“What do you want?”

“Like all good boys, I want to play.”

“You’re sick.”

He laughed. “That’s what I’m told.”

“I’m hanging up,” Serenity said, although she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Silence on the other end.

“You still there?” she asked.

He laughed again. “I knew you’d want to hear more.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up, that’s all.”

The phone went dead.

Chapter Thirty-eight

January 15, 1:25 p.m.

Olalla, Washington

It was a running joke in rural Kitsap County that if you ever wanted to get rid of something, just stick it off to the side of the road with a FREE sign: No matter what it was-hideous couch, broken lawn mower, TV console turned into an approximation of a minibar-it would be gone in the blink of an eye. It seemed that the southern end of the county was blessed with a good portion of the population who just couldn’t pass up a bargain without tapping the brakes. Indeed, it was a kind of protocol to the disbursement of the unwanted. No one ever dumped anything at the makeshift free-for-all. People only took.

On the morning of January 15, Ken Saterlee set out two boxes of half-used interior paint and a few other odds and ends from a construction site that he’d worked the previous month as a “punch man.” His wife hated the Sunshine Yellow color that he’d thought was a major score. By 10 A.M., after he returned from coffee, he noticed that there were three boxes next to his driveway off Willock Road, just south of Port Orchard near Olalla. The first two were the boxes he’d set out; the third was a medium-sized wooden container with a weathered brass fastener and hinges. It looked more decorative than functional, the kind of thing one might pick up at an import store. It was about ten inches tall and a foot wide.

He picked it up. It had something inside. Not expecting much of a treasure, Ken Saterlee figured someone had dropped off the box to take advantage of his FREE sign.

He opened the box and nearly vomited. Twenty minutes later, detectives from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office were on the scene.

Inside the box was a human head.

Medical Examiner Birdy Waterman had hoped that the head would show up in her basement office sooner rather than later. She rescheduled the autopsy of a car-crash victim the minute she heard the missing piece of the Marissa Cassava case would be arriving. When it did, she took the box that the deputy coroner had ferried into the autopsy suite and set it on the smaller of the two stainless steel tables.

She was alone: her assistant was out with a bad sprain, and homicide detectives Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson were still combing the scene around Willock Road in search of anything they could turn up to help with the investigation. That morning, Dr. Waterman wore her hair up, twisting her thick black locks into a French braid. She planned on meeting a man she had once dated for drinks right after work. He was in Seattle on business. Birdy always considered him one of the good ones, one of the men she wished she’d tried harder to find a way to share her life with. But she hadn’t back then. It was probably too late now. She’d never know. Judging by the hour, the head on the table would eat up the rest of the day and then some.

There would be no dinner that night with an old friend.

With nimble gloved fingertips, she opened the lid on the box. The reporting deputy had been correct when he said that it was an “antique-looking” container, not a real antique by any means. She fully expected that when she flipped it over it would say, MADE IN INDONESIA or MADE IN CHINA.

She looked down. “Hello, Marissa,” she said. “What in the world did he do to you?”

Gently, she lifted the head and set it on the table. The woman’s brown eyes were staring upward, open, blank in their gaze. Her hair had broken off in patches on the side of her head. The pathologist rotated the head almost sweetly, the way a person might pick up a small animal. Not wanting to hurt it. The eyes looked right at her.

Dr. Waterman ran her light over the face, looking for signs of trauma, fibers, fingerprints, anything that might help tell the story of the Kitsap Cutter’s third victim. She swabbed the mouth for semen and other biologicals.

Everything looked so clean. So pristine. She wondered how the head could have stayed so preserved, so perfect. Her answer came when she used her temperature probe to record the temperature of the head. It was a routine task in any autopsy, although usually the coroner took the liver temp to determine how long the victim had been dead.

“Forty-four degrees,” she said to herself, recording the information on a chart. The temperature outside exceeded that by five degrees.

Next, she took a closer look at the neck, paying particular attention to the condition of the vertebra. The head had been removed from the body with surgical precision. A clean slice that matched perfectly with the body that she’d processed the previous year.

She had hoped to find some tool marks cut into the bone that might indicate what had been used for the decapitation. Serrated blade? Hunting knife? A piece of evidence that might point to the killer had eluded her when she examined the body.

Again, nothing. So very clean.

A butcher? A skilled hunter? A doctor? she wondered. Or someone just quick, strong, and maybe lucky enough to sever the head from the body in a clean, swift hack?

The tissue where the head had been severed was clean, like a piece of washed meat. No blood. No fluids whatsoever. It was dry, the way human flesh can sometimes resemble beef jerky.

Birdy Waterman knew the head had been stored somewhere, cared for, maybe even used in some ritualistic manner. It had been a trophy, but ultimately it was discarded with some junk.

She lifted the covering over Marissa Cassava’s body-frozen since its recovery at Anderson Point-and reunited it with her head. It took her back to the reservation when she and her friends would swap Barbie doll heads, ditching the blonde for the one with the dark hair, the one that somewhat resembled them. She inched up the fabric, thinking about the young woman with a baby waiting at home, and how someone, something, undeniably evil had done this to her.

Her mask on, goggles in place, she turned on the Stryker saw she used to cut into the skull. Despite the saw’s superb air filter, bone dust blew through the air and onto the pathologist’s protective gear. To some, the noise was the most hideous sound imaginable, but to Dr. Waterman it was the sound of getting to the truth.

Inside the cranium, blood sparkled like tiny shards of rubies. Still frozen.

As she wrapped things up, she returned her attention to the wooden box. She flipped it over and smiled: A WAL-MART EXCLUSIVE MADE IN CHINA.

She pulled off her gloves and washed up. A quick phone call later, and the homicide detectives were on their way.