Vanish

They pulled off the other sleeve and returned the now-nude corpse to its back. Though still a young man, his flesh had already amassed a record of trauma. The scars, the tattoo. And now the final insult: the bullet wound in the left cheek.

Abe moved the magnifier over the wound. “I see a sear zone here.” He glanced at Maura. “They were in close contact?”

“He was leaning over her bed, trying to restrain her when she fired.”

“Can we see those skull X-rays?”

Yoshima pulled films out of an envelope and clipped them onto the light box. There were two views, an anteroposteral and a lateral. Abe maneuvered his heavy girth around the table to get a closer view of the spectral shadows cast by cranium and facial bones. For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked at Maura. “How many shots did you say she fired?” he asked.

“One.”

“You want to take a look at this?”

Maura crossed to the light box. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I was there when it happened.”

“There are definitely two bullets here.”

“I know that gun fired only once.”

Abe crossed back to the table and stared down at the corpse’s head. At the bullet hole, with its oval halo of blackened sear zone. “There’s only one entrance wound. If the gun fired twice in rapid succession, that would explain a single wound.”

“That’s not what I heard, Abe.”

“In all the confusion, you might have missed the fact there were two shots.”

Her gaze was still on the X-rays. Gabriel had never seen Maura look so unsure of herself. At that moment, she was clearly struggling to reconcile what she remembered with the undeniable evidence now glowing on the light box.

“Describe what happened in that room, Maura,” Gabriel said.

“There were three of us, trying to restrain her,” she said. “I didn’t see her grab the guard’s gun. I was focused on the wrist restraint, trying to get it tied. I had just reached for the strap when the gun went off.”

“And the other witness?”

“He was a doctor.”

“What does he remember? One gunshot or two?”

She turned, her gaze meeting Gabriel’s. “The police never spoke to him.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one knows who he was.” For the first time, he heard the note of apprehension in her voice. “I’m the only one who seems to remember him.”

Yoshima turned toward the phone. “I’ll call Ballistics,” he said. “They’ll know how many cartridges were left at the scene.”

“Let’s get started,” said Abe, and he picked up a knife from the instrument tray. There was so little they knew about this victim. Not his real name or his history or how he came to arrive at the time and place of his death. But when this postmortem was over, they would know him more intimately than anyone had before.

With the first cut, Abe made his acquaintance.

His blade sliced through skin and muscle, scraping across ribs as he made the Y incision, his cuts angling from the shoulders to join at the xiphoid notch, followed by a single slice down the abdomen, with only a blip of a detour around the umbilicus. Unlike Maura’s deft and elegant dissections, Abe worked with brutal efficiency, his huge hands moving like a butcher’s, the fingers too fat to be graceful. He peeled back flesh from bone, then reached for the heavy-duty garden pruners. With each squeeze, he snapped through a rib. A man could spend years developing his physique, as this victim surely had, straining against pulleys and barbells. But all bodies, muscular or not, yield to a knife and a pruner.

Abe cut through the last rib and lifted off the triangle containing the sternum. Deprived of its bony shield, the heart and lungs now lay exposed to his blade, and he reached in to resect them, his arm sinking deep into the chest cavity.

“Dr. Bristol?” said Yoshima, hanging up the phone. “I just spoke to Ballistics. They said that CSU only turned in one cartridge.”

Abe straightened, his gloves streaked with blood. “They didn’t find the second one?”

“That’s all they received in the lab. Just one.”

“That’s what I heard, Abe,” said Maura. “One gunshot.”

Gabriel crossed to the light box. He stared at the films with a growing sense of dismay. One shot, two bullets, he thought. This may change everything. He turned and looked at Abe. “I need to look at those bullets.”

“Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”

“I think I know why there are two of them.”

Abe nodded. “Let me finish here first.” Swiftly his blade sliced through vessels and ligaments. He lifted out the heart and lungs, to be weighed and inspected later, then moved on to the abdomen. All looked normal. These were the healthy organs of a man whose body would have served him well for decades to come.

He moved, at last, to the head.

Gabriel watched, unflinching, as Abe sliced through the scalp and peeled it forward, collapsing the face, exposing cranium.

Yoshima turned on the saw.

Even then, Gabriel remained focused, through the whine of the saw, the grinding of bone, moving even closer to catch his first glimpse of the cavity. Yoshima pried off the skullcap and blood trickled out. Abe reached in with the scalpel to free the brain. As he pulled it from the cranial cavity, Gabriel was right beside him, holding a basin to catch the first bullet that tumbled out.

He took one glance at it under the magnifying lens, then said: “I need to see the other one.”

“What are you thinking, Agent Dean?”

“Just find the other bullet.” His brusque demand took everyone by surprise, and he saw Abe and Maura exchange startled glances. He was out of patience; he needed to know.

Abe set the resected brain on the cutting board. Studying the X-rays, he pinpointed the second bullet’s location, and with the first slice, he found it, buried within a pocket of hemorrhaged tissue.

“What are you looking for?” Abe asked, as Gabriel rotated the two bullets beneath the magnifying lens.

“Same caliber. Both about eighty grams…”

“They should be the same. They were fired from the same weapon.”

“But these are not identical.”

“What?”

“Look at how the second bullet sits on its base. It’s subtle, but you can see it.”

Abe leaned forward, frowning through the lens. “It’s a little off-kilter.”

“Exactly. It’s at an angle.”

“The impact could have deformed it.”

“No, it was manufactured this way. At a nine-degree cant, to send it in a slightly different trajectory from the first. Two missiles, designed for controlled dispersion.”

“There was only one cartridge.”

“And only one entrance wound.”

Maura was frowning at the skull X-rays hanging on the light box. At the two bullets, glowing brightly against the fainter glow of cranium. “A duplex round,” she said.

“That’s why you only heard one shot fired,” said Gabriel. “Because there was only one shot.”

Maura was silent for a moment, her gaze on the skull films. Dramatic as they were, the X-rays did not reveal the track of devastation those two bullets had left in soft tissue. Ruptured vessels, mangled gray matter. A lifetime’s worth of memories atomized.

“Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage,” she said.

“That’s their selling point.”

“Why would a security guard arm himself with bullets like these?”

“I think we’ve already established this man was not a hospital employee. He walked in with a fake uniform, a fake name tag, armed with bullets designed not just to maim, but to kill. There’s only one good explanation I can come up with.”

Maura said, softly: “The woman was meant to die.”

For a moment no one spoke.

It was the voice of Maura’s secretary that suddenly broke the silence. “Dr. Isles?” she said, over the intercom.

“Yes, Louise?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you and Agent Dean should know…”

“What is it?”