Two Graves

3

LONG AGO, DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT VINCENT D’AGOSTA had learned to be late to any appointment at the M.E. building on East Twenty-Sixth Street. He had found out the hard way that there were distinct disadvantages to being early, most of which involved arriving while an autopsy was still ongoing and thus being compelled to witnesses the final stages, which were inevitably the worst. They’d told him he would eventually get used to it.

He hadn’t.

This one, he knew, would be more challenging than most. A young IT consultant down from Boston on a business trip, butchered and dismembered in a New York luxury hotel, security feeds showing a killer who looked like a model, with a victim who was equally attractive. The nature of the crime—which had all the hallmarks of a random killing for pleasure, perhaps involving a libidinous component—guaranteed strong public interest. Even the Times had run a story.

At a certain level, while he hated to admit it to himself, he was not displeased to be here. The zone captain had assigned the case to him, making him squad commander. It was his crime, his baby.

He passed through the doors containing the famous phrase, TACEAT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS. HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. “Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.” And this made him think, with some satisfaction, how well things were going in his own life. His heart injury was just about fully healed, his relationship with Hayward was on track, his ex-wife was out of the picture, he was in regular touch with his son, and his unreliable employment history and disciplinary letters were now firmly in the past. The only unsettled issue was Pendergast and the man’s pursuit of his kidnapped wife. But if anyone could take care of himself, it was the FBI agent.

His mind returned to the case at hand. It was more than an opportunity; it marked a crossroads in his career, a new begi

With this in mind he entered the main corridor of the M.E. building, flashed his shield at a nurse by way of greeting, signed in, and headed for Autopsy 113. He gowned up outside, then entered the room—to find that his timing had been perfect.

The dismembered body lay on a gurney. On a second gurney next to it, arrayed in rows with military precision, were the missing pieces, large and small, that had been cut from the corpse, along with Tupperware containers holding the various organs removed by the pathologist in the course of the autopsy.

The forensic pathologist was weighing the last one to be removed from the body cavity—the liver—and transferring it to its own container.

Arrayed around the body were two people from his freshly assembled team: Barber, the precinct-assigned investigator; and the guy from latent prints with the fu

He tried to avoid dwelling on the details, keeping his eyes moving, not coming to rest on any particular item. Under the circumstances, he actually felt pretty good: that morning, to the a

A murmur of greeting, nods. He didn’t recognize the gowned-up forensic pathologist, who was still reporting data into a headset. It was hard to see much of her, but he could tell she was young and strikingly good looking, with lustrous black hair pulled back—but very tense, brittle.

“Doctor? I’m Lieutenant D’Agosta, squad commander,” he said to her by way of greeting.

“Dr. Pizzetti,” she replied. “I’m the new forensic pathology resident.”

Nice. Italian. A good omen. The “new” part explained her nervousness.

“When you have a chance, could you fill me in, Dr. Pizzetti?” he asked.

“Of course.” She began tidying up the corpse, dictating the last of her observations. It lay on the gurney like a loosely assembled human jigsaw puzzle, and she now straightened some of the pieces that had become displaced during the autopsy, returning the corpse to a semblance of human shape. She shifted some organs, fixed lids on a few still-open Tupperware containers. And then her assistant spoke to her in a low voice and handed her a long, evil-looking needle.

D’Agosta felt himself go rigid. What was this? He hated needles.

Pizzetti bent over the head. The cranium was already open, the brain removed. Wasn’t it over? What the hell was she doing?

As he watched, she reached down, opened the corpse’s eye with her thumb, and inserted the needle.

D’Agosta should have looked away quicker, but he didn’t, and the sight of the needle sliding into that bright blue staring eye tightened his stomach in the most unpleasant way. Usually they took samples of ocular fluid for toxicology tests at the begi

D’Agosta pretended to cough into his mask, still looking down and away.

“We’re almost done, Lieutenant,” said Pizzetti. “We just needed one more tox sample. Didn’t get enough the first time.”

“Right. Fine. No problem.”

She ejected the needle into a medical waste bag and handed the syringe, filled with a yellowish orange fluid, to her assistant. Then she stepped back and glanced around the room. She peeled off her fouled gloves, tossed them into the red-bag waste, pulled down her mask, and unhooked her headset. Her assistant handed her a clipboard.

She was tense. D’Agosta’s heart softened for her: young, a new resident, probably her first high-profile case. Worried about making a mistake. But from what he could see spread out in front of him, she’d done a fine piece of work.

She began the briefing with the usual litany: height, weight, age, cause of death, distinguishing marks, old scars, health, morbidities, pathologies. Her voice was pleasant although tight. The latents guy was taking notes. D’Agosta preferred to listen and retain by memory; note taking often caused him to miss things.

“Only one wound contributed to death: the one to the throat,” she said. “No tissue under the fingernails. Prelim tox tests all negative. No sign of struggle.”

She went on with a meticulous description of the depth, angle, and anatomy of the single stab wound. This was an organized, intelligent killer, D’Agosta thought, as he heard how efficient the fatal wound had been in exsanguinating the body, silencing the victim immediately and causing her to bleed out very quickly, all with one thrust with a razor-sharp, double-bladed knife about four inches long.

“Death,” she concluded, “occurred within thirty seconds. All the other cuts were made postmortem.”

A pause.

“The body was dismembered using a Stryker saw, perhaps one very much like the one beside me.” She pointed to a saw mounted on a rack next to the body. “The Stryker has a wedge-shaped blade that moves back and forth at high speed, driven by compressed air. It is specifically designed to cut through bone but to stop instantly when encountering soft tissue. It is also designed not to cause any spraying of bone or fluids as it cuts. The perpetrator’s use of it appears to be expert. Unusually expert.” She paused again.

D’Agosta cleared his throat. The bolus in his stomach hadn’t gone away, but at least it wasn’t threatening to erupt. “So the perp might be an M.E. or orthopedic surgeon?” he asked.

A long silence. “It’s not my place to speculate.”