Chapter 9

Friday, March 12

11:00 a.m.

Toe tags were a thing of the past.

Nowadays, morgues like the one hidden in the basement of Concord Hospital catalogued the bodies ready for autopsy digitally.

Leigh shucked into the personal protective equipment provided just outside the examination room. Latex gloves, shoe booties, and a full-blown head-to-toe disposable suit would protect against bloodborne pathogens, any diseases Michelle Cross might've been carrying, and other contagions. When it came to dead bodies, no one could be prepared enough.

Boucher had volunteered to go through the rest of Michelle Cross's investigative notes while Leigh made the hour-long drive southeast. It'd given her time to consider the analysis done on the toy soldiers recovered with each of the recent victims. The only acceptable conclusion? Chris Ellingson couldn't risk using the same collection from twenty years ago. Too obvious. Forensic analysis had evolved. Family genealogy and DNA records were solving decades-old cases now. Stood to reason Ellingson had been forced to evolve, too. Problem was, she couldn't prove his alibi for Michelle Cross's estimated time of death true or false. Henry Rathe refused to talk to her, and Boucher wasn't having much luck with canvasses or neighbor interviews.

The people in Lebanon were in denial.

No one wanted any part of another murder investigation. No one wanted to remember.

"Your left bootie is on backward." Director Livingstone shoved long legs into her own PPE. Straightened dark hair had been slicked back into a tight ponytail, giving the illusion of youth, but the creases around Livingstone's rich eyes said late forties. There was an emptiness in her voice. Worn and tested. Maybe jet lag. Maybe the weight of the job so many investigators like her had taken on over their careers. She didn't know.

"Thanks." Leigh took a seat along the locker bench as embarrassment threatened to unravel any confidence she'd talked herself into on the drive here. Another reminder she'd spent most of her career behind a desk. Not in the middle of an active investigation, but she'd always been a quick learner. And there was no better teacher than personal motive.

Snapping into latex gloves, Livingstone adjusted her equipment into place as though she'd done this a thousand times. It was easy to imagine she had. A woman in a predominantly male world would've felt the need to prove herself every time she stepped onto a scene. The director would've volunteered for whatever duties would expand her knowledge and put her ahead of her male counterparts, especially any that involved a body. Testing the truth for herself, delving into cases headfirst without coming up for air for days, always searching for answers—Angelina Livingstone gave the impression of an investigator who committed 100 percent and refused to back down. It was admirable. And exhausting. Living life from case to case, watching relationships and hobbies fall to the wayside—it ate the best veterans up inside. "You haven't attended an autopsy before."

The Scottish accent took the bite out of that truth. Or made it worse. Leigh wasn't sure. She tried to smooth irreversible wrinkles out of the thin bodysuit as if pulling her appearance together would make a damn bit of difference in what waited on the other side of those doors. "Is it that obvious?"

"Here's a tip." The director's equipment swished as she closed the distance between them. "TV gets everything wrong. There's no cheating the odor of decomposition. Just breathe through your mouth. Your senses will adjust to the smell after about ten or fifteen minutes. Until then, if you have to throw up, make sure it's in the hazardous waste bin."

A hint of a sympathetic smile softened the woman's mouth. Well, at least one person didn't automatically hate Leigh for coming home. Then again, Livingstone wasn't from Lebanon. She was an outsider. "I'll try to keep that in mind."

The double doors barricading the dead from the living swung open, and Dr. Jennings stepped through, gloved hands raised as though prepared to go into surgery. Technically, she was. There just wouldn't be any recovery for the patient afterward. A set of goggles, a hairnet, and a mask shrouded the pathologist's sharp features. "We're ready for you."

Livingstone cocked her head toward the doors. "Come on, Agen' Brody. I promise I'll hold your hair back for you if you toss your breakfast."

Leigh couldn't hold back the low-level laugh escaping up her throat. As intimidating as the director had been at the death scene, Livingstone was making an effort with her. She slowed before pushing inside the examination suite. Was that because Leigh didn't have field experience or from pity?

She shoved inside. Beige walls with a thick green stripe closed in around her. The suite was much smaller than Leigh had expected. An eye wash station was positioned straight ahead. Where she'd imagined a perfectly square or rectangular open area with room to maneuver, Concord's morgue was actually more L-shaped with a wall jutting into the space. A single stainless-steel slab took up the center of the room with a large sink and shelving at the head. Track lighting cast a wide glow over the slab and body, but the rest of the room had become unknown.

