“I am, Adam. Except don’t you leave me until your other agents get here! I have to admit that although I love my husband, I’m not quite ready to meet him on the other side.”
Smiling, he nodded and turned back to Matt and Meg. “You two can go straight to the morgue. Killer’s at the office with Angela. By the time you finish at the OCME, you can pick him up and, by then, Angela will be able to give you the information about where you’re staying. This speech...it’s Walker’s first bid for the presidency. He could be in danger, too.”
What he didn’t say in front of Maddie was If Walker’s not in on it.
Meg didn’t argue. But she didn’t agree. If Walker wasn’t in on it, someone in his retinue was. They’d learn who that person was if they could just find Lara.
And find her...alive.
*
Meg was getting accustomed to the morgue, Matt thought. Regardless of how often he’d been at autopsies, it was always difficult. Probably because all mortals knew that they were destined for cremation or earthworms...
Then there were the philosophical questions about the essence of life itself. Matt knew that when death came, the body was no more than organic waste. In the morgue, and by the time of burial or cremation, the body was no more human than a side of beef in a freezer.
What a terrible way to think.
But maybe not. He wasn’t an atheist or even an agnostic. He’d seen—and he believed. He knew that the human soul or essence—the quality that made every man and woman unique—moved on. Rarely, very rarely, agents had seen the dead at an autopsy or in a morgue. It was definitely an unusual occurrence. Perhaps the dead could bear it no more than the living.
As Kat explained that the body had been compromised by embalming and she wasn’t sure what they’d find, he was glad to see that Meg’s eyes were still somewhat wide and misty. Yet she had what it took to be here—even though she didn’t want to be. What she had was not only a sensitivity to human tragedy, but the strength to face it.
“What we’re really looking for is the absence of digitalis, yes?” Matt asked Kat.
“We’ll do all kinds of toxicology tests—including some not normally done,” Kat replied.
“Have you felt anything?” he asked her next.
Kat shrugged lightly. “No. But that doesn’t mean one of you won’t sense...something.”
Wong joined them in the room where Congressman Hubbard now lay.
“I have all the victims of the, uh, River Ripper here,” he told them, a look of distaste on his face. “They’re in the next room. I’ve been searching for anything they might have had in common, other than their size, their coloring, their age. Anything that might tell us more about why they were chosen. Do you want to make comparisons yourselves?”
“Of course.” Matt nodded. He shared Wong’s aversion to the “River Ripper” label, but he knew the media just couldn’t resist.
Meg fell into step with him as he followed the ME to the next room. Toe tags identified each of the victims. Cathy Crighton, the first to die, had been very badly cut by stones in the river and mauled by the creatures—beyond the brutality done by her killer. The second victim, the first one he’d seen, the woman Meg had feared might be Lara, was next. Her tag read Karen Grant. Genie Gonzales had been transported from Richmond and now, the last young woman, the prostitute Marci Henning, lay on the fourth stainless-steel table.
Matt viewed the four of them and realized that from a distance they really were remarkably alike. Just as he’d expected. But when he moved closer, he noted that the fourth was somewhat different.
“How tall was she, Dr. Wong?”
“Five-four,” Wong said, “approximately.”
“The cuts seem more jagged—as if they were done quickly,” Meg commented. He turned and saw that she was pale, but still right by his side.
“Good observation. Especially considering the condition of the corpse,” Wong said.
“But you still believe it’s the same killer?” Matt asked.
“Definitely. The kind of drugs found in the system and the amount of each, the way the first slash was made, the fact that the tongue is missing and the way the body cavity was torn open. Yes, I’d say the same man—right-handed, and following his method consistently. The difference is...he was either in a hurry on Ms. Henning, or...he was tired.”
“Interesting. If you’re a serial killer, why go after someone when you’re exhausted?” Meg wondered.
“Maybe he has a timetable,” Matt said. “Which is a very frightening idea.” He let out a sigh. “I’ll go over the morgue photos tonight and see if there’s anything else, anything at all that I can discover. So far, we know that Cathy Crighton left work and was probably taken off the street. It was likely the same with Genie Gonzales. We don’t know about Karen Grant, and we know that Marci Henning was working the street—and left in a black sedan.” He found himself gently touching Marci’s hair. A life never really lived, a life of broken dreams. And then death.