She took the card and walked us to the door. As we stepped out onto the porch, I heard the click of all those deadbolts sliding back into place—Mrs. Valdez, sealing herself back into her fortress after being reminded of just how cruel the world could be.
The crime scene van was still parked next door, but the techs were packing up. They’d have collected everything they could—blood samples, fingerprints, any trace evidence left behind. Now it was up to us to make sense of it.
“A bit paranoid, isn’t she?” Adam commented.
“Can you blame her?” I allowed myself a grim smile, pulling my jacket tighter against the wind. “How much are you willing to bet that our dear Martin has a criminal record?”
“So you’re sticking with your theory, then.” It wasn’t a question.
I sure was.
It looked like we had a vigilante serial killer on our hands.
* **
The air in the morgue always tasted like cold metal and antiseptic, a sterile bitterness that coated the back of my throat the moment the heavy doors slammed shut behind me. It was a smell designed to mask death, but it only ever managed to highlight it.
Hayes was already scrubbed in, his back to me as he adjusted the overhead lights. Under the harsh halogen glare, the body on the stainless steel table looked less like a man and more like a discarded prop from a slasher film. His skin was the color of wet clay, mottled with the dark purple pooling of lividity along the back and shoulders.
Hayes snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves against his wrists. “Shall we start, then?”
I nodded and took a step closer.
There were four distinct wounds clustered around the sternum and left pectoral. They weren’t clean slits; they were ragged, gaping mouths where the flesh had been torn rather than sliced. The bruising around the edges was a deep, angry violet, indicating the force behind the blows.
Hayes leaned in, using a gloved finger to spread the edges of the highest wound. “The trajectory is upward and inward. The blade hit the fourth rib here—see the chipping?—but glanced off and likely punctured the lung. The fatal blow, however, was likely this one.” He pointed to a lower wound, slightly to the left of the breastbone. “Straight through the ventricle.”
“So he bled out fast,” I said.
Hayes nodded and moved down the table to the victim’s left arm. Or what was left of it. The bone protruded jagged and white from the retracted meat of the forearm, surrounded by dried, blackened blood.
“The tissue damage here is severe. The skin is shredded,irregular. And look at the bone fragmentation.” He adjusted the light, casting a stark shadow over the stump. “This wasn’t a knife. It wasn’t a saw. This was a chop. Something heavy and dull, swung with immense force.”
I felt a sour churn in my stomach. “Post-mortem?”
“Antemortem,” Hayes said grimly. “See the hemorrhagic infiltration in the surrounding tissue? His heart was still pumping when this happened.”
The killer was a bit of a sadist, then. Not surprising.
Hayes picked up a scalpel and turned back to the chest. He made the Y-incision with a single, fluid motion, the blade parting the skin with ease.
I watched, detached yet strangely fascinated. There was something to be said about seeing someone who had once been a person open up so easily—skin yielding, muscle parting, the body offering itself up without any resistance.
Hayes used the rib cutters next, lifting the chest plate away and revealing the ruined machinery of the organs underneath. “Left lung collapsed, just as I thought,” he said, lifting the dark, spongy mass. “Pericardial sac is full of blood.”
The autopsy carried on like that, with Hayes offering commentary all the while. Once we finished up, he moved to the sink to wash his hands. I stayed by the door, pretending to review my notes.
Would it be rude of me to leave now? I wondered, then got annoyed with myself for even thinking that.
This was exactly why it was a bad idea to sleep with people you worked with. It always made things awkward afterward. Professional boundaries existed for a reason, and I’d just obliterated mine with spectacular efficiency.
But it was too late to have any regrets now.
Not that I had many, mind you.
Hayes always seemed so reserved, someone who kept himself on a short leash, so it felt good to see him let loose for once. In my experience, it was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for. They stored everything up until the dam finally broke, releasing all that pent-up energy.
“Is there anything else you need?” Hayes asked, his voice pulling me out of my head.
