“Dirk’s dead. Someone roughed him up pretty good before his throat was cut. There was also a playing card on his lap. It was the ace of diamonds.”
Hayden removed his hat and slid on black latex gloves as he stepped inside the trailer. It was almost a mirror image of what they’d found at Crow’s, only Dirk was sitting in his recliner. His fingers were broken and one knee was shattered. The place appeared to have been ransacked.
“What the hell is this guy looking for?” Brogan asked.
“He knows who’s responsible for taking those girls thirty years ago,” Hayden said. “And he knows there’s evidence that could ruin him or he’s protecting someone.”
Faith arrived back at the medical examiner’s office midmorning. She found Nancy in what was now called the bone room with the remains from the ranch. The first two sets had been arranged in anatomical order, and the third was partly complete.
Faith grabbed a fresh set of gloves and took in the sight of the three gurneys arranged side by side. All likely had been young girls held in that basement room, murdered, and then buried.
“Any idea how long sets two and three have been in the ground?” Faith asked.
“Rough estimates are at least twenty-five years, but it could easily be longer. At this stage we’re only guessing,” Nancy said.
“That timetable matches with forensic evidence found in the room in the ranch. We have an idea of who we might be dealing with here, but so far no confirmed identification.”
“We might have caught a break with victim number three,” Nancy said. “She has a metal plate in her right femur.”
“Did you reach out to the manufacturer?” Faith asked.
“I contacted the surgical implant company late yesterday, and I heard back just a few minutes ago,” Nancy said.
“What did you discover?” Faith asked.
“The plate on the femur of victim three was indeed surgically placed in a young girl by the name of Kathy Saunders. In 1985, Ms. Saunders, age fifteen at the time, was involved in a bad car accident. She suffered a broken femur requiring the plate.”
Faith felt a surge of satisfaction as she always did when the pieces of a case fell into place. She walked up to the second gurney and picked up the brittle white femur with the metal plate. She tried to imagine this was once a living, breathing young woman.
“Oddly,” Nancy said, “the forensic team found a ballpoint pen with this victim. Most of her clothes have long disintegrated, and they theorize it might have been in her pocket. It’s going to take more testing, but they believe that’s the pen the girls used to write in the magazines.”
She was accustomed to the dead telling her stories through their remains, but there was something far more sobering and disturbing in reading their thoughts. “Were there any signs of fetal or infant remains?” Faith asked.
“None. If their infants didn’t survive the births, they weren’t buried with their mothers. The pelvic bones also don’t show signs of childbirth, which tells me if they did deliver, the mothers died very soon after.”
The utter insult to these girls sent tremors of rage through Faith, and it took her a moment to corral it before she could speak in an even tone.
“The Texas heat coupled with vultures and wild animals could have turned these bodies into bones in a matter of days,” Faith said. “Out there on that isolated ranch, they could have been scattered and rendered into dust. But the killer chose to bury them.”
“I can’t believe it was out of respect,” Nancy said.
“I’m not defending the killer. I’m trying to understand why he didn’t just leave them out in the open. Why put grave markers?” She thought about Marissa, who, if the ancestry site was correct, was her half sister. Marissa’s birth date fit with the disappearance and death of Olivia Martin. “Maybe he fathered all the babies.”
“Why would you say that?” Nancy asked.
“There was no evidence suggesting any of the three girls that went missing were pregnant. Just thinking out loud,” Faith said. “There are sociopaths who are obsessed with passing on their DNA.”
Nancy shifted her gaze back to the bones. “This was his own little baby farm?”
“I think so.” The idea was too disturbing for her to consider right now. “Any signs of trauma to the bones?”
“None,” Nancy said.
These girls could have died any number of ways that would not leave a mark on the bone. Drowning, suffocation, poison, or hemorrhaging could be detected in the tissue, but once it had decomposed, the clues that would have solved the manner of death would have been lost.
“Check all the teeth and see if you can get mitochondrial DNA. That might help if any offspring are identified later.”
“How would we even begin to find these kids? They would be adults now.”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Faith said.
The walls of the room felt as if they were shrinking, and her head felt light. The idea that she was the product of a madman and an imprisoned runaway made her physically sick. “What else is on the schedule for today?”
