Forty-Six

The room was large and bright, lit by two rows of florescent lights that ran the length of the ceiling. Two steel tables dominated the main floor space, one fixed, one wheeled.

They stepped through the door and were immediately hit by a blast of cold air and an immense feeling of sadness that seemed to chill their bones. The brunette woman’s body was lying uncovered on the fixed table. The stitches to her mouth and body had been removed, now substituted by new ones that outlined the Y incision. In a strange way she looked peaceful. The immeasurable suffering that was etched on her face just a few hours ago seemed to have vanished, as if she was grateful to someone for removing those terrible stitches from her body.

They all put on latex gloves and approached the table in silence. Doctor Hove buttoned up her white lab coat and moved around to the other side of the body.

Hunter stared at the woman’s face for a long time. There was little doubt in his mind.

‘I think her name is Kelly Jensen,’ he said quietly, retrieving a black-and-white printout from the folder he’d brought with him and handing it to the doctor.

Captain Blake and Garcia craned their necks across the table. Doctor Hove had a good look at it before holding it close to the woman’s face. Without the stitches to her lips, and washed of all that blood, the resemblance was undeniable.

The doctor nodded in agreement. ‘On looks alone I’d say you’re right, Robert.’

‘Her file says that when she was a teenager she tripped and fell through a glass window in school,’ Hunter continued, reading from a file sheet. ‘Two large shards pierced the back of her left shoulder leaving a V-shaped scar. Her right elbow was also cut and she should have a semicircular scar just below the joint.’

Doctor Hove lifted her right arm and they all bent over to take a look at her elbow. An old and faint semicircular scar marked the skin a couple of centimeters below the joint. Very quickly they all repositioned themselves around the head of the table. The doctor didn’t have to lift her upper body far, just a few inches was all that was needed. On the back of her left shoulder, scar tissue marked by the evidence of old stitches formed a sideways V-shape.

‘I don’t think there’s much doubt now, is everyone agreed?’ Doctor Hove lowered the victim body back down.

‘Who is she?’ the captain asked.

‘The information I have at the moment isn’t much, just what was passed to Missing Persons. Thirty years old from Great Falls in Montana. She was reported missing twenty-one days ago.’ Hunter paused to clear his throat. ‘Now here comes the punch. The person who reported her as missing was her agent.’

‘Agent?’ Garcia asked.

Hunter nodded. ‘Kelly Jensen was a painter.’

Forty-Seven

Everyone held their breaths. Captain Blake was the first to slash the silence.

‘How old was the first victim?’

‘Laura Mitchell was thirty,’ Garcia replied.

‘And when did she go missing?’

Garcia looked at Hunter.

‘She was reported missing fifteen days ago,’ he replied.

Captain Blake closed her eyes for an instant. ‘Fantastic,’ she said, ‘so we’re dealing with some psycho killer who’s after pretty, brunette, 30-year-old painters, and has a hard-on for stitching their bodies shut?’

Hunter didn’t reply.

‘Are there any more brunette 30-year-old painters who are missing?’

‘I searched all the way back to ten weeks, Captain, Laura Mitchell and Kelly Jensen were the only two.’

The captain’s gaze returned to the body on the table. ‘Well, that’s something I guess.’ She turned to face Hunter and Garcia. ‘We’ll talk about this back at PC. What do we have here, Doc?’ she asked Doctor Hove.

The doctor stepped a little closer to the autopsy table.

‘Well, just like the first victim, the stitches the killer applied to his second one were amateurish, to say the least.’ The doctor pointed to Kelly Jensen’s mouth. ‘Actually, they were more like knots than anything else. Ten in total, five to each body part.’

‘Same as the first one,’ Hunter confirmed.

Doctor Hove nodded.

‘So you’re saying we shouldn’t be looking for anyone with medical knowledge?’ the captain asked.

‘If he has any, he didn’t show it here. The thread used is also very thick. What in medical suture we call a number six or seven. Thread sizes are identified by the United States Pharmacopeia,’ she explained. ‘Seven is the thickest. In comparison, a size four thread is roughly the diameter of a tennis racquet string. The thread used here will be going to the lab for proper analysis today, but there’s no doubt he used some sort of nylon.’ Doctor Hove turned and retrieved a folder from behind her. ‘Her organs were healthy, but dehydrated. They also showed symptoms of mild malnutrition.’

The captain shifted on her feet. ‘The killer starved her?’

‘Possibly, but not for long. The symptoms are consistent with one, maybe two days of starvation at the most. She was deprived of food and water either on the day or the day before she died.’ She lifted her right hand in a wait gesture. ‘Before any of you raise this point, the stitches to her mouth were brand new, probably inflicted just hours before she died. That wasn’t the reason why she’d had no food or water.’

‘Any guesses?’ Captain Blake asked as her eyebrows arched.

Doctor Hove tucked her dark hair behind her ears. ‘There could be any number of reasons. Some sort of ritual on the killer’s part, the victim herself refusing to eat as an act of defiance or because she felt sick, or angry, or anything . . .’ She shrugged almost imperceptibly.

‘Did you find any sort of marks at all on her body, Doc?’ Hunter took over.

The doctor’s face morphed as if Hunter had asked the million-dollar question.

‘Now here is where it starts to get interesting.’ She took a step to her right and allowed her eyes to refocus on Kelly Jensen’s ghostly white face. ‘I couldn’t find a single scratch on her.’

Captain Blake looked puzzled. ‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Doctor Hove confirmed. ‘As we said earlier, her wrists and ankles are totally free from marks and abrasions. We know she wasn’t restrained to that table in the kitchen basement of the preschool. But I can’t find anything that suggests she was restrained at all during the time she was held captive either.’ The doctor paused. ‘My examination of the inside of her mouth and the skin around it also showed no evidence that she was gagged.’

‘Which means the killer wasn’t concerned with the victim making any sort of noise,’ Garcia noted.

Doctor Hove nodded. ‘She was either drugged up to her eyeballs, or locked inside a very secure and soundproofed room, or both. Toxicology results will take a few days.’

‘Needle marks?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not even a little nick. Except for the tiny scrapes to her palms and knees, which I’m pretty sure she got when she fell to the floor, she doesn’t have a scratch on her. Take away the stitches, and there’s not a shred of evidence the killer ever touched her.’