Doc Holiday’s victims had shown similar bruising, but ligature marks as well. His previous torture repertoire had included cigarette burns. This girl had no cigarette burns. There was no obvious evidence of forcible sexual penetration and no semen present, yet the fact that she had been naked from the waist down strongly suggested a sexual component to the crime.

Möller and his assistant turned the body over with great care, mindful of the alignment of broken bones and the delicacy of torn flesh, handling the head like a basket of eggs. The most significant finding on this side of the victim was a small tattoo on the left shoulder, a couple of Chinese characters that meant nothing to anyone present. Liska took a photograph of the mark with her iPhone.

After the initial visual examination, Möller chose to go to the skull, to carefully dismantle the puzzle pieces of shattered bone in order to extract what was left of the brain to be weighed and examined. He then moved on to the torso and, with an artist’s hand, drew the scalpel down the body, creating the Y incision: shoulders to sternum, sternum to groin.

Kovac tried unsuccessfully to tune out the sound of the garden loppers snapping the ribs from the breastbone, and the mechanical cranking of the rib spreader opening the chest cavity. After the literally hundreds of autopsies he had observed during his career, those sounds still got to him worse than anything else, except perhaps the smell of a burn victim or a floater. Something about cracking a chest made him see himself on the gurney and start rethinking that occasional cigarette.

Möller lifted out the internal organs one by one, weighed each, inspected each for signs of organic disease and physical injury. The information was logged and recorded.

The assailant’s knife had remarkably missed the vital organs and major blood vessels. There had been significant bleeding into the body cavity, but the damage was not so much that she would have died quickly from it.

“So she could have been alive when she came out of that trunk,” Liska said.

“It’s not likely, but she probably wasn’t dead due to the stab wounds,” Möller qualified.

“If she didn’t bleed out,” Kovac said, “what killed her?”

Möller ignored the question. Homicide detectives were to medical examiners what four-year-old children were to overworked mothers.

He opened the victim’s esophagus to find chemical burns. He lifted the lungs from her chest and placed them in the hanging scale, shaking his head.

“The lungs are heavy and wet,” he said. “Inhalation of acid fumes damages the mucous membranes and causes pulmonary edema—a buildup of fluid.”

“She was alive when the bastard poured the acid on her,” Kovac said, anger burning through him just as the acid must have burned through this poor girl’s flesh.

“Worse than that,” Möller said as he continued his work. “She aspirated the acid itself. There is lung tissue here which has basically been digested.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kovac muttered.

He jammed his hands at his waist and walked away from the table, his own lungs hurting as he tried a few deep breaths. He had learned long ago never to mentally put himself in the victim’s place. Therein lay the road to alcoholism. But it was difficult not to imagine the horror this girl had suffered in her final moments—held down, stabbed, acid raining down on her. It was difficult not to imagine her screams as her flesh burned and her panic as she gasped for a breath and sucked the caustic chemical into her airway.

Without a word to anyone, he walked out of the autopsy suite into the hall and just stood there.

He was by all descriptions, including his own, tough, hardened by long years looking at dead bodies and the wretched things people did to other people. He just needed a moment to regroup, to clear the anger from his head, to take the information of this autopsy and compartmentalize it into the relevant fact file in his brain.

He heard the door open behind him. Liska walked around in front of him and leaned back against the wall with her arms crossed. She didn’t say anything. They both just stood there, breathing in and out, neither of them feeling the need to fill the silence.

Finally, Kovac heaved a sigh and said, “She probably wasn’t conscious by the time the killer poured the acid on her. The stab wounds . . . She’d lost a lot of blood.”

“Probably. I hope so.”

“We’ve got the skin and blood under her fingernails. We’ll get a DNA profile.”

“Maybe he’ll be in a database,” Liska said.

“Yeah, maybe. We’ll hope so,” he said, deciding to at least pretend to grab on to that small hope.

At this point, small hope was as much hope as they had.

7

Liska begged off going for a postautopsy drink in favor of going home to her domestic drama. Kovac begged off going home to avoid the fact that he had no domestic life.

The Minneapolis Police Department lived in city hall, a massive Gothic-looking stone monstrosity of a building the color of liver crowned in steep verdigris-green roofs. Built around the turn of the twentieth century, with turrets and a clock tower and a five-story rotunda, it had originally been the county courthouse building. The courts now did business in the flashy, modern Hennepin County government complex on the other side of Fifth Street. The police department and Minneapolis city offices remained in the old municipal building.

Kovac parked in a slot reserved for a deputy chief, knowing there was no danger of any deputy chief interrupting his New Year’s Day to come to the office. The halls were empty, his footfalls echoing as he made his way toward the Criminal Investigative Division offices.

Maintenance had yet to solve the mystery of the rogue heating system. He started peeling off clothing as soon as he was in the door—gloves, coat, scarf, hat. He threw the pile on Liska’s chair in the cubicle.

“Judas, it’s like the gateway to hell in here!” he declared to no one in particular.

A couple of the younger detectives had drawn the short straws to come in on the holiday. They sat three cubicles down watching the Rose Bowl on an iPad. There was no boss present to worry about busting their asses—which was why Kovac didn’t hesitate to reach into his bottom desk drawer for the bottle of Glenmorangie he had stashed there. He poured a couple of glugs into a black coffee mug with white printing: HOMICIDE: IT’S WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST.

The liquor went down like molten gold, smooth and warm, to pool in his belly and begin unraveling his frayed nerves from the inside out. Only in relaxing did he realize the degree of tension his body had been holding on to. He felt like a coiled spring, slowly relaxing. He took what felt like his first deep breath in three hours and exhaled slowly as his gaze wandered the work space he shared with Liska.

The small gray cubby was chock-full of books and binders and messy file folders. Post-it notes were stuck to every surface—reminders to call for lab results, to contact witnesses, to check with prosecutors for court schedules. Cop cartoons that had been printed off the Internet were taped to cabinet doors and pinned to the walls.

He and Liska had been trading gag gifts for years. Her favorite from him—the pen with the fake eyeball on top—stuck up prominently from the coffee mug bristling with pens beside her phone. His personal favorite—a very realistic-looking rubber severed human finger—was reaching into the nose hole of human skull that looked down on him from a shelf above his computer.

These were the comforts of his home away from home. Stuff that meant nothing to anyone but him. Stuff that connected him to no one in any meaningful way. Liska had pictures of her kids around her computer area. Kovac had an anonymous human skull with a rubber finger in its nose.