Anatomy

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Detective Nicole Usher gulped despite having every intention
not to gulp. You didn’t get your gold badge without seeing some things. Gross
things. Horrible things. Things no one should ever have to see.

Yet the body that lay before her, before them all, was just
wrong
.
It wasn’t so much that the killer had dissected the woman, flaying open her
chest and abdomen. Or that he had carefully teased ligament away from bone. The
thing that made her force back bile was the series of little labels stuck into
the vital organs.

Liver. Kidneys. Ovaries… Each word written in the victim’s
own blood.

That
was what made her gulp again and look away.

Around her, the crime scene was barely contained chaos, with
every acronym in the book accounted for. EMTs, CSIs, MEs, FDs, PDs. Given that
this was the serial killer’s sixth victim, when the call came over that another
body had been found, all hands, whether they were needed or not, came on deck.

Nicole glanced to her partner, Ruben Torres, the lead
detective on the case. All answered to him, which was what he wanted. What he
had wanted for a long time. Their city was large enough to have its fair share
of murders, but small enough that they didn’t have a Major Crimes division.
Instead, the department had one detective that they turned to for their most
difficult cases, the Captain’s go-to detective.

For decades, that had been Hatachi Nogamori. But after a
long-overdue retirement, the door was thrown wide open, and Ruben had been the
first to charge through. To Nicole’s eye, he had the skills, knowledge, and
ambition to fill Hatachi’s shoes.

Now, though, with his jaw muscles rippling, Nicole wasn’t so
sure that Ruben was all too enthused that he had stepped up to the plate. She
knew the disgust on his face wasn’t from the gore. Even though the sun was
going down, the mid-summer heat rose from the alley’s pavement, bringing with
it a smell—so strong that you could taste it—of a poorly ventilated butcher’s
shop, which someone had tried to clean up with formaldehyde.

The heady aroma turned Nicole’s stomach, but she was pretty
sure it didn’t bother Ruben. He’d seen a tour in Iraq before the Green Zone was
established. Her partner didn’t ever talk about his time in the Middle East,
even to her, which pretty much convinced Nicole of exactly how grueling the
tour must have been.

A flash of light cut through the dusky night.

Nicole blinked several times as the CSI photographer stepped
around her and took another shot.

Ruben, too, seemed startled out of his thoughts, and
grumbled, “Just make sure these pictures aren’t leaked to the press.”

The older photographer frowned, setting the heavy camera
down against his potbelly. “We’re all here to do a
professional
job.”

Ruben bristled at the CSI’s tone. She knew her partner’s
frustration. Those leaked pictures had revealed the one detail of the crime
that they had been holding back…the organ labels. Now every crackpot in the
city was claiming credit for the murders. It had taking days, if not weeks, to
disprove their statements, sucking precious time and resources away from
finding the real killer.

Before Ruben could counter the older man’s statement, Nicole
pointed to the roof of an adjacent building. “Speaking of the press…”

An especially intrepid cameraman and news anchor were
peeking their heads over the roof.

“Damn it!” Ruben barked, then turned on his heel toward a
group of uniformed policemen. “If you are going to gawk, at least secure the
perimeter!”

The cluster of blue uniforms scattered in the wake of
Ruben’s anger. Which was so unlike her partner. Ruben was usually the good cop,
negotiating the politics of the detective’s bullpen like a fish in clear water.
Most of the men he’d just chastised were poker buddies.

Nicole stifled the instinct to lay a hand on his arm in
comfort. While their relationship was no secret, she knew that the boys’ club
gathered here would see her gesture as a sign of weakness. And with all of the
media attention? She couldn’t risk a random cellphone snapshot of their
intimacy.

This investigation had gone from a local police matter to a
statewide manhunt to, now, a national
cause
celebre
. And the
longer the investigation stretched out, the more intense the media coverage
became. Which wasn’t making any of this easier. It was a little hard to keep
your head in the game when Nancy Grace was calling you an incompetent
ham-fisted Fred Flintstone of detectives.

Nicole waved a fly away from her face. It persisted, landing
momentarily on her shoulder. She tried not to think of what its tiny feet left
behind on her blouse. The grit of the crime scene crept under her clothes,
mixing with the sweat streaking down her back. There weren’t enough showers in
the world to wash the desperation from her skin.

