I could only hope that the shock of the attack had overwhelmed her, dulling the pain of the knife wounds somewhat—that her mind hadn’t been able to process the horror of what was happening to her. I hoped most of the damage had been postmortem.
As my mind roamed over the horror of her final moments, I was almost sorry I hadn’t listened to Gabriel. But this was important. This was the murderer’s work, and I had to see it up close. This was his sadistic form of expression, how his mind worked. I pushed my visions of her death to the back of my skull, trying to focus.
A steady buzz drew my attention. Several flies roamed the open, bloody cavity. When a body was hours or days old, flies were valuable allies of the forensic team. A skilled investigator could estimate the time of death using fly and larvae samples taken from the body. But this corpse was fresh, and the flies were nothing but parasites, using the poor woman to feed their young.
I waved my hand to shoo the flies away. The coppery smell of blood overpowered me, and I quickly stood up. The flies returned, haunting the woman’s wounds again.
I struggled with the desire to close her eyes, to soothe the tortured stare from her face. Somehow, that was what hit me the hardest: her eyes. Wide open and in pain. Maybe I couldn’t feel her emotions on a visceral level, but they were written plainly on her face.
Stepping away from the body, I gritted my teeth, trying to picture the monster who would rip apart four young women like this. How many more would he kill before someone stopped him? Would I be able to help?
I was pretty sure I would. This was what I did best. I helped find men like him and put an end to their murder binges.
From the perimeter around the police tape, I felt the crowd’s horrified energy, and it began to build my resolution. I wouldn’t return to the US until we’d put this monster in prison.
“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, handing me a pair of latex gloves. I took them and put them on, the synthetic material somehow reassuring .
“I will be,” I muttered. “Looks like the viciousness is increasing.”
“That was our impression as well,” Gabriel said. “This one is the worst so far.”
I looked around the small city square. There were no shop fronts here, just the back entrances of buildings, a fenced-in parking lot, and a tiny road. Still, it seemed impossible that he’d slaughtered her in the center of the city without anyone noticing.
“Do we have any witnesses?” I asked.
Gabriel shook his head. “No. A passerby found her at twenty past eleven. He saw no one near the body.”
“Do we have an estimated time of death?”
“Yeah. Between eleven and eleven twenty.”
“So he found her only minutes after she had been killed.”
“Yes.”
I frowned. “This doesn’t make sense. Someone killed her and disemboweled her completely. It would have taken some time. How did he manage to do that without anyone noticing? Surely people must cut through here to get to the bars and restaurants I saw on Bishopsgate?”
“There isn’t much light here without the spotlights. And most people out at this time in the City are likely plastered.”
I looked around. The body was reasonably hidden from the nearby street, but anyone looking a bit carefully would surely have noticed it. “He must have been silent. And calm. This is… extraordinary.”
“I agree. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Any organs missing from the scene?” I asked, thinking of the previous cases.
“The heart, at least, but I’m not sure what else. We’ll have a preliminary autopsy report tomorrow.”
“Did you do a door-to-door? Did anyone hear anything?”
“We’ve only just found her,” he countered. “And no one lives around here. Unless you wander further east, it’s all empty banks and businesses at this hour.”
I stared at the woman. “Do we have an ID?”
“Her name is Catherine Taylor,” Gabriel said. “Nineteen years old. There was a driver’s license in her purse, discarded by the body. We don’t know if it’s a coincidence yet.”
“Coincidence?” I asked.
A sigh slid from him. “Jack the Ripper killed a woman called Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square.”
My throat tightened. Shit. Was he starting to mimic the actual Ripper? “The other victims weren’t killed in places where the Ripper struck.”
“This is the first that overlaps.”
“And the other names didn’t match the original Ripper’s victims, right?”