She snapped her mouth shut. “How do you always know?”
“Because you guys are all the same. It’s the first thing out of your mouths every time. Cause of death, time of death, all of that.” He snorted. “As if I’ve had a chance to even figure any of it out.”
“Well, we were thinking cause of death was the slashed throat,” Rodney suggested.
“He was,” she clarified.
At that, Smidge turned and stared at her. “What’s your vote?”
She shrugged. “I don’t like very much about this one at all,… so I won’t hazard a guess.”
His eyebrows popped up. “What? You won’t go for the obvious?”
She shook her head. “No. The obvious in this case doesn’t work for me.”
“Explain,” he barked.
“She has been too badly tortured,” she detailed. “And I’m thinking those are severed vocal cords.”
He looked at her in approval. “You’re right. It cut her vocal cords. And this is a cut to her throat”—he pointed—“but I’m not sure it’s what killed her. It’s not very deep.”
She nodded. “I was thinking he might have been almost killing her and bringing her back, almost killing her and bringing her back,” she suggested. “And cutting her vocal cords meant nobody would hear her. He could torture her for as long as he wanted to.”
At her side, Rodney muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ. I didn’t even think along that line. Who the hell would?” He turned and frowned at Kate, dumbfounded.
She shrugged. “It’s a big city. It’s dense, and who has a space private enough for a woman to scream—like she would have from the pain,” she said quietly. “The severed vocal cords are a given.”
“So what do you think killed her?” asked Smidge, as he continued to examine the body.
“Well, I’m really hoping,” she added quietly, “a shitload of drugs are in her system.”
“There probably are. I just don’t know what and how much yet.” Smidge stood. “You’ll get more when I get more.”
She nodded quietly.
“Do you ever think of going into this field?”
“No.” Her headshake was adamant. “I’m doing what I do now, and that’s about as far as I can go.”
“Hey”—he shrugged—“you’re doing the part I don’t do. We need all of it.”
With one last glance at the body and the dumpster and the mess all around, she turned and nodded. “We need everybody on board for this one.” Kate wrapped her arms around her chest. “It feels ugly.”
“That’s because it is ugly,” Smidge agreed, giving her a look. He motioned at two guys, who lifted the body from the dumpster and placed it on the plastic laid out for that purpose. He added, “No clothing and no ID, nothing to identify her.”
“Any tattoos?” she asked quietly.
He looked at the dead woman again. “No. Nothing I’m seeing at the moment anyway. But then the body’s still a mess.”
With the corpse in front of them, the gruesomeness of what had been done to her was even more apparent. One breast appeared to have been cut off, and chunks of flesh were missing from her thigh and her pubis.
Kate shook her head. “I really don’t like the missing pieces.”
“In what way?” Rodney asked, his tone snarky. “Just think about it though. It might give us something to go on.”
She shook her head, frowning. “I mean, that’s possible, but why those pieces? Why there? Was he just experimenting? Was he curious? What the hell,” she said in disgust. “Wouldn’t it be nice if people would consider a human body as sacred and something to be honored instead of desecrated?”
“We’re living in the wrong times for that,” the coroner argued. He stood again, barking orders to his team. He walked toward her. “I don’t need to tell you to catch this asshole, right?”