Mark of the Demon (Kara Gillian 1)

He twitched his shoulders in a shrug, then moved to the body and plunged the needle into the side of one eye. I cringed and stepped back as he slowly drew the vitreous fluid out, filling the syringe. Even though I knew that vitreous was very useful when running toxicology tests on the victims, it still gave me a shiver to see a needle stuck into an eye, and Carl loved to tease me about my squeamishness.

I turned away and looked at Doc. “Do you have an ID on her yet?” It was the office of the Coroner that was responsible for making identification and then the subsequent notification of next of kin, though of course law enforcement always worked hand in hand with them.

A pained expression crossed Doc’s face. “Not yet. We’ll take dentals and make a DNA card for comparison in case anyone comes forward, but Jill said that her prints didn’t come up with anything. If this is anything like the other Symbol Man cases, it’s going to be hard as shit to ID the victim.” He sighed. “And his previous victims were usually too decomposed to get prints from. We were lucky on this one, except for the fact that she’d never been arrested and wasn’t in the system.”

I echoed his sigh. “No missing-persons reports match her so far. She probably wasn’t somebody who was missed.”

“Just like the others,” said Doc. “What was it, twelve? Thirteen?”

“Thirteen. The skulls were sent to a forensic anthropologist at Tulane, who did facial reconstructions on all of them. IDs were made on four, so I guess it was worth the effort.” I’d spent several fruitless hours poring over the photographs of those clay faces, trying to see if there was any possible link between the victims, other than their social status.

My gaze traveled over the precise design of cuts in the woman’s skin. “All these cuts—could she have bled out from this?”

Doc took a gloved finger and probed one of the cuts. “Doubtful. None of them is very deep, but they would have hurt like shit.” He motioned toward the ligature marks on her neck. “We’ll probably find that the cause of death is strangulation. She’s got a ton of petechial hemorrhaging.” He pulled the lower lids of the woman’s eyes down to show the pinprick spots of blood inside the lid and in the eyes—a clear sign of strangulation. I could see similar pinprick marks all throughout the woman’s face and neck. I could also see the faintest prickles of arcane energy but so faded and fleeting that, if I hadn’t already known it was there, I would have likely missed sensing it.

“Go ahead and roll her,” Doc said to Carl. The morgue tech moved to the opposite side of the table and grabbed the woman’s wrist and hip, rolling her onto her side with a practiced yank so that Doc could examine her back. “Well … that’s interesting,” he said with a frown.

I peered at her back, trying to see what he deemed interesting. All I could see were more of the precise cuts amid the dark red lividity. I glanced at him to see if he was going to elaborate.

“There are injuries consistent with a fall.” He palpated the back of her head and then moved his hands down to her hips, taking hold of her pelvis and shifting it in a gruesome and unnatural manner. “From a considerable height, too, I’d say. Ten, maybe twenty feet or so. Looks like she landed mostly on her back and left side. Her pelvis is shattered. The back of her skull is a mess, and so is her shoulder.” He picked up Carl’s camera and snapped a series of pictures, while the morgue tech silently held the body on her side. Then Doc motioned for Carl to roll her back to a supine position.

“Was she still alive?” I asked. “Could that be the cause of death?”

He shook his head. “There’s some abrading of the skin, but there’s no bruising or swelling, so it was after she was already dead.”

I thought of the vats at the wastewater plant. Could the killer have carried the body up those stairs, hoping to dump her up there? Perhaps he’d dropped her? That could explain why this body had been so much easier to find. If he’d left her atop one of the vats, it might have been much longer before she was found.

Doc continued his perusal of her injuries. “Some of these cuts are healed or healing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “How healed? I mean, how long was he doing this shit to her?”

“A few days. Maybe a week.” He pointed to a section of her lower legs that was scabbed over. “I don’t think more than a week.”

Shit. “That’s a long time to be tortured.”

“And I have a bad feeling that we’re going to be seeing more of this,” he said, picking up his scalpel and beginning the Y incision. “I guess our boy is back in action after his little holiday.”

I grimaced in agreement as I backed a few feet away from the metal table—far enough to avoid accidental blood spatters but close enough to still be able to see if anything interesting or unusual was found. It was obvious that Dr. Lanza had performed several thousand autopsies. He had the torso Y-incisioned and filleted back in about half a minute. But once he got into the body, he was meticulous and thorough, cataloging trauma and irregularities with precision.

For some reason I felt incredibly comfortable around Doc. He was one of the few people around whom I didn’t feel ever so slightly inadequate. Maybe it was the way he talked to me like an equal, even though he had light-years more education, training, and experience. Or maybe it was because he was so incredibly patient when answering my questions about trauma and the human body, even when I knew the questions were stupid. He never acted as if the questions were silly, even when I could see as well as sense the other detectives rolling their eyes. He always gave me a patient and thorough explanation and then would tie the answer in to some aspect of whatever case I was working on.

“So, Kara,” Doc said as he removed the lungs. “How’d you get lucky enough to get into Homicide and snag this case as primary?”

I shrugged. “The captain says I’ve busted my ass enough in property crimes, and handling a big case like this will be good experience for me.”

He glanced up at me, a lung in his hand. “Well, that’s a pretty big vote of confidence.”

I smiled wryly. “Now I just have to make sure I don’t fuck it up.”

He tsked at me and placed the lung on the cutting board, slowly slicing through it and looking for defects. “You have a team, you have your supervisors, you have your coworkers, and you even have me.” He grinned and gestured grandly at himself with the bloody knife. “The only way you could really fuck it up would be if you got in over your head and didn’t ask for help.” He sliced a sample of the tissue off and dropped it into a tub of formalin.

“Careful, I may end up bugging the shit out of you,” I teased. “Of course, I also have a sneaking suspicion that they figure it’s not that risky to have me working it, since the Symbol Man victims are usually ‘nobodies.’”

An annoyed expression crossed his face. “Much as I would love to argue with you, I think you might have a point, serial killer or no,” he said. “No one gives a shit about this woman. She hasn’t been reported missing, and she’s apparently never been arrested. She’s possibly mentally ill and probably has been homeless or living out of shelters for years.” He took up a pair of large scissors and began to cut out the heart. “The serial killer in Baton Rouge got a ton of reaction because the victims were young women from nice families. The serial killer in St. Charles got about a tenth of the attention, because the victims were homeless men who led ‘high-risk lifestyles.’” He shrugged. “The response to this killer has always been a bit below par, in my opinion. But that’s just my take on it.”

“Yeah, well, I give a shit.”

He glanced up at me and smiled. “I know, Kara. That’s why you’re going to do great.”