“Yes, that was me.”

“Morrelli was just telling us about that case last night.”

“Sheriff Nick Morrelli?” An unexpected but pleasant flutter invaded her already tense body.

“Yeah, we all went out for ribs last night. But he’s not Sheriff Morrelli anymore. Turned in his badge for a suit and tie. He’s with the D.A.’s office in Boston.”

Maggie retreated to the front of the room, hoping the distance would shield her and prevent them from witnessing her sudden discomfort. Five months ago, the cocky, small-town sheriff had been a thorn in her side from the day she arrived in Platte City, Nebraska. They had spent exactly one week chasing a killer and sharing an intimacy so palpable, just the thought of it was able to generate heat. Her class was staring at her, waiting. How was it possible for Nick Morrelli to dismantle her entire thought process by simply being in the same city?

CHAPTER 20

Tully reached under his glasses and tried to rub out the exhaustion. As though blaming them for lack of relief, he pulled the glasses off, tossing them onto one of the many piles on his desk. The glasses used to be for reading only. Now he found himself wearing them more often.

Ever since he’d hit forty three years ago, his body parts seemed to be failing him, one by one. Last year it was surgery on his knee, just a torn ligament, but it had put him out of commission for two weeks. Of course, it didn’t help matters having a fourteen-year-old daughter telling him how “out of sync” he was. It seemed as if he couldn’t do anything right as far as Emma was concerned.

Earlier she had been furious with him for having to spend another evening next door with Mrs. Lopez. Maybe that was part of the reason he was still here working, stalling, avoiding going home to his own daughter and the silence she wielded as punishment. Ironically, this was the same daughter he had fought so hard to keep near him.

Though it wasn’t much of a fight once Caroline realized what kind of freedom she might have without the responsibility of a teenage daughter. This was the same woman who couldn’t bear to be separated from her daughter and husband six or seven short years ago, when she took an account executive job at a national advertising firm. But as the high-profile clients rolled in and the promotions took her all the way to the top, somehow those expensive trips to New York City and London and Tokyo seemed to get a lot easier. By the final years of their marriage, she had become a stranger to him. A beautiful, sophisticated, ambitious woman, but a complete stranger.

Tully stretched back in his chair, lacing his fingers together behind his head. God, how he hated change! He glanced around the small fluorescent-lit room. He missed having an office with windows. In fact, if he even thought about being sixty feet under ground, he knew his claustrophobia would easily kick in. He had seriously considered turning down the position at Quantico, knowing the Investigative Support Unit was still located in what he considered the bowels of the training facility.

He was rubbing his eyes again when he heard the tap on his open door.

“Agent Tully, you’re here late.”

Assistant Director Cunningham wore shirtsleeves, but still carefully buttoned at the wrists and collar, whereas Tully’s sleeves were rolled up in uneven folds and shoved above his elbows. Cunningham’s tie was cinched tight at his neck, making Tully self-conscious about his own, now wrinkled and tossed aside somewhere on a file cabinet, leaving his collar unbuttoned and open.

“I was waiting for a phone call from the medical examiner,” Tully explained. “From Dr. Holmes.”

“And?”

The assistant director leaned against the door, and Tully wondered if he should clear off one of the chairs. Unlike his boss’s immaculately neat office, Tully’s looked like a storage closet, with piles of papers, scattered files and overflowing bookcases. He sorted through the stack of notes from his phone call, not wanting to depend on his memory, which at this time of night had shut down like a computer hard drive.

“The girl…the young woman had an incision in her left side that extended to the small of her back about four inches long. Dr. Holmes said it was very precise, almost as if he had performed surgery on her.”

“Sounds like our boy.”

“He removed her spleen.”

“A spleen isn’t very big, is it? It looked like there was much more in that pizza box.”

Tully reached for the copy of Gray’s Anatomy that he had borrowed from the library. He quickly thumbed to the place where he had used a gum wrapper as a bookmark. He grabbed his glasses.

“The spleen is about five inches in length, three inches in breadth and an inch or an inch and a half in thickness,” he read out loud, then closed the book and set it aside. “The book says the spleen weighs about seven ounces, but that depends on what stage of digestion it’s in. It can get much bigger. Our victim hadn’t eaten much that day, so her spleen was fairly small. Dr. Holmes said that some of the pancreas was also attached.”

“Were there fingerprints found anywhere at the scene?”

“Yes, we got two pretty good ones—a thumb and an index finger. But they’re not matching Stucky’s. It’s possible they may have been made accidentally by someone on the scene, but it sure seems as though they were left behind on purpose. The entire rim of the Dumpster was wiped down, and then there are these two fingerprints right smack in the middle.”

Cunningham frowned, his weathered brow creasing as if he remembered something. “Double-check Stucky’s early file. Make sure the prints haven’t been switched or altered or that there were any computer mistakes. If I remember correctly, Agent O’Dell was finally able to identify him because of a fingerprint Stucky left behind. He blatantly left it behind, too. But it took us a while to identify it at the time. Someone hacked into the county computer system and switched the prints on file.”

“I’ll double-check, sir, but we’re not dealing with a county sheriff department’s computer system here. We’re checking these against the ones AFIS has on Stucky, prints they’ve taken directly off Stucky. And with all due respect, I don’t think anyone can easily hack into the Bureau’s system.” AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) was the FBI’s master database. Though it networked with local, state and federal agencies, dozens of precautions were in place against computer hackers.

Cunningham sighed and scratched his jaw. “You’re probably right,” he conceded with a fatigue Tully hadn’t witnessed before.

“It may end up being a rookie cop’s,” he told his boss, as if hoping to relieve some of Cunningham’s exhaustion. “If it is, we’ll know in the next twenty-four hours. If they don’t make a match to any law enforcement officers, then I’ll have someone do a cold search.”

Tully kept his glasses in place, feeling more alert with them on and needing to appear in control. “Sir, I haven’t found anything that would suggest Stucky is trying to send some sort of message by which organ he extracts. I wonder if I’m missing something.”

“No, you’re not missing anything. Stucky does this for shock value and simply because he can,” Cunningham said as he came farther into Tully’s office, but remained standing.

“Did he study to be a surgeon at some point in his life?” Tully flipped through a file Agent O’Dell had put together on Stucky’s past. In many ways it read like a résumé for a Fortune 500 executive.

“His father was a doctor.” Cunningham wiped a hand over his jaw. Tully recognized the gesture as something his boss did when exhausted and trying to retrieve information from his vast memory bank. He took the opportunity to study his boss’s face, which seemed thinner, the hollows in his cheeks and eyes darker in the fluorescent light. Even exhausted, his posture remained straight, no hunched shoulders as he now leaned against the bookcase. Everything about the man spoke of a quiet dignity.