME's examination continued. "Broken forearm, two broken ankles."
"Postmortem?" Mary asked.
"Most likely. The injuries are consistent with a body that's been found in water. The strong current would have banged it against rocks and outcroppings. I'd expect broken bones and lacerations such as these."
"Anything that looks like an inflicted wound?" The question came from Anthony.
"No."
With a syringe, Dr. Phillips drew blood by puncturing the heart; then he filled several tubes.
Now it was time for the internal exam.
Gillian braced herself for the initial cut.
He made a long, deep, Y-shaped incision, beginning at the shoulders and ending at the pubic bone. With shears, he snipped through the rib cartilage and removed the rib cage. More blood was collected for a microorganism culture.
The dissecting continued inside the neck. He removed the trachea and esophagus. "There's your probable cause of death," Dr. Phillips said, placing them in a stainless steel tray. Asphyxiation." With a scalpel, he poked around at the trachea, separating some small pieces of foreign matter. "Regurgitated food particles." He moved to the head, examining the eyelids. "Petechial hemorrhaging. A classic sign of asphyxiation."
"She choked on her own vomit?" Mary asked.
Using his foot, the doctor clicked off the tape recorder. "It would appear so."
He moved back to the face, touching the skin damage he'd pointed out earlier. "I would guess that she was bound and gagged, her mouth sealed with tape. During that time, she got sick and threw up. No place for the vomit to go except, of course, out the nose. The nostrils immediately became plugged, and that was that. Asphyxiation. Since the exam isn't finished, this information is off the record, and nothing is a hundred percent until I've sewn up the body, gone over the slides, and gotten the reports back from the labs."
He turned the recorder back on, then continued with the dissection, proceeding to the carotid artery and jugular veins. Half an hour later, he'd moved down to the abdomen.
"Sulfhemoglobin," Phillips noted, pointing to the green discoloration in the abdominal cavity.
A heavy, cloying, familiar odor filled the room, a smell that was as unforgettable as it was indescribable. Maybe if you put a combination of rancid gym shorts, dirty diapers, and rotten food outside in a hot, sealed car for a couple of days, then you might come close to recreating the stench. One thing for sure, it was a smell nobody ever forgot.
"What's this?"
From the vaginal cavity, Phillips pulled out a small sandwich bag with a plastic zipper. He unzipped the bag. Using a pair of tweezers, he extracted an object and deposited it on a tray. Everybody leaned closer. On the small stainless steel tray was a single red rose petal.
"That's a first for me," Phillips said.
"Weird as hell," said one of the police officers.
The other one started humming the song "Red Roses for a Blue Lady" under his breath.
Everybody cracked up.
"News of this finding can't be released to the public." Mary glanced around the table. "Having exclusive knowledge of this kind of evidence can be used in our favor."
There was a unanimous nodding of heads and verbal agreement.
"I've seen what I need to see," Anthony said. He turned and left the room. Gillian thanked Dr. Phillips; then the sisters followed Anthony out the door. In the changing area, they removed their masks, and stripped out of their scrubs, dropping them into the biohazard container.
Anthony wiped his arm across his face. "That smell will be in my sinuses for a week."
"Should have used Vicks," Mary said.
"You know how I hate that stuff."
They left the building, all three of them taking deep, cleansing breaths.
Anthony pulled out his mobile phone. "We are all pretty much in agreement that this is the same guy, right?"
"If it is, then he probably didn't intend to kill her— at least not yet," Mary said. "She was abducted. Her mouth was taped, her wrists tied. And like Phillips said, she got sick and choked to death."
"Pretty clear cut," Anthony added.
"I don't get the rose petal," Gillian said. "Is it a signature?"
"Could be a clue he left for us," Mary said. "Subconsciously he may even want to get caught before he kills someone else. And it definitely ties in with the grafting performed on the previous victim."
"He could be toying with us." Anthony checked his phone for messages. "I'm calling Wakefield. He needs to schedule a meeting—within a few hours, if possible." He talked while entering the number. "Charlotte Henning died by accident, so everybody needs to be on high alert. I'm afraid this guy could be extremely agitated and already trolling for a replacement."
Chapter 13
In the City Hall building Mary, Anthony, and Gillian made a beeline for the cafe on the first floor, a place called Larry's Canteen. There they were able to grab snack food and beverages from the vending machines—enough to get them through the next couple of hours.
The meeting room was on the same floor. When they arrived, Mary was relieved to see that Wakefield had been able to round up several detectives from the Minneapolis Police Department, officers from the Hennepin County Sheriffs office, plus agents from the BCA. Also present was the press liaison—quite likely the most important person in the room at the moment. Ben Collins was also there, lounging in a chair, feet crossed at the ankle, looking sheepish. Elliot hurried in at the last minute, out of breath and carrying a sack lunch.
It was good to see such diversification. In the old days, lack of organization, competition, and jealousy, made for little exchange of information among bureaus. Over the last several years there had been a deliberate movement toward sharing on all levels, with the various departments agreeing that they were after the same thing: capturing the criminal.
Chairs were lined up in rows schoolroom fashion.
People grabbed and rearranged them until they were U-shaped.
"I want to thank all of you for getting here on such short notice," Wakefield said, perching on the corner of a full-size desk at the front of the room. "We don't have an official autopsy report on the latest victim— who's turned out to be the missing Canary Falls girl— but we do have information that could be crucial to the safety of our citizens. I also have lab results to pass along, but we'll get to those later. Right now I'll let Agents Spence and Cantrell explain their immediate concerns."
