“No one would have heard her way out there anyway,” Jake said flatly.

Hauser shifted in his boots, and looked over at Jake, thinking back to the sonofabitch he had been to Scopes last night.

“Race?” Jake asked, and locked his fingers around one of the plastic tarps. It felt like silk snakeskin.

“Her eyelids were gone. No skin between the toes. Nothing.”

Hauser swallowed again, remembering that Jake had got down on the blood-caked carpet and peered between the woman’s toes like some kind of perverted rubbernecker.

Jake peeled back the plastic sheet.

The sheriff saw Madame X, laid out like a blistering red roast. Her body had lost some of the humanity. He was grateful that it was no longer posed in the horror of agony, but in the Now I lay me down to sleep position that did absolutely nothing to soften the marks of violence on it. She still looked used, violated, and Hauser’s gum was tinged with the acid bursts of spit from the back of his throat when he swallowed. He turned around and spat the gum into a garbage can with a single bloody latex glove stuck just inside the rim.

Dr. Reagan looked up at Jake. “We sent DNA samples out to the bureau this morning. Do you know what kind of turnaround times we’re looking at?”

“Mitochondrial is twelve hours; we’ll get race, haplogroup, and confirmation of mother—child relationship between the two victims. Nuclear will take about seventy-two and hopefully we’ll find her in the system. Criminal record. Government employment. Diplomat. Missing person.”

Hauser raised his head, cleared his throat. “I put a search out on every case of domestic violence in the past six months where there is a two- to four-year-old boy at home. Maybe she had a husband who beat her and she ran. Maybe he found her.”

Jake shook his head. “This was not done by an angry husband.”

Dr. Reagan paused patiently, and her eyes went to Jake’s skin. She looked down at his hands, crosshatched in dark ink that swirled out of his sleeve, down over his wrists, over his metacarpals, ending along the first knuckle of his phalanges. In all her time as medical examiner, she had never had anyone who looked or talked like Jake Cole come through—especially not in the capacity of law-enforcement specialist.

Jake squinted at Madame X and took a flashlight off of a trolley to his right without moving his eyes. He leaned forward, flicked it on, and peered into her mouth. The splintered teeth glowed white and the dark black of the flesh went to a bright red under the harsh glare. “Dental records?”

“She shattered most of her teeth—the FBI labs said the dental reconstruction will take about two weeks. I can tell you that she had three fillings—two porcelain, one silver. Her teeth broke because they weren’t that strong to begin with. She had a vitamin D deficiency at some point and she’s never really recovered.”

Jake rolled the sheet back and away from Madame X. Bits of dried blood and muscle tissue cracked off and rained down. Jake put the sheet at the foot of the stainless-steel table and stared at the deep Y incision in her chest, now fastened with bloody baseball stitches in a braided line.

Reagan removed the shroud from the boy.

Hauser closed his eyes once, hard, and when he opened them his mouth was a tight line that said he was back in cop mode. At least for a few minutes.

Jake ignored the child and kept his attention locked on the dead woman on the table. He thought about the hairs he had seen earlier in his head. “What about the blond hairs on the floor of the guest room? There were more in the living room in front of the window, too.”

The effect on Hauser was instantaneous. “What blond hairs? I didn’t see any—”

“I didn’t see them until this morning.”

Hauser was frozen in a position that said he was either going to run or hit someone. “You didn’t go back in the house this morning. My deputy would have—”

Jake tried not to sound flippant. This was the part they never understood. “Not the real house.” He lifted his hand, tapped his index against his temple. “I recorded everything I saw last night, then went through it this morning. And I found hairs.”

Dr. Reagan gave him a hard brown stare. “They are equine.”

Hauser, still stuck on disbelief, simply repeated the last word as if it were a question. “Equine?”

Jake thought out loud. “The Farmers are sailors—not horse people. I didn’t see one ribbon or photo in the place that would make me believe that they were horse people. And if the hairs had come from the antiques, they’d be black.”

“The antiques?” Hauser asked.

“Antique chairs and sofas are stuffed with horsehair.” He turned back to Dr. Reagan. “Tox scan?”

Reagan flipped through the printout and the pages rattled. Jake saw a coffee ring flip by. “I appreciate the late night.”

Reagan’s subway-tile hue darkened a little, as if she were done holding her breath. “There are plenty of slow days.” She stopped. “Toxicology. All negative. I did a CBC, a WBC, and a WBC differential.”

Jake waved it away. “That’s perfect.”

“Her liver was pretty beat up, her gamma-glutamyl levels were high but aspartate levels were perfect, so it’s an old problem. She gave up drinking a while ago.

“She had renal issues at one point—her kidneys had been stressed by something she used to take. Function was somewhere around seventy percent. I doubt she even knew she had problems unless she had a blood work done in the past little while. She smoked. Had at least one child. No venereal diseases. She was fit at the time of death—I’d say in super shape. No subcutaneous fat. No fat deposits in abdomen, posterior, under the arms, or around the neck. Her heart was in stellar shape.”

“What was she skinned with?” Hauser asked.

Jake stared down at the crescent-shaped ridges in the muscle. Without meaning to, he said, “Single-edged knife with a recurve blade. Heavy, probably a hunting knife.”

Reagan looked at her notes and nodded. “About eight inches.”

Hauser shook his head. “Not an ideal knife.”

“Meaning?” Jake asked.

Hauser swallowed. “A small curve-bladed skinning knife would do the job in half the time.”

Jake nodded. “What does that tell us?”

“That he had time?”

“Bingo.”

Jake examined the thin ridges along her muscles where the tip of the knife had left its mark, removing a little more of who the woman was with each swish of the razor-sharp edge. “Vaginal wounds?”

Hauser had fallen back into a nervous silence, his lopsided stance a little more pronounced now. His eyes were no longer on the woman, but spent their time nailed to Jake.

Reagan shook her head. “Nothing. Wash, swabs, and pelvic exam were clean. Nothing was put into her vagina.”

Jake was examining the bottom of Madame X’s foot. He ran his index up the muscle as if he expected it to curl in a ticklish reflex. “Size six feet,” he said softly. “Small.”

Hauser’s head tilted to one side in that canine way that was becoming familiar to Jake. His mouth opened up and in a monotone voice he said, “Female, roughly thirty-two years of age. One old break in her wrist. Slender athletic build. Good muscle mass. Light smoker. Weakened kidney function. Bad liver from an old alcohol problem. Three fillings and an old iron deficiency. Size six feet and her killer did not interact with her in a sexual manner.”

Jake held up his hand. “Don’t say that. We don’t know yet.”

Hauser pointed at Madame X. “No vaginal wounds, Dr. Reagan’s words, not mine.” Then, seeing his arm pointing at the dead, he let it drop to his side. “Was this about sex?”

“Not in any way you or I could relate to. But to the perp? That bastard got a massive endorphin rush out of it. It’s too early to tell if this is sexual for him. Where’s her skin?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t there. We haven’t—”