“I’ve enjoyed the persiflage, Mr. Butts,” he said through the glass, a thin smile on his lips. “But I’m afraid I have an appointment with the M.E. in”—he glanced at his watch—“sixty seconds. And members of the press—however broad the interpretation—are not invited.” Then he gestured to the woman in uniform, who smartly relocked the door.
Beyond the glass of the door, Gannon could see the three figures receding into the office. There was a strange, almost electric moment of silence among the assembly surrounding the steps. And then Betts, outraged and outmaneuvered, began to curse until his voice filled the plaza, echoing off the buildings and pegging the sound engineer’s VU meters fully in the red.
14
HERE THEY ARE, SIRS,” said the M.E., McDuffie, leading Pendergast and Coldmoon into the lab and sweeping his arm toward the two naked cadavers, brightly illuminated on gurneys in the center of the room. In their exsanguinated state, they were both so bizarrely white that they looked like alien creatures or wax manikins. Coldmoon tried to hang back a little—this was the part of the job he disliked the most. But Pendergast moved in with all the eagerness of a hungry man at a free banquet. The guy never ceased to surprise. Coldmoon had thought he’d gone crazy, talking willingly, even eagerly, to that camera crew…until he realized he’d just been stalling for time until he could ensure that he got to the M.E. before they did. Or perhaps he was just amusing himself at their expense.
Hands clasped behind his back, Pendergast peered down at the first cadaver, leaning in so close that he almost looked like he was going to kiss it. He walked around it with additional intense scrutiny. Then he did the same thing with the second. McDuffie watched, as did his gowned assistant. At least, Coldmoon thought, the autopsies had been completed and the Y incisions sewn back up. They looked frightful, of course, but it could have been worse. Much worse.
Pendergast straightened up. “Agent Coldmoon, do you find it interesting that one victim is so much more damaged than the other?”
Now Coldmoon was forced to take closer notice of the bodies. One was in decent shape, under the circumstances, but the other—the one that had been found in the river—was bloated and torn up, with half a dozen stab or puncture wounds, cuts, scratches, a piece of his scalp ripped off, the right index finger missing.
“Strange,” he murmured.
“Not strange at all,” said Pendergast.
Coldmoon looked at him. “What do you mean?” God, not another lecture.
“This is the classic pattern. With the first victim, the killer is finding his way. He is exploring: seeking his center, so to speak. And because it is all so new, he is nervous and tentative. By the second victim, he is surer of himself, and so the killing is done with greater confidence and less, shall we say, untidiness.”
“You think we have a serial killer in the making?” Coldmoon asked.
“Not with certainty, no.”
“Then who is it?”
“Perhaps someone simply doing his job—and getting better at it.”
Pendergast wheeled a digital magnifying scope over to the first victim and focused on one of the puncture wounds. He fiddled with the dials, took a few screenshots. He moved it to another area of lacerations, then another. Again he looked up.
“Agent Coldmoon, would you care to take a look?”
“I was just waiting for a turn.” Coldmoon came over and glanced into the eyepiece. It showed an odd, pucker-like wound, washed clean by the river. There were other similar wounds, some bigger than others, and several had ripped the flesh. All had been dissected during the course of the autopsy, then stapled back up.
“Dr. McDuffie,” said Pendergast, turning abruptly to the M.E., who jumped at the sudden movement. “Tell us what you found in your dissection of these wounds, if you please.”
“Yes, of course. As you can see, we did a transect of each wound to map it and take samples for further lab work. What you see with the initial victim are a number of stab wounds made with a trocar-like implement. Some are deep, others shallow. I can give you a map of them if you’d care to see it. The wounds are clustered on the inside anterior upper portion of the thigh. My assumption—really, the only one that makes sense under the circumstances—is that the killer was probing for the femoral artery, but in a rather haphazard way. The final stab wound intersected the artery, and that is how the blood was drained.”
“How much blood?”
“All of it. Literally every drop. The heart would have stopped pumping after about three to four liters had been removed. But the final one to two liters are gone as well, which indicates there was active suction through the hollow part of the trocar—a significant amount of suction.”