She managed to track a man in uniform past the cabin, all the way back to the road and his truck, before she thought herself at risk of being found out. There was little cover for her here—but by now it was full-on dark. His pickup was her chance to get out the easy way, and she was determined to take it before law enforcement swarmed the area.
The truck bed was covered by a rain tarp. When the man turned his back, she lifted the tarp at the corner and crawled beneath it. As she settled herself amongst the buckets and shovels and bags of sand, the truck’s engine roared to life.
Her heart revved along with the engine.
She was going to make it down off this mountain alive.
What she had to do now was get back to Denver, then catch the monster before he struck again.
Chapter 22
Friday, October 25
7:00 A.M.
Medical examiner’s office
Denver, Colorado
Even before Spense opened the door to the autopsy suite, the anticipation of the smell sickened Caitlin. It wasn’t the mingled scents of blood and guts and vinyl body bags she dreaded. It was that je ne sais quoi, that intangible sense of one’s own mortality that hung in the air, the plus one that accompanied death to every party. But without places like this, justice might never be done. And justice was what she craved. It was one of the main reasons she got up in the morning.
Until she’d met Spense, it had been the only reason.
Bracing her shoulders, she swept through the door beside Spense and Hatcher, as though the men were escorting her to a Broadway play instead of the macabre theater that awaited inside.
“Dammit, we’re early.” Hatcher pointed at Dr. Hadley Gaines.
The skeletal medical examiner hunched over the head of a cold steel table, his white lab coat flapping around the knees of his scrubs. Air from the vent above blew what remained of his thin black hair off his forehead. His brow wrinkled in concentration as he used a syringe to extract vitreous fluid from one of the victim’s eyeballs. He then handed the sample off to an assistant and straightened, bumping his head on a hanging meat scale in the process. “Early bird gets his killer.”
“Pardon me if I don’t want to stand around and watch you pop the top off this thing and weigh its brains. I just wanna know—is it her or not?”
Hatcher’s question raised Caitlin’s hackles, perhaps, a bit unfairly, because in truth a corpse was no longer a person, so the term it technically applied. But this body the detective referred to so carelessly had belonged, only a short time ago, to a living breathing young woman. Though the dehumanization of the dead made it easier for some to do their jobs, witnessing that dehumanization never failed to make her heart shrink in her chest.
“Then come back later,” Gaines said indifferently. “Go have yourself a donut or something.”
“We might as well stay.” Caitlin certainly had no appetite for breakfast or even coffee, and they just might glean something extra if they hung around.
“I’m in,” Spense said.
Hatcher grimaced. “Fine.”
“Suit yourselves.” Gaines began the Y incision, preparing to break into the body cavity. Only this thief would be stealing the victim’s organs, and more importantly, her secrets. Without further prompting, he began narrating his crime.
One thing Caitlin had learned: medical examiners loved to spin a good story.
“Unfortunately, the elements and the scavengers got to her before we did. As you can see, the face is unrecognizable. From the extent of body decomp, I’d estimate she’s been out there somewhere between three and seven days.”
“That as close as you can say?” Hatcher sounded irritated.
“For now, yes.”
That meant it might be Laura’s body . . . or not. She’d barely been missing three days.
“In the good news department, we’ve got Chaucer’s dental records coming, and I can tell you the age of our Jane Doe is late teens to very early twenties. Preliminary inspection of the pelvis suggests she’s nulliparous.”
“Nulli what?” Hatcher asked.
“This young woman has never borne children.” Gaines picked up the shears and went to work opening the rib cage, then began slapping organs one by one onto the meat scale while the assistant wrote their weights on a dry erase board. “The examination of the skin revealed lividity in the back, suggesting the victim died in a supine position.”
“We found her lying prone,” Spense said. “You think the body was moved?”
“Yes, but who knows if it was man or beast who flipped her over.”
“What about sexual assault—did you find evidence of that?” Hatcher asked.