"Welcome to the show, Detectives. This is the moment you've been waiting for." Dr. Jennings—Leigh didn't actually remember learning her first name at the scene—took position at the head of the table. Shoulder-length black hair had been slicked back into a hairnet under the strap of her goggles, accentuating the long thin nose with the horizontal dent at the bridge. A blue light to catch flies sizzled behind the deputy ME's right shoulder. "I'd ask for you to keep all appendages to yourself until after the deceased has been properly dissected."

"Just you?" Livingstone asked. "No assistants?"

"Lucky for you, Director, you get me all to yourself today." Dr. Jennings rubbed her hands together, trying to douse her building excitement. Or maybe she was just happy to talk to someone who could talk back. "You also get to help me weigh the organs."

"Great." Livingstone rounded the slab to the opposite side of the victim.

In truth, New Hampshire had been trying to hire pathologists going on two years. The field itself was desperate for more physicians willing to spend their days with corpses rather than in trying to keep patients alive. Leigh was sure a dimly lit morgue hidden in the hospital basement wasn't quite the backdrop most medical students pictured for their budding careers. Not to mention the smell. She wasn't sure if the odor clawing down her throat had come from Michelle Cross or if it'd permeated the walls. Either way, it wasn't a pretty picture from any angle. "What have you been able to confirm so far?"

"To start, this is in fact Michelle Cross. DNA and fingerprints are a match to those taken by Lebanon PD when our dear Michelle was fingerprinted after a shoplifting incident in her younger years. Obviously, that didn't work out for her. I've also reviewed the deceased's medical records. Nothing out of the ordinary, and X-rays are all clear." Dr. Jennings picked a pair of tweezers from the arrangement of tools off to one side of the slab and pinched something shifting just inside Michelle Cross's nose. She raised it up. The larva, almost translucent, wiggled to get free, and Leigh's stomach turned. "Oh, must've missed one of you buggers."

The medical examiner collected a small glass jar from the same table as her tools, dropped the maggot inside, and set it back. Down went the tweezers. "Where were we? Right. As you can see, our little friends didn't waste any time laying their eggs inside Ms. Cross's orifices. Seems this little guy is at the maggot stage and just waking up from the cooler, but the fellows I collected earlier were still in their egg cycle when I did my external examination. Too cold for their taste, which leads me to conclude my initial time of death estimate was right. Somewhere between 10:00 p.m. March 9th and 1:00 p.m. March 10th. Unfortunately, I can't give you anything more accurate than that without a witness window. Now, let's get to the good stuff, shall we?"

The victim's hair had been shaved short, exposing a dark contusion along the left side of the head. Her teeth were still exposed beneath the fleshy remnants of her cheeks and patches of lips. That hadn't changed, and Leigh was reminded of the nightmares she'd had in the days after finding her brother's body beneath the house. Human, but not.

Dr. Jennings pointed about an inch higher than the injury. "This lovely bruise superior of the left ear was enacted postmortem. It's darker than the skin around it and flat. Like she was hit with a board, or?—"

"Or her head hit the bridge where she was found." Leigh could see the wood grains cutting through the bruising, making a pattern. Lighter and crisp. They were evenly spaced but curved. Similar to a tree's age rings. "Maybe when the killer was trying to get her out of the tarp or perhaps even unload her from his vehicle."

Dr. Jennings raised intense green eyes to her. "Very impressive, Agent Brody. Yes, that would fit. Are you sure you're not a pathologist at heart?"

"I've seen enough bodies to last me a lifetime," she said.

"Gresham Schmidt didn't have any postmortem contusions." Director Livingstone shifted onto her toes to get a better look at the opposite side of the body. She'd been right about the odor. It was already fading to dull Leigh's senses. "I assume you've compared MO to the first victim. Do your previous findings support your assessment of this body? Are these two deaths the result of the same killer?"

This body. As if Michelle Cross had lost her identity the moment she'd been murdered.

Like Troy and Derek Garrison had lost theirs.

