Dana wondered what had happened to the pendant itself. Had they missed it among all the wreckage? No way to know, and she did not think it was a practical idea to go to the crash site and try to be Sherlock Holmes. So she kept digging through the file. There were inventory pages for each of the dead teenagers, and she scanned them, just on the off chance that they might have had similar pendants, but there was nothing like that. So much for a budding theory. There was very little jewelry of any kind, though, even among the girls.
On another page, she found a list of noted Scars, Marks, Tattoos. Nothing there that connected the victims, although there was a notation that the two boys, Jeffrey and Chuck, had indications of tattoos that were materially obscured by trauma. She fished for the autopsy photos of the two boys and peered at them closely, grunted, and showed them to Ethan.
“Look at this.”
“That’s gross,” he said.
“No, it’s just that each of them had tattoos on their upper arms at about the same place. Same size, too. And look there and there? You can see some orange and black.”
“So?”
“So, maybe they had tattoos of an eclipse.”
“Again … so?”
“Maisie was wearing an eclipse pendant when I saw her. They only found a silver chain.”
Ethan began to dismiss it, then stopped and chewed his lip for a moment. “Hmm … since the sheriff’s department only found the chain and not the pendant, and both tattoos were messed up, you think someone’s trying to hide a connection?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He studied her. “You’d make a good cop.”
“We would.”
They searched for more, but there was nothing else that could even remotely connect with an eclipse. So they moved on. There was a page attached to each victim’s report that summarized their blood analysis. She read them over, then showed the pages to Ethan. “See this? It shows that none of the teens had been drinking.”
He read through them. “Blood alcohol levels normal? In every case? I missed that.” Ethan looked at her. “Okay, so none of them were drinking. They said they were high.”
“But on what?” Dana asked. “There’s just this.” She pointed to a comment, then read it aloud. “‘Evidence of synthetic compound simulating effects of standard 5-HT2A receptor agonists.’” She shook her head. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” said Ethan. “Maybe we can figure out a way to ask Two-Suit.”
She agreed and began to close the big folder but stopped, took a breath, and then went back and pulled Maisie’s autopsy photo out again and studied it. Maisie had been badly mangled and the wounds were horrific, but Dana forced herself to look closely at them. Clipped to the last photo was a photocopy of a page that had been used to take notes. It had an outline of a generic human female body, with arms out to the sides. There were dozens of X’s marked on it and a list of corresponding injuries, all in medical shorthand that Dana could not interpret. Remarks like subdural hematoma and comminuted fractures of the occipital bone are observed, and the mucosa of the epiglottis, glottis, piriform sinuses, trachea, and major bronchi are anatomic. Picking through that to make sense of it would require a medical dictionary, and despite all the books on the shelves, there wasn’t one to be found.
But then something struck Dana, and she stopped and looked more closely at the diagram, then shuffled through and pulled out the autopsy photos.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” she asked quickly.
“Sure, why?”
“I want to check something.”
Ethan got up and fetched a big magnifier from the desk, and she took it and used it to look at each separate wound. The damage was so extensive that it was difficult to find what she was looking for, but it was there.
It was all there.
The damage to Maisie’s wrists, the punctures in the tops of her feet, the smaller cuts along her hairline, and the deeper cut in her side. Dana’s mouth went suddenly dry, and once more it was hard to breathe.
“No…,” she murmured.
“What?” asked Ethan.
“Oh my God,” said Dana. “Quick, get me something to draw on.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Do it,” she snapped.
He hurried over to the desk again and brought back a yellow legal pad and mechanical pencil. Dana took them without a word, tore off a sheet, placed it over the diagram, and traced the same female outline. Then she removed the copied sheet, studied it, and carefully drew only those injuries she had seen in both her dream and waking vision. When she was done, Dana showed it to Ethan.
“Okay,” he said. “So?”
“I think these are the injuries that really killed her,” said Dana, and went over her memories again.
“How do you know that?”
“When I saw Maisie in the locker room, all I could see was what was being done to her.” Dana went over the locker room incident again and then explained about the dark angel in her dream on Sunday night, the night Maisie was murdered.
“Wait, you actually saw this … this … angel … cut and stab her?” said Ethan, appalled. “That’s gross.”
“No, it wasn’t exactly like that. The dream is hazy. In the locker room I saw her with stigmata. Seeing this diagram, I think—no, I’m sure—that Maisie was killed using the wounds of Christ and that the car accident was set up to hide it.”
“Why? By who?”
“How would I know?”