“We’re not going to get anything from soft tissue—other than DNA, which might help, at least in identifying her,” the ME said.
They were at the county morgue.
Griffin and Rocky were staying for the autopsy.
Wendell Harper had been in only long enough to ask that the report be emailed to him as soon as possible. He was heading back out to the Quabbin.
Dive teams were going to go over the area once again, just in case.
The good thing that morning was that the morgue wasn’t busy, and there was no question that their lady from the lake would be getting first priority.
There were only two others awaiting autopsy at the moment; one was an eighty-year-old who had suffered from cancer and died in her home, and a ninety-year-old who had simply died in his sleep.
Death, for the most part, had been gentle in the area the last day or so.
Except for the poor woman on the gurney before them.
“Even pinning down a date and time for when she was killed is almost impossible—the damage to the body is so great,” the ME said.
He was a young man, ironically named Dr. Graves, Dr. Evan Graves. But he was as serious and seemed to be as thorough as a doctor could possibly be.
The body had been cleaned by Graves’s dernier, or assistant. It lay naked—and heavily, heavily decomposed.
Graves pointed out every factor that he could. “I’m going on a lot of scientific research,” he said. “Bodies found in the water—especially cold water—in the first week are usually in decent condition. After eight days—according to research done for a paper called Legal Medicine—decay begins to set in. They looked at bodies off the coast of Portugal—those found in the first week were easily identified. After twenty days—DNA was their only method of identification.”
Griffin held silent, letting him talk. The young doctor was still a newbie; in a few years, he’d get to where he’d tell law enforcement just what they needed to know. He’d come to realize that most of them had been through enough autopsies to have a decent rudimentary grasp of what happened to a body after death.
Then again, there was always something that could be learned.
“About ten years ago,” Graves continued, “studies were done on plane crash victims—one off the coast of Sicily and off the coast of Namibia. At three weeks, the body found was partially skeletonized. At thirty-four days, in that kind of water, the second body found was completely skeletonized. I’ve read a great deal about such studies,” he assured them. “So, looking at our body today, considering the cold water, I’d estimate three to four weeks. Decomposition—in the water or on land—begins immediately at the point of death. The water allows for other creatures, but kept insects away. Fish eat each other often enough—and they have no problem nibbling on a decaying human being. Crabs are brutal on a body—crabs are probably responsible for the fact that there’s really no face left.
“And the water was cold,” Graves told them, “so that creates a different timeline. Had she been down there for months, we’d have had nothing but bone, and maybe a bit of something here and there.”
“So, you believe, three to four weeks.”
“I’m going to say, because of the water temperature, possibly almost four weeks.” He sighed. “From what I can thus far fathom from the bones, she was young—twenty to twenty-five years of age.” He hesitated. “We’ll probably strip her down to bone, and get our best answers that way at this point.”
“Thank you,” Griffin said. “The main question here is, can you tell us how she died?”
Graves looked up at him. “I most certainly can.” He indicated the neck. “Her throat was slit, gentlemen. Slit hard and far back—if she had received much more of a blow from the knife, the head would have been decapitated. Actually, it’s a miracle that it was still attached when you found the body.”
*
Vickie didn’t mean to slam Devin in the ribs with the force that she did. She was just so startled to see Charlie Oakley she had reacted without thought.
Devin yelped, then smiled at Frank Sanderson across the table from her. “Cramp!” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Excuse me!” Vickie said. “A friend just walked in.” She slid out of the booth, catching Devin’s eyes and indicating the man who was about to leave. Devin quickly appraised the situation.
“Vickie,” Devin said, “ask retired detective Oakley to join us.”
Vickie nodded and hurried over to catch up with Oakley. She tapped him on the back, startling him.
He turned around and stared at her. “Vickie!” he said. “Miss Preston.”
“Charlie. Hi. What are you doing out here?” she asked.
He lowered his head and eyes, squirming uncomfortably. “I couldn’t stay away,” he told her, looking up at her at last. “It was on the news, Vickie. That a body was found. In the Quabbin. I had to come out here. I have to know what’s going on.”
“Charlie, Sheena died long ago.”
“And I’m still around, right?” he asked.
She nodded. “Charlie, where are you staying?”
He hesitated again, she thought.
“With a friend,” he told her.
“In Barre?”
“In Ware,” he told her.
She nodded, looking at him. The restaurant was on Route 32, almost in between Barre and Ware. Ware itself was something like fourteen miles, about a twenty-or twenty-five-minute drive, due to the winding roads in the area.
“We’re sitting with a couple of new friends who are also involved with this situation,” Vickie told him. “Won’t you join us? I’ll tell you quickly first—Isaac Sherman’s fiancée disappeared about a year ago. Her body was found in the woods near the Quabbin. A bear attack was blamed. Frank Sanderson’s daughter, Carly, is missing. The police believe that she’s alive. Sanderson thinks that she’s being held somewhere against her will. Because she’s an adult, there isn’t a great deal that the police can do.”
“I’m happy to come meet them,” Charlie Oakley told her.
She brought him over to their table.
Frank Sanderson and Isaac Sherman rose to meet him. Charlie sat with them. He told them about the case in Fall River.
And about the murder of Sheena Petrie, and how he never believed that it was connected—or that the prostitution ring had been real Satanists in any way, shape or form. It was his sincere belief that someone else had carved the Satanic words into the earth near the place that Sheena Petrie’s body had been found, and that the “cult” had been purposely set up to take the fall, since they were already going up on murder charges and no one was believing a word they said, anyway.
“They’re out there!” Isaac Sherman announced suddenly. “Can’t you feel it? They’re out there in the woods, and they’re planning for something very, very bad.”
Vickie glanced over at Devin. Goose bumps had risen on her arms.
Because she believed it was true.
They were out there.
But they were hiding in acre upon acre of forest, and her group had no idea where!
*
“I wish we were just at headquarters with this one—with Angela Hawkins and all her wonderful boards,” Rocky said.
They had left the morgue, and were traveling back to Barre.
“We have dead people. We have missing people,” he said. “We have massive acreage where someone could be hiding. Why are they hiding? Cults are usually out in the open. They have great big compounds.”
“And then, they sent people into Boston to attack others,” Griffin noted.
“Think that was to keep us away from this area?”
“If that’s the case, it wasn’t really a bright move—not if you consider the fact that most historians know the quotation links to Ezekiel Martin, and that Jehovah was out here somewhere.”
“Say that our killer—and I use that term whether he or she wielded the knife themselves or not—is a bright person. Extremely bright. Sometimes, those who are superintelligent don’t really have a lot of street smarts,” Rocky pointed out.
“Theory?” Griffin said.