Leigh knew the logic of emotional distance. She'd had to do the same when reviewing crime scene photos to give police priorities to focus on, but it was different in person. Investigators like Livingstone and Dr. Jennings faced the worst humankind could do to each other. They couldn't let themselves see the victims they investigated as human. This body—and others—was solely evidence. Boucher had told her as much the moment they'd met. Police couldn't get attached, couldn't let emotion infect the case, but Leigh was past that. This case was emotional. It was personal. She studied what was left of Michelle Cross's face, memorizing everything she could. Leigh wasn't going to remember her as a number in Lebanon PD's cataloged files. She deserved more than that.

"Too soon to tell. Keep in mind, we haven't concluded the autopsy, Director, but there are many similarities between the two in regards to my external examination." Dr. Jennings placed a rubber block, the size of a half loaf of bread, under the middle of the victim's back between the shoulder blades. The effect elongated Michelle Cross's neck and extended her natural arch to give the medical examiner better access to the thoracic and abdominal cavities. "The placement and the amount of stab wounds for one. I would be confident in telling you whoever killed Michelle Cross knew where and how deep to plunge the knife to keep her alive for an extended period of time. No cutting of arteries, all leading to one result in the end. I came to the same conclusion in the Gresham Schmidt case."

"Death by a thousand cuts." Director Livingstone kept her voice even, but her breathing had changed. Heavier. "From what I knew of him, Schmidt was a good detective. Highly decorated." Livingstone seemed to snap out of her reverie. She raised her gaze to Leigh from across the examination table. "He was asked to retire from Scotland Yard last year, but he kept working one of his past cases. A missing child. In the end, he solved that case by linking the child's abduction to a trafficking ring and brought down key players in the operation. We already know Schmidt had a bad habit of investigating unsolved cases in an unofficial capacity. Is it possible Gresham Schmidt was investigating the same case here in Lebanon as Michelle Cross?"

What were the chances both victims had been looking into the twenty-year-old murder of Troy Brody and Derek Garrison? That both had been killed in the same manner of the original victims within a week? Why now? Leigh tried to stand a bit straighter so as not to give away the unease slithering through her. Michelle Cross's sister hadn't recognized Gresham Schmidt's name when she'd asked, but there had to be some connection between these victims. Something that had brought them to the killer's attention. "The case was closed twenty years ago. There wouldn't be any reason for Schmidt to look into it."

"Unless someone wanted him to." Livingstone's gaze turned hard, and a hint of the rage Leigh had carried nearly her entire life infused the director's voice. It hadn't had enough time to simmer, but left unchecked, it would boil over, destroying everything and everyone in its path. Just as it had done for Leigh. "We're still waiting on Scotland Yard's response to our warrant requesting access to Gresham Schmidt's financials and cell phone records to track his movements in his final days. As of right now, we focus on the victim in front of us."

Leigh moved out of the pathologist's way as she set a scalpel at Michelle Cross's shoulder and sliced through flesh to the bottom of the sternum. Dr. Jennings did the same with the other shoulder, connecting the incision. No blood spurts as the movies suggested. In reality, once the heart stopped pumping, there was no pressure to push blood through the veins and arteries. "How many stab wounds?"

"Twenty-two from my count," Dr. Jennings said. "And an additional thirty-seven shallow lacerations."

Leigh's heart thundered between her ears. The director said something indistinguishable as she interrupted the dull track lighting overhead to hand the medical examiner the rib saw. Both positioned masks over their mouths and noses, but Leigh couldn't move at all. "Twenty-two? You're sure?"

Confusion etched into Dr. Jennings's expression. "Counted them myself, Agent Brody. Twice during my initial examination." The pathologist looked between her and Livingstone. "I counted an equal amount in the first victim, Gresham Schmidt. I don't have all the information yet, but the number of stab wounds supports your theory this may be the work of the same killer."

No. It didn't. At least, not in the way she'd expected. Just as she hadn't expected the toy soldiers found with these victims to be any different from the one she'd recovered from her brother's body all those years ago. Serial offenders evolved, but their signatures didn't. That compulsion was what helped her track patterns through a number of crimes and investigations as a consultant. Her ability to follow predictable behavior was what made her so good at her job with CJIS. It was what gave her a sense of peace when she'd finally summoned the courage to find out what'd really happened to Troy. It should've been easy. She would spot the pattern. She'd put the pieces together.

The patterns were always there, in dozens of cases.

But this…

Twenty-two stab wounds didn't fit Chris Ellingson's pattern. "Troy Brody and Derek Garrison were stabbed thirty-one times each." The words seemed to take on a life of their own. Detached. Independent of her will. "I've been looking at the wrong suspect."