MECHWARRIOR: DARK AGE #24: DRAGON RISING

The autopsy room was very quiet except for the soft hum of specimen refrigerators along the right wall. The temperature hovered at a cool eighteen C, enough to chill the tip of Detective Harry Loveland’s nose. The hospital laundry was just around the corner from the morgue, and the air smelled like soap laced with the sharper bite of fixative and the stink of decomposition mingling with the jagged tang of copper.

A fluorescent light-globe floated over a waist-high stainless steel autopsy table. A body, covered by a white sheet, lay on the table. The body might have been male or female. Loveland couldn’t tell.

‘‘Maybe.’’ The ME was a round man with eyes small as ball bearings. ‘‘I’ve never run into a killer with three distinctive killing styles.’’

Special Agent Richard Thereon said this with no hint of superiority, and Loveland liked him for it. No matter what the planet, Bureau guys shared a sort of cookie-cutter quality: the gray suit, starched white shirt, nice tie. Agents had ’tude, couldn’t wait to show you what a moron you were. Thereon worked out of Ancha’s Bureau of Investigation and was . . . different. He could’ve been a turd. Loveland’s jurisdiction was Kordova on Towne. Detectives usually didn’t work cases out of their jurisdiction. Loveland did because the planetary legate said he could. (Other planetary jurisdictions hadn’t objected. Now they could blame Loveland if the investigation went south.) Anyway, Thereon wasn’t a turd.

‘‘Well, if he is, it’s only sporadic.’’ The ME poked at his computer. The screen filled with the body of a nude woman on an autopsy gurney. Her skin was puffy but not hideously swollen, with a bluish hue. The long hair was dark and limp as seaweed. A deeply purple-black bruise encircled the woman’s throat right below the thyroid cartilage, like a too-tight necklace. Her eyes were gone, tags of bleached flesh highlighted against naked bone.

‘‘Okay,’’ the ME said, ‘‘I’ve had a chance to review all the cases that the Kordova ME, Doctor Slade, did. The Little Luthien killer’s first vic, Alicia Lang, found 23 February 3134. Time of death was within the twenty-four hours prior to discovery. Cause of death was fatal brain anoxia secondary to ligature strangulation. The eyes were removed antemortem.’’

‘‘Yup. But here’s what’s interesting. Your guy is ambidextrous and a pro. No nicks, no hesitation marks. The lids were cleanly sliced with a single-edged blade, likely a scalpel. Same with the second victim, except that woman had no ears, and the third, no tongue.’’

‘‘See no evil, hear no evil,’’ Thereon said. His eyes were gray, large and stormy, as if filled with heavy clouds. ‘‘A real joker.’’

‘‘Yeah, except Chuckles got a kill buddy, Shu Imashinigi,’’ the ME said. ‘‘Vic two had lots of hesitation marks, ripped skin. But by victim three—’’ Another woman, her mouth a bloody gaping maw. ‘‘Imashinigi’s improved. Only nine cuts to get the tongue. But even at the end, his technique was still pretty crude.’’

Another click, and this time, there was an image of an adolescent girl in pieces. ‘‘When they found his daughter’s body in his deep freeze, she was in pieces. But she was surgically dismembered, very neatly. That’s Chuckles, not Imashinigi. That pelvic block dissection . . .’’ The ME was balding as well as plump, and he palmed his scalp, stroking the skin as if smoothing back hair. ‘‘I couldn’t’ve done it better.’’

Loveland had investigated fatal rape cases where MEs cored the pelvis. He didn’t like the procedure now any more than he did then. In this case, that detail was kept back from the press as well as any hint there was a killing team. ‘‘Why the dissection?’’

‘‘To rub your nose in it, Harry,’’ Thereon said. ‘‘He wanted you to know that this girl had been brutally victimized by her father. Our unsub is extremely intelligent, highly organized—and having the time of his life.’’

At the autopsy table, the ME peeled back the sheet to reveal not a man’s face, neck and shoulders but a woman’s. ‘‘Just like Slade, I kept asking myself how Chuckles did it. How did he immobilize these women? Because they were alive. Then I read Slade’s reports, and then I got Agent Thereon’s report on that Ancha prostitute, the one got her throat ripped out, and the Bureau ME’s findings. So I looked at this lady—and I found it.’’

Loveland stared down at this Jane Doe, unclaimed, not missed. Her face was pulpy. Her nose had been broken by a blow delivered by a right-handed individual. Her chocolate-brown skin was dusky, with extensive marbling by dark green vessels ballooning with stagnant blood. The morgue refrigerator maintained the body near freezing to prevent further decay, but Loveland still caught a whiff of rot.

And the woman didn’t have a throat. Instead, there was a ragged, bloodless crater. The trachea had been crushed, the left carotid artery severed, and the right pulped. As she suffocated, Jane Doe had seen her blood sheeting her killer’s face.

But while the bite marks matched, the DNA samples didn’t. Both prostitutes had been murdered by the same man in the same way because the bite marks matched. Yet the DNA recovered in this woman’s throat and beneath her nails was different. They had two cold hits.

Using his gloved hands, the ME gently turned the woman’s head. Her hair was a spiked black tangle, but the running stitches, like the seam on a baseball, were clearly visible: the skin sutured after the skull cap had been refitted, and the woman’s face and scalp pulled back over the exposed bone. ‘‘Right there,’’ he said, peering through a magnifying glass. ‘‘Between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Impossible to pick up unless you knew where to look. The fact that all the victims since Proserpina have dark skin makes it that much harder to find.’’

Loveland squinted through the magnifying glass as the ME gently pulled the skin taut between two gloved fingers. Then Loveland saw it: the tiny lips of a circular wound invisible to the naked eye.

The ME said. ‘‘He must’ve used a stiff, strong wire and pithed her like a frog, except he didn’t obliterate the brain-stem. So she’d be conscious but paralyzed.’’ The ME peeled the sheet to the woman’s abdomen. ‘‘This poor woman didn’t feel a thing, but she saw every second.’’

The woman’s breasts were gone. Flesh and fatty tissue had been deftly sliced away to expose muscle the color of meat left too long in a grocer’s display case.