The Cold Room. J.T. Ellison

Taylor always suspected it was more than that, but never had the proof.

      Sadness overwhelmed her. She looked at the young man on the table, wondered what drove him to despair.

      “Do you know why?” Taylor asked. “What might have pushed him to this? Was there a note?”

      “No, there wasn’t. But there was a lot of anal tearing. It was pretty apparent that he was being abused, for a prolonged period of time. I’m not sure exactly what his story is, but he doesn’t have biological parents in the state. He was a part of the foster system.”

      Taylor felt the fury bubble up from within her soul. “So we have foster kids being raped who kill themselves with shotguns now. Jesus, Sam.”

      McKenzie spun on his stool and faced them. “I had a friend kill herself. It was awful.” He spun away and Taylor met Sam’s eyes. That sentiment they understood all too well.

      Sam signaled to one of her assistants. “Could you finish this for me? I’ll be back to post him next.”

      She walked two tables over to the prepped body of the victim from last night, stripped off her gloves and replaced them with a fresh set.

      McKenzie followed them reluctantly. “The prints are back. Her name’s Allegra Johnson.”

      Taylor looked at the girl, so insubstantial. The steel table dwarfed her, like it would a child. The wound tract from the knife that had been buried in the girl’s chest glared under the lights, an angry slit.

      “She was in the system?”

      “Yeah. Solicitation. Shocking. Skinny girl like this—drugs and prostitution were my first guess,” he answered.

      Sam and Taylor’s eyes met again. Taylor took a deep breath. “McKenzie, kill the sarcasm. You can never assume, or guess, when it comes to a victim. You end up planting ideas in your head about them, and then you try to make the crime fit your preconceived notion of what makes sense to you. There could be other explanations for her physical appearance. She could very well be ill, or homeless, unable to feed herself. This could have been a crime of opportunity. We don’t know yet why she was chosen. We won’t know until we do a thorough victimology, okay?”

      McKenzie’s brows furrowed for a moment while he thought it out. What she said must have made sense, because his forehead smoothed and he nodded. “Okay,” he said. Maybe training him wasn’t going to be as hard as she expected.

      Sam cleared her throat, and another tech, a quiet man named Stuart Charisse with incongruously lighthearted curly hair, appeared to help her. He started taking pictures while Sam turned on the microphone attached to her face shield, and started the case rundown. Taylor listened with half an ear as Sam gave the details—date, time, who was present, all the minutiae that was necessary to the formal autopsy process. McKenzie stood next to her, bopping his head up and down in an internal rhythm to Sam’s dispassionate recitation.

      Allegra’s body was a mass of wretchedness. Every bone was clearly defined; Taylor could count each rib individually. The girl looked like she’d literally wasted away.

      Sam started her assessment. “The body is that of a malnourished twenty-one-year-old female African-American who looks younger than her recorded age. The body was received to the medical examiner’s office naked, attached by fine filament to a post measuring six feet, three-quarter inches long by ten inches square. The filament was wrapped around the forehead, wrists, torso, waist, hips, thighs and feet of the victim’s body.” Sam turned off the mike.

      “It was a bitch and a half getting her off that post. The knife was buried two inches into the wood. We documented the whole thing, video and stills. This will be a good teaching case. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something as bizarre.”

      Taylor nodded. “Good. That’s the kind of stuff A.D.A. Page loves. Helps for when we catch this guy and try his ass. Was the filament holding her up fishing line?”

      “I think so. Trace will tell us exactly what kind. If we’re lucky, maybe he’s some kind of famous bass aficionado and we’ll be able to track the line to his tackle box.”

      “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

      Sam turned her mike back on and bent over her work. “The body is five foot one inches tall and weighs sixty-nine pounds. Body Mass Index is thirteen point four. The body is cachetic, with temporal wasting, prominent bone protrusions, concave abdomen. Pale oral mucosa, pale conjunctivae with some minor petechial hemorrhage. A vitreous fluid level is taken.”

      Taylor glanced at McKenzie, expecting him to freak, but he stood his ground and watched. Good. He was toughening up.

      Sam took the victim’s hand, pinched a fold of skin between her gloved thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. The skin tented and stayed that way. The silent attendant took a picture. She moved to Allegra’s abdomen and repeated the action. The results were the same.

      “Skin is ashy and has exceptionally poor turgor. No one can say this girl was just plain skinny. I’m seeing severe dehydration, for starters,” Sam said.

      Taylor nodded. “About that. Baldwin mentioned something last night. He’s been dealing with a serial case in Italy.”

      McKenzie brightened. “Il Macellaio or Il Mostro?”

      “How do you know about them?” Taylor asked.

      “Oh, I follow serial-killer cases. I find them fascinating.”

      Ha. McKenzie didn’t have a clue what it would be like to really follow a serial killer. He wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic.

      “Il Macellaio. Tell me what you know,” she said.

      “Well,” McKenzie began, suddenly blushing at being the center of attention.

      She needed to train him away from that, and fast. The minute A.D.A. Page, who was cute as a button and fierce as a shark, got him on the stand, started asking him questions and he blushed, the jury would assume he was lying.

      “Relax,” she said. “I’m just curious, okay?”

      He continued to redden, though he nodded his head yes. “Il Macellaio likes to have sex with dead girls,” he managed.

      “Ugh,” Sam said, but Taylor nodded her approval.

      “It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, McKenzie, but you’re right. He’s a necrosadist, a killer that murders in order to have sex with the dead victim. Very rare. And he poses his victims like famous paintings after he’s through with their bodies. Which is where I was going. Baldwin said several of the earlier cases’ COD was starvation, but Il Macellaio moved on to strangulation. I guess he got tired of waiting for them to die.”

      Sam had moved on to the next phase of her exam, had the victim in stirrups and was between her legs taking samples. “Yo, we’ve got lubricant here. Starvation and necrophilia, huh? Sounds like a nice guy. If that’s the case for Ms. Johnson, and I can’t say one way or the other until I finish the post, he’d probably need some lube to get things in the right place, if you know what I mean.”

      “Why?” McKenzie asked.

      Sam kept working, but spoke over her shoulder to him. “When you’re severely dehydrated, all your fluids dry up. All of them. Your blood thickens, your blood pressure drops dramatically, you’d feel sluggish and unable to move around. With no nourishment at all, it wouldn’t take long to be dry as a chip. That’s why her skin is tenting, there’s no fluid in the body to help the skin return to its normal state. It would be a rough way to go. But here’s our pièce de résistance. Stuart, could you help me roll her? Gently, now.”

      It didn’t take much to get the girl over onto her face. Taylor saw the pattern on the girl’s back and sucked in her breath.

      Sam traced her finger along the girl’s back. “Yeah. Pretty wild, huh?”

      McKenzie cocked his head to the side. “Is this lividity?”