Remaining seated, Anthony detailed what had occurred during the autopsy. His voice was low but clear.
"Is it your belief that the same person committed all of the homicides?" one of the female detectives asked.
"We can't say about the badly decomposed body," Anthony related, "but the last three were killed by the same person."
"I don't get it. What about the eyes? If it's the same person, why didn't he remove the eyes? Why didn't he stick branches in her fingers?"
"Because the girl died too soon," Mary explained. "She never had a chance to fail or disappoint him. There was no reason for him to remove her eyes or try to graft her, because she was still an enigma to him."
"I've been thinking about that eye deal." Without removing his hands from his sweatshirt pockets, Ben wiggled higher in his seat. He seemed to have shaken off his earlier no-show shame. "It's like Santa Lucia."
"Lucia?" Wakefield asked, looking both annoyed and baffled.
"Yeah, you know. The saint who gouged out her own eyes."
"Not familiar with that story." Wakefield glanced at Gillian, the big reader.
"This guy liked her—a lot, especially her eyes," Ben went on. "But she didn't want anything to do with him, so she gouged them out and sent them to him. Haven't you seen that picture of her with her eyes on a plate? At first you think it's just a couple of grapes she's offering somebody, but then, when you look closer, you see they're eyeballs."
People laughed, mostly at the inappropriateness of Ben's contribution.
"Isn't Lucia a Swedish celebration?" Mary asked, willing to follow Ben down his path. "I wonder if that in some way might tie in with the blond hair. Did all the victims have similar eye color?"
Several people flipped through paperwork and reports. "All blue."
"Ben may be on to something," Anthony said. "At this point I'm not sure what, but it's good to throw all ideas out there. You never know where it might lead or what kind of connection might later be drawn."
Wakefield checked his watch. "Okay, let's move on. What about the method in which the eyes were removed? We have one done with almost surgical precision, another torn out How do you find a correlation there?"
"The removal itself is the correlation," Mary said. "How they were removed directly reflects the killer's emotional state at the time. With one he was cool and careful. With the other, angry and sloppy."
"What about the surgical precision?" Wakefield asked. "Your profile says nothing about the guy possibly being a surgeon."
"Nothing points in that direction. Although remember that a profile is only an educated guess. He's obviously proficient with a blade, has a fondness for roses, and could even be into propagation."
"We've got Records running the profile right now, matching it to people on our extended suspect list. We should have it narrowed down in a few days. As soon as that happens, I'll get copies to everybody."
"The city and surrounding areas need to be on high alert," Anthony said. "I don't want people to panic, but this is a grave situation. He could strike again at any moment."
"The department's scheduled a press conference in two hours," Wakefield said. He got to his feet and passed out lab results. "Here's what we've got so far. They found the same navy fiber on both April Ellison and Bambi Scott.
"The dress worn by the Ellison girl is a vintage 1960s number," he added. "We figure it's something the guy had around the house—maybe belonged to his mother, aunt, grandmother—or he picked it up in one of those little shops around town. We have people looking into that prospect, but so far no results. They've hit the vintage shops; now they're working on charity places like Goodwill."
Wakefield continued. "This guy just isn't leaving much in the way of clues. And I'll tell you something—Walgreen's can't keep dark hair color on the shelves. Light-haired women all over the place are dyeing their hair." He looked around the room. "Anybody got anything else?"
Gillian opened her folder. "Unfortunately, the BCA hasn't made much progress. We've reviewed the surveillance tapes from the mall hundreds of times, but can't pull anything together. We've had our experts enhance the visuals, coming up with several faces we've finally matched to names. None of them have fit the profile, and all of them look clean. Right now, we're hoping for a tip from the public."
The group broke up, with Gillian and Ben heading back to St. Paul to report the most recent findings to the BCA. Elliot remained at City Hall. The mayor wanted to speak with him and Wakefield before the press conference. Mary and Anthony exited the building through the Fifth Street doors, moving toward the Third Avenue ramp where Anthony had parked his car.
"I've got to get something substantial to eat, how about you?" Anthony asked.
"There used to be a little pub up two streets."
They headed in that direction.
It was still there. People were getting off work, and the pub was dark, crowded, and intimate. The hostess put them at a small, highly varnished table near the front window.
They ordered sandwich baskets and iced tea.
The waitress brought their drinks, placing both glasses on small square napkins. Mary smiled at her and nodded her thanks.
"How's the arm?" Anthony asked.
"Almost normal. The anti-inflammatories seem to be working."
Mary was dressed in a dark blue suit Anthony recognized, along with a white top. Her skin was almost flawless, her mouth, even without its present touch of color, was perfectly shaped. She was lean and tall. He liked that.
She squeezed lemon into her drink. Evening light filtered in, illuminating one side of her face. Green eyes. That always surprised him about her; under most conditions her eyes looked brown.
"As one trained in the art of acute observation, I can't help but notice a certain amount of tension whenever your sister's around," Anthony said.
She gave him a pained, I'd-rather-not-talk-about-it look. "We have some unresolved issues I'm trying to put aside so I can remain focused on this case." Her voice was dismissive.
In the time they'd been partners, he couldn't recall her ever volunteering information about herself. Anything he'd picked up had been sifted through casual conversation. But then, he'd never told her much about himself either.