Ruben turned his attention from the roof to the medical
examiner kneeling by the body. “Time of death?”

The ME chewed at the butt of a cold cigar and read from one
of the labels. “Specimen collected at 9:52pm Central Standard Time.”

Her partner’s jaw muscles worked overtime, yet he somehow
modulated his tone so as not to sound as exasperated as he clearly was. “That
was her
capture
time. I need time of
death
.”

Shoving the cigar butt over to the corner of his mouth, the
ME spit onto the pavement. Not exactly hygienic or conducive to a proper crime
scene, but the ME was the oldest of the good ole boys. Dr. McGregor did as Dr.
McGregor saw fit, and you’d best like it.

“I really don’t know why they haul my ass out here to the
body,” McGregor grumbled. “When have I, or any ME ever in the history of crime
scene investigations, been able to tell you anything but… ‘I’ll have to see
once I get the body on the table?’”

“Anything you could tell us about the time or cause of death
could be a help,” Nicole answered, as Ruben’s lips pressed down into a firm
line. They both knew that the CSIs wouldn’t find any forensic clues. This
killer was far too sophisticated to make a clumsy error. Their only hope to
catch the killer was to jump on any lead they could get, such as time of death,
and hope it opened up a new avenue of investigation.

The ME scanned the crowd, then nodded to an EMT as she
gathered up her gear. “You.” Nicole had met the young EMT before. She had an
androgynous name. Jaime, maybe? She had been one of the first responders at the
crime scene.

“Me?” the EMT squeaked out. Her eyes darted around her,
obviously hoping that McGregor was talking to someone else.

“Yes, you,” he said, waving her over. Reluctantly, Jaime
came over. “Now could you please tell these fine detectives when and how this
victim died?”

The EMT’s eyes flickered to Nicole, then Ruben, then the ME,
then even to the photographer. She found no solace from any of them. “I
wouldn’t know.”

McGregor didn’t let it go. “Shocking,” he mocked. “Why don’t
you just guess? Apparently Detective Torres wants something, anything, Accurate
or not.”

“We get the point, Dr. McGregor,” Nicole said, trying to get
the poor EMT out from under everyone’s glare and close this conversation before
Ruben said something he would regret. Hell, even she was getting to the point
of wanting to test if McGregor could take it as well as he dished it out.

“No,” the ME said. “No, I don’t think you do.” He turned
back to the young woman. “Well? No theories? Postulations? Informed guesses?”

Surprisingly, the EMT’s shoulders squared and she kneeled
next to the body. “If this killing holds up to the others, she was lured to a
remote location, injected with a cocktail of paralytics, then…dissected.” The
woman gulped. Nicole knew how the EMT felt as the she continued. “Cause of
death will most likely prove to be a combination of severe shock and blood
loss. However, The Professor has gotten better and better at keeping his
victims alive during the procedure, so her time of death could be hours after
her capture.”

McGregor grunted in the EMT’s general direction. “See? You
don’t need me out here.”

With a groan, McGregor rose and dusted off his cover-up.
Again, not very crime scene-friendly.

“So?” a voice asked. “We’re thinking suicide?”

Everyone’s head snapped around to find a man in a tuxedo,
tie casually undone, walking up to the supposedly secured crime scene.

“Who the hell are you?” Ruben demanded, but the man just put
his hands in his pockets and leaned over the body, cocking his head from side
to side.

“Did she leave a note?” the man asked.

Nicole had no idea what was going on, but as odd as the man
was, he demanded attention, and Ruben seemed more than intent on giving it to
him. Her partner nodded for a uniformed cop to frisk the tuxedo. Nicole braced
for the man’s reaction, her hand straying toward her holster.

The man hardly seemed to notice, though. His hands stayed in
his pants pockets as he studied the body and the cop performed the pat-down.

“Did she lose her job?” the man asked. “Her husband leave
her? Is that what the trigger was?”

Even though he was making absolutely no sense, there was a
smoothness to his tone that made him seem anything but wrong. The cop pulled
what looked like a badge out of the man’s jacket pocket and read the name
aloud, “Kent Harbinger. FBI.”

Nicole inhaled sharply as Ruben’s eyes narrowed to a slit.
“FBI?” he repeated.