Stop it, he told himself. Stop it.
“Lorazepam is part of a group of benzodiazepines, which in high doses can induce sleep and certainly a sedative effect at the very least.”
“Ideal to immobilise a victim, then?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“How accessible?”
Pinter shrugged.
“You would need a prescription, usually, but I would be lying if I said that hospital pharmacies didn’t suffer from their fair share of drugs theft.”
“Anything else in her blood?”
“We were able to isolate the presence of above-average levels of adrenaline, but aside from that, nothing out of the ordinary.”
So far, the modus operandi was in keeping with Keir Edwards and they all knew it.
“What about the amputation sites?”
“I know what you’re wondering,” Pinter said excitedly. “You want to know if the wounds are consistent with those inflicted by The Hacker, during his heyday.”
“And are they?”
“They are,” Pinter confirmed. “In fact, we can draw further conclusions from Claire’s body, since we have more of it to look at. You remember that with his previous victims, we could see that the bones had been separated cleanly, beneath the major joints, which is a manner consistent with the approach taken by a surgical professional.”
“I remember.”
“Well, it’s the same here, except only more so. Not only has her body been dissected beneath the major joints, even the nerves have been cut high up. The myoplastic flaps –”
“Jeff, speak English, for God’s sake,” Phillips muttered.
An unkind expression seemed to pass over Pinter’s face for a moment and then it was replaced by his usual cheery expression.
“The incisions have been made from the anterior … from the front and the back of each juncture, working around the limb in a circular fashion. Again, in keeping with a professional standard of amputation.”
“Was she alive, during this?”
“Um, well.” Pinter blew out a breath. “For some of it, we can say that the blood was still circulating around her body. There is some clotting around both knees, which would suggest that she was alive during that process. There’s clotting around the elbows, also. For all other sites, there is no evidence to suggest circulation.”
Compassion laced Phillips next question.
“How did she die, in the end?”
“Major cardiac arrest,” Pinter replied, without inflection. “Her system would have been severely weakened owing to the blood loss, added to which there was a cocktail of sedative and adrenaline running through her veins which would have messed about with her heart rate. Factoring in medical shock … you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”
“This is all very interesting,” Ryan said, “But you gave me the impression over the telephone that it was vitally important that we rush down here.”
“Wait until you see the killer’s pièce de résistance.”
With a bit of a flourish, Pinter whisked the white sheet away.
Ryan and Phillips looked upon the remains of Claire Burns with a combination of disbelief and recognition. It was a sad, sorry end to a life that had only really just begun, Ryan thought. He grieved for them, for the dead that he championed. It may not have shown on his face, which was hard as marble, but his heart and his soul went out to her family. Yet, that wasn’t what sent a shiver across his shoulder blades. Now that her body had been pieced back together, they could clearly see that the front of her torso had been marked with deep, slashing cuts to form the shape of an inverted pentagram. It was something they had seen before.
Ryan raised his eyes to the pathologist.
“This goes no further than this room,” he told Pinter. “I want a list of everyone who has worked on Claire’s body.”
Jeff nodded and then drew the sheet back over Claire’s serene face.
Outside, Ryan turned to Phillips.
“Frank, give me a cigarette.”
“What? You know fine well that I gave up those tar-infested killing sticks. Besides, you don’t smoke.”
Ryan simply held out a hand.
With a grumble, Phillips reached inside the breast pocket of his blazer and drew out the single cigarette he kept there, as a daily test of his willpower.
Ryan bummed a light off a passer-by outside the hospital entrance and inhaled the smoke as his mind tried to process the latest development.
“We have no way of knowing whether there were once similar markings on Amy’s body,” he said after the first few puffs.
“Her body was too far gone,” Phillips agreed.
“So what the hell is going on? First of all, Pinter tells us that the dissection was done in the same way as Edwards – in fact, the style was so similar as to be nearly identical. That suggests a copycat, or at least someone wanting to keep Edwards on the radar. Then, there’s the markings, and that doesn’t point to Edwards at all.”