“The bodies of Garnet and Sullivan have also arrived,” Nancy said. “They’re both ready to be autopsied.”
“When it rains, it pours,” Faith said. “Did the detectives say which body they wanted us to begin with first?”
“Captain Hayden asked that you start with Heather Sullivan.” Nancy shook her head. “I’ve seen a lot of gruesome deaths in my years here, but the last week has taken it to a whole new level of evil.”
“It’s not been easy. Hopefully we can help stop the killings.”
Both women knew they had to do something, and do it fast.
“Set up a room,” Faith said. “I’ll be ready to go in a half hour.”
“Will do, boss,” Nancy said.
Thirty minutes later, both were in the suite ready to begin when the swinging door opened and Mitchell Hayden, now gowned up, entered the room. He moved with quick, purposeful strides, his gaze holding hers only for a second before he nodded and said hello to them.
Faith tugged down the overhead microphone. “Captain Hayden, is a detective from Austin police joining us?”
“Their detectives are running down surveillance tapes and witnesses.” He tugged on latex gloves. “Ready?”
She nodded to Nancy to pull back the sheet.
“According to the police report, her name is Heather Sullivan, age forty-nine,” Nancy stated.
Faith studied the round face etched with deep lines around the eyes and mouth. Age spots darkened portions of her forehead and the sides of her cheeks.
“I’ve run a toxicology test,” Nancy said. “She has the look of a drug user.”
When Heather Sullivan had been dressed, she’d looked trim, but here on the table Faith could see she was painfully thin.
“X-rays of her lungs showed a couple of questionable spots,” Nancy said.
Faith turned her attention to the victim’s neck, which had been stabbed and sliced. Judging by the angle, she guessed her killer had been behind her.
“Nancy, did you get a liver temperature?” Faith asked. Rigor mortis gave an approximate time of death, but either a rectal or liver temp was the most accurate way to go. After death, the body lost heat at a rate of thirty-four degrees per hour until it reached the temperature of its surroundings.
“I did,” Nancy said. “It was taken as soon as she arrived here. The temp was seventy-eight degrees, which almost matches the air temp at the crime scene. Her body was burned so that might throw off my estimate, but best guess, she’s been dead less than twenty-six to thirty-five hours,” Nancy said.
Faith inspected her charred skin. “The burns occurred after death.”
“We think the same person killed Sullivan, Garnet, and Crow,” Hayden said. “In Crow’s case, he used a hammer before the man suffered a heart attack and died. With Garnet the killer used a hammer first and then sliced his throat.”
“He didn’t use a hammer on Heather,” Faith said.
“Maybe she was frightened enough and talked before he had to.”
Faith continued her external exam, cataloging scars and any signs of old injuries. She found nothing else that might hint that there’d been trouble in this woman’s life.
She reached for the scalpel, made her incisions, and removed the rib cage. She took out and weighed each organ.
The uterus showed no sign of pregnancy, but there was significant scarring. “I doubt she could have had children. I believe she may have had a botched abortion or a miscarriage that wasn’t treated properly.”
She removed, weighed, and cataloged all the organs and then repacked them back into the abdomen. She opened up the throat and noted the damaged jugular.
As she tipped the head back and studied the throat, she saw what looked like a white piece of paper. She adjusted the headlamp hanging above, picked up tweezers, and used them to pull out the card.
Both Hayden and Nancy watched as she carefully unfolded it. It was the queen of hearts.
“A card. Just like with the Crows and Garnet,” Hayden said.
Macy felt the warm embrace of the long fingers that reminded her of her mother’s. There was a calming voice hovering over her, and she could make out sporadic words now. “Getting better. Sleep is best. Vitals good. I never knew about you. I wish I had. It would have all been different.”
She couldn’t nail down who was speaking, but she felt calm when the person was close. As much as she wanted to tell this person she was alive and only trapped in her body, she couldn’t get her eyes to open, regardless of how hard she tried.
Macy’s frustration grew with this broken body of hers that refused to cooperate. If she could just open her eyes, she would see all the answers that were so close.
As Faith returned to her office after visiting Macy, she pulled the rubber band from her hair and rubbed her scalp. She drew in a breath and rolled her shoulders, trying to chase away the tension. With a solid identification in hand, she called Detective Lana Franklin in Austin’s Homicide Unit.