He and I had something in common, I realized. We knew what others did not: that the bag of skin before him, holding a stew of decomposing tissue and percolating chemicals, was no longer Vicky Meeks. She was long gone, and the body left behind was nothing more than a symbol for her mother to mourn over.

The medical examiner’s detachment intrigued me. I concentrated on him, trying to feel what he was going through as he weighed out parcels of tissue on the scale and reduced Vicky Meeks to a series of precise scientific notations. Up in the forensics lab, three stories above us, Peggy Calhoun had chosen a microscopic world as her battlefield, but the medical examiner had chosen a world within as his. He was its warrior and his concentration absolute. To him, Vicky Meeks was a puzzle in reverse, a conundrum of flesh and bone to be filleted, separated, laid bare, and labeled in his search for the reasons why this body had given up as her vessel.

It did not take him long to catalog the causes of death. He announced them to Maggie quietly as he worked. Vicky Meeks had been killed slowly, bit by bit. She had been battered, bound, tortured with sanguinary zeal, and finally, strangled when her killer grew disenchanted with the reality of games that could never measure up to his fantasies.

Washing her body clean of grass and grime had revealed more of the small groupings of parallel slits carved into her legs and torso. Alissa Hayes had borne the same strange cuts, although some of hers had been much older than others and a few people had suggested she’d done it to herself—until they were discovered on the backs of her thighs, where no one could have achieved such symmetry solo. Vicky Meeks had similar cuts in almost the exact same places, although hers looked freshly inflicted, the wounds as red and raw as bite marks.

With unwavering silence Maggie watched the body reveal its secrets. She was not like the medical examiner, I realized. To her, the flesh and bones before her were still sacred. Yet I could tell she had shelved almost all personal emotions, that she was focusing on what the body could tell her with such intensity that she was close to sharing in the obsession the wounds revealed.

When the examiner explained that the girl had been held for at least a day, bound by her hands and feet, Maggie touched the rope burns tenderly, her eyes half closed, as if she hoped to divine the source of the torturer’s madness. It was the same thing she had done at the crime scene—held her palms to the earth where the body had lain, as if she could feel knowledge through it.

The medical examiner was in the middle of cataloging a constellation of shoulder wounds when Danny bumbled in the door, a sterile gown thrown haphazardly over his clothes. He reeked of booze and sweat.

I was astonished. What had inspired him to attend the autopsy? Was he trying to rise to Maggie’s level of competence? Or did he have a more malignant reason for being there?

I could not feel much from Danny. A dullness clung to him, as if he were giving up life layer by layer.

I wondered if Danny was dying.

“Well, look who the wildcat drug in,” the medical examiner said, his eyebrows rising in surprise.

I’d never known he had a sense of humor.

Danny glared at him but said nothing.

Maggie treated Danny with respect, as if his doing his job was no more than what she had expected. She summarized the examiner’s findings in a clear voice, perfect in her recall. As she began explaining the nature of the symmetrical knife cuts, Danny could no longer pretend he did not recognize the pattern. He flushed and I could feel his heart palpitating as if it were my own. His hands began to tremble so violently the medical examiner noticed.

“You okay?” he asked with concern.

“Alissa Hayes,” Danny whispered.

“Who?” Maggie asked, her gaze so intense it broke through Danny’s confusion.

“Alissa Hayes,” he said. “About four years ago, maybe less. Fahey and I caught the case.”

“What about the Alissa Hayes case?” Maggie asked slowly.

“She had these same marks. The parallel cuts that look like gills.”

“Are we talking about a closed case?” Maggie said. “As in the ones I was going through earlier when you stopped me?”

Danny was sweating so profusely I almost felt sorry for him. “It was closed,” he mumbled. “We got a guy for it.”

“Someone is serving time for it?” Maggie asked. I could feel her indignation rising. “Someone got convicted?” She looked straight into Danny’s eyes. “Was it a clean conviction?”

That was her way of asking Danny if he had tampered with the evidence.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Maggie glanced at the medical examiner, but he just shrugged. “Before my time,” he explained.

“Let’s take a look at the file,” Maggie suggested. “This could be a copycat.”

“Maybe so,” Danny said, turning away from the body. “Maybe so.”

We all knew it wasn’t true. Danny had what was left of his conscience to tell him that he’d been sloppy, that one of his mistakes had come back to him.

Me? I had Alissa Hayes herself to tell me the exact same thing.