The medical examiner sighed. “That I can believe. Come on. Let’s go take a look.”
Alex glanced at Remy, who just shrugged as they followed the woman out of her office, down a long hall, and through a door with a swipe-card security pad on it. Alex hadn’t expected the ME to take them to see the body, but if it helped make the ID, that was fine with him.
“If this woman—Nicole Arend—disappeared, why hasn’t her name shown up on the missing persons database?” Dr. Mills asked over her shoulder.
Since the ME seemed like the kind who could sniff out bullshit almost as fast as Gage, Alex decided he’d better be straight with her and explained their theory about the missing college girls and how they thought the crimes were being covered up.
The doctor stopped to swipe her card again at another door, then turned to look at them. “That’s a pretty serious cover-up you’re talking about and not something I’d expect SWAT to be involved in.”
“It’s not a cover-up yet, just a theory,” Alex clarified. “And that’s what it will stay if you can’t confirm this girl is Nicole Arend.”
They walked into a room with a lot of those morgue freezers you see in all the TV shows. Mills looked on a list attached to the wall, then walked over to one of the doors and opened it. Inside was a zippered white body bag with a clipboard resting on top. She reached for the zipper and started to tug it down, but then stopped to look at both of them.
“You two sure you want to do this?” she asked. “It’s definitely not as gruesome as that mess of a body that blew himself up in June, but it’s worse than the dead Albanians SWAT tangled with a few months before that. It’s even worse than those organized-crime types that all had their throats ripped out after getting in a showdown with you guys at the airport last year.”
Dr. Samantha Mills seemed to know an awful lot about SWAT, especially the stuff that involved a lot of people getting messed up. Realizing she was waiting for an answer, Alex nodded.
Mills pulled the bag’s zipper down far enough to expose the girl’s face. The blood had been cleaned off, but it was still as hard to look at as it had been before. There wasn’t a single inch of her that wasn’t covered with cuts, scrapes, and deep bruises. Damn, she’d really been worked over.
Alex pulled out the photo of Nicole that Becker had gotten from the RTC student records and held it up beside the body bag. He didn’t need to match the face to the picture, because the body’s scent matched the one he’d smelled in the dorm room, but he had to make it look good for the ME.
On the other side of the body, Mills nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you might think this could be the same girl. The bone structure is identical. It’s definitely close enough to justify getting her dental records. That should tell us for sure, even with all the postmortem damage.”
“Postmortem?” Alex frowned. “Are you saying all this was done after she was dead?”
Mills nodded. “Yes. Small blessing, I guess. Nearly all the damage you saw when you found her was done well after her death. The chief ME is still in the process of doing the full examination, so nothing is final, but if you ask me, this looks like a ritual killing.”
“What kind of ritual?” Remy asked.
“I have no idea,” she admitted. “But what else do you call it when a girl’s been tortured and has organs missing?”
“Missing?” Alex asked.
“Her heart and one of her kidneys are gone.”
Alex felt queasy at the thought. He hoped Lacey never had to hear about any of this.
They left Nicole’s picture with the doctor, along with as much personal information as they had on the girl. As Mills led them back up to the front of the building, she agreed to call Alex the moment she was able to confirm the ID.
Dr. Mills smoothed a stray tendril of long blond hair back into her bun, her face grim. “If you’re right, and this girl is only the first of five college girls who have been kidnapped, we could definitely have a serial killer on our hands.”
Chapter 14
Leo lifted his head from his paws the moment Lacey and Alex walked in the door, an expression on his face that could only be described as hopeful. But when he saw that Kelsey wasn’t with them, the look faded from his furry face, and he put his head down again. Lacey knew the feeling. She wished she could deal with it the same way he did. It certainly would have made her horrible day better if she could have gone to bed and acted like it had never happened.
Four hours ago, the dead woman she and Alex had found the other night was positively identified as Nicole Arend. An hour after that, missing persons connected all the dots with the information Alex and his SWAT teammates provided them and announced that Kelsey, Sara, and Carla had officially joined Abigail on the list as missing, like Kelsey hadn’t been missing before, only misplaced.
Minutes later, the story hit social media and the TV news circuit. A little while after that, someone from Councilman McDonald’s office asked Lacey and Alex to come downtown for an impromptu press conference.
Lacey didn’t believe getting up in front of a camera would help find Kelsey, especially since pictures of Abigail Elliott had been on TV for two weeks, and it hadn’t done them any good at all. But Alex had said that getting word of Kelsey’s abduction out to the public was a good thing, that it might catch someone’s attention and trigger a memory that could lead them to her.
In a word, the news conference had been awful. The entire event turned out to be nothing more than an orchestrated PR event. First, they’d dragged Alex up to the raised platform at the front of the room and positioned him between Councilman McDonald and an older man in a dress blue uniform who turned out to be Chief of Police Randy Curtis. The chief talked first, throwing some praise Alex’s way for the work he’d done finding the link between the five missing girls, but mostly taking all the credit for himself and his department.
Then they pulled Lacey and Abigail Elliott’s mother—Sheryl—up to the podium. They weren’t asked to say anything as the councilman flashed pictures of Nicole Arend and the four missing girls up on the screen behind them. McDonald asked for help in finding them, but to Lacey, it all sounded horribly similar to the news flashes she’d heard before, except now there were more girls missing, one of whom was dead. She prayed with everything in her that Kelsey didn’t end up the same way.
Just when Lacey thought it was over, a man in a suit stood up and introduced himself as a detective from the homicide division. He talked about taking over the case and about the task force he was putting together. While he made promises about finding the killer-slash-kidnapper and the girls, Lacey got the feeling the detective was far more interested in catching the killer than in rescuing the girls.
