Plain walls, tall columns, and expansive windows belied the gruesome tasks carried out within the building on the corner of Forty-Ninth and Broadway. It seemed more suited to scruffy-bearded software designers until the plain-lettered sign came into view—Sacramento County Coroner. John pulled into the parking lot at the rear morgue entrance. He avoided the front public lobby where families waited to claim the remains of their loved ones. Good news never came to those who gathered there, and John felt the lobby held a suffocating cloud of misery from years of accumulated sorrow.
Dual glass doors parted for the detectives as they walked in from the covered bay, past the coroner’s white nondescript minivans, used to harvest the dead for examination. A pair of attendants rolled a white-sheeted gurney from an industrial scale toward a wall-mounted X-ray machine. Movement and control of the remains that passed through this building required the skill of an air traffic controller. Dr. Sandra Kelly was equal to the task. During her tenure as coroner, budget cuts hit the operation along with the loss of half of the forensic pathologist positions and the elimination of the chief forensic pathologist. Only two forensic pathologists remained, and they were on call twenty-four-seven to handle the load. Each performed more than six hundred autopsies a year, more than twice the national average. Criminal defense lawyers pounced on the slightest hint of a miscalculation or procedural error due to the workload. So far, Dr. Kelly aptly doused the embers of doubt when called as an expert witness. The look on her face changed when she noticed John and Paula cut through the six open bays of the autopsy suite. These three recent murders tested the coroner’s office resources and her own reputation. This was personal.
Dr. Kelly grabbed a file as the two detectives entered.
“Come with me,” Dr. Kelly said. No polite conversation, no banter. The doctor led them to the homicide suite, one of two enclosed autopsy spaces.
A sheet draped a lump in the center of the stainless-steel table. Too small for a corpse; the remnants of Cardozo’s body hid under the cover. The size of the bundle betrayed the violence inflicted on the former gangbanger.
One wall in the suite displayed a dozen photos of the Mercer and Johnson autopsies. The wounds were identical, grisly bookends of one another. A single, long gash ran from victims’ throats down the length of their torsos.
“Let’s start here,” Dr. Kelly said. “Mercer and Johnson exhibited a common single wound track running from the sternoclavicular joint, where the collarbone and sternum connect down to the pubic arch. Deep, straight, and precise.”
Dr. Kelly pulled back the sheeting and exposed Cardozo’s carcass. “You see anything different here than what we found with Mercer and Johnson?”
John stepped forward to the steel table where the torso sat like an empty shell, void of its life-sustaining contents. The lump of flesh and bone was sickly white under the autopsy room lighting, more grotesque than it had been in the moonlight. The chest cavity had sunk in on itself because the ribs no longer connected to the sternum. Each rib bore evidence of a sharp cut severing the rib cage from the breastbone. The victim’s skin was drawn and puckered like the leather of an old baseball glove. This, too, was evident in the prior two victims.
“Looks the same to me,” John said.
“And you call yourself a detective,” Dr. Kelly said behind a smirk.
The coroner pressed her gloved hand down on the incision, at the point where the incision began. The severed rib, cartilage, and muscle tissue, while cleanly cut, bore reddish, mottled stains. “Along with the histamine levels in the tissue, this indicates that the incision was perimortem.”
“This is how you knew he was alive when the killer went to work on him?” Paula said.
“Exactly. Help me turn him,” the doctor directed.
John took a purple latex-free glove from a box on the counter and pulled it over his right hand. Along with Dr. Kelly, he turned the torso onto its side.
John saw the bruise before Dr. Kelly pointed it out. “That looks like a ligature mark. I couldn’t see that through the mud last night,” he said.
“The bruises tell us this victim was restrained before death. There is a narrow gouge in the skin from whatever was used to bind him. I’ve swabbed it for trace, but I’m not hopeful it will reveal anything.”
“Narrow, like rope or a length of wire?” John said.
“I’d be inclined to say wire. It was wrapped tightly around the victim’s torso, and it didn’t leave any abrasions that I’d expect to see from a rope or drapery cord.”
“Mercer and Johnson didn’t have any evidence of restraint,” Paula said, looking at the crime photos.
“Why did Cardozo need the restraint that the others didn’t?” John said.
“The simple answer is he was alive. Couple that with the near lack of lividity, and that means most of the blood was drained before it had the opportunity to pool. See here, there are a few speckles of pooling; not what you would normally expect,” Dr. Kelly said as she touched pinpoint purple specks on Cardozo’s back.
Together, John and the doctor lowered the torso back down. John snapped his glove off and tossed it into a red biohazard container near the exam table.
He walked to the wall that displayed the Mercer and Johnson autopsy photos. “What are you saying?”
“The evidence points to the fact that they were dead before the incisions occurred,” Dr. Kelly said. “This new one was alive. We don’t know if Cardozo was conscious or not.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Paula added. “You mean he may have been awake when this happened to him?”
“It’s possible, and the use of the restraint tells me that it was highly probable.”
“Cause of death?” John asked.
“I have tissue samples in the lab for a tox screen. He didn’t leave us liver tissue, ocular fluid, blood, or brain matter to work with. Just an empty shell. Right now, Cardozo is like Mercer and Johnson—homicide with the exact cause of death undetermined.”
“This guy covers his tracks. But the killer had to know that Cardozo’s tattoos would give us a quick identification. We needed a DNA hit to identify Mercer and Johnson. Cardozo was different,” John said.
“What if the profiler was right about the whole spilling his guts thing, the idea that he was a snitch? Was the killer trying to find out if he was an informant? It might explain why Cardozo was awake when he was gutted,” Paula said.
“That’s an angle we can explore,” John said. “We can go back and check against known informants. Just because the West Block Norteños claim Cardozo wasn’t in trouble with the gang doesn’t mean they didn’t do a little housecleaning.”
Dr. Kelly pulled the sheeting back over Cardozo’s remains. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help here. There’s simply nothing left to autopsy. Everything is gone. It’s like it was already done for us.”
John turned, took a step toward the door, then stopped and returned to the photo display. His finger traced the incisions on the Mercer photo and then touched the Johnson photo. He tapped the latter. “What’s he doing with the body parts he keeps?”
“I don’t know. The precision with which he dissected, removed limbs and all the internal matter is disturbing. This is someone who knows exactly what he wants with the body and goes about it very efficiently.”
“Medical training?” John asked.
“You want to look at every doctor, mortician, and veterinarian in the Central Valley?” Paula asked her partner.
“It’s a pool to start with,” he said.
“It’s a frickin’ ocean until we know what he’s doing with the body parts. There is absolutely no chatter on the street about finding body parts. Is he getting rid of them? He could be making stew like that New York cop for all we know,” she countered.
“A disgruntled sous chef, an off-the-rails satanic cult, or a killer getting rid of gang informants, Cardozo is our connection to the ‘why.’ This killer is skilled and kept his victim alive while he slowly killed him. What did he want from Cardozo?” John said.
“More than his insides?” Paula asked.
“Something made Cardozo special. We find out what that was and we’re finally in our killer’s head.”