Hunter and Garcia zigzagged their way through a group of Japanese tourists and approached the main reception counter. The middle-aged African-American woman behind it looked up from her computer screen, removed her reading glasses and gave them a smile that was both warm and sorrowful at the same time.

‘Hello, gentlemen, how can I help you?’ She spoke in the same tone and volume as a librarian.

Morgue receptionists’ greetings were pretty much the same all over the USA. They never greeted anyone with the words ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, or ‘good evening’. Usually, a person visiting a morgue would struggle to find anything good about the day they were having.

‘LAPD Detectives Hunter and Garcia to see Doctor Carolyn Hove,’ Hunter said, producing his credentials. Garcia did the same.

‘She’s expecting us,’ Hunter added.

The receptionist allowed her eyes to hover over both detectives’ badges for a moment before reaching for the phone on the counter in front of her, but before she was able to dial the heavy metal door on the east wall was pushed open by Doctor Hove herself.

‘Robert, Carlos,’ she said. ‘You guys made it in good time.’

Doctor Hove wore a white lab coat with a photo card clipped to her left pocket. She was holding a blue file in her right hand.

‘Hey, Doc,’ Hunter and Garcia said at the same time, greeting her warmly.

Doctor Hove was a tall and slim woman with deep penetrating green eyes. Her long chestnut hair was bundled up into a bun and tucked under a factory-style hairnet. A surgical mask hung from her neck.

‘Once again,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if this really applies, but . . . welcome back, both of you.’ She paused and her eyes narrowed a fraction as she looked at Hunter. ‘Though, I must add that you don’t look like you just came back from a break, Robert. Are you sure you’ve been away?’

‘Oh, I’m sure.’

Garcia stifled a smile.

‘So,’ Hunter asked, his eyes focusing on the file in her hand. ‘What have you found, Doc?’

She didn’t follow his gaze. Instead, she tilted her head in the direction of the door she’d just come out of.

‘I think you both better come with me.’

Twelve

Hunter and Garcia followed Doctor Hove past the reception counter, through a set of double swinging doors and into a wide corridor with strip lights on the ceiling and shiny floors.

As they entered the corridor, they were all greeted by a cold, antiseptic odor that lingered in the air and scratched the inside of their nostrils as if it were alive.

Hunter hated that smell. No matter how many times he’d been through these corridors, he just couldn’t get used to it. He subtly scratched his nose and did his best to breathe only through his mouth.

They passed a couple of closed doors with frosted-glass windows on the left side of the corridor, before turning right at the end of it and into a second, narrower hallway. There they came across three lab technicians, also in white medical scrubs, standing around a coffee machine. None of them looked their way.

They pushed through a set of double swinging doors and, as they did, they all had to squeeze against the wall and wait for a trolley wheeled by an orderly to go past. The body on the trolley was covered by a white calico sheet. Balanced on its torso was a box of test tubes containing blood and urine.

Garcia made a face and looked the other way.

At the end of that corridor, they finally reached a small anteroom. Another set of double doors with two small frosted-glass windows stood directly in front of them. Above the doors, in big black letters, a plate read – Autopsy Theater One.

‘Here we are,’ Doctor Hove said, as she punched a six-digit code into the keypad to the right of the door. It buzzed loudly, and then the door unlocked with a hiss like a pressure seal.

Most people who have never been inside an autopsy room would expect the air to be heavy with the smell of a compound like formaldehyde – something many associate with biomedical labs and the preservation of a body or part of it, human or otherwise. Instead, Hunter detected a faint scent of antiseptic and industrial soap. The temperature inside the autopsy rooms was also a few degrees below what would be considered comfortable. Within minutes, an unprepared visitor would be shivering in here from the temperature alone.

The room was relatively spacious. A large double sink hugged the west wall, with a central channel that led to a drain. Next to it was a metal counter with a multitude of tools, including a Stryker saw. Parked against the north wall, in neat rows, were three empty trolleys. The center of the room was taken by two stainless-steel examination tables. The body on the furthest of the two was completely covered by a white sheet. Just above the table, circular and powerful halogen lights were suspended from the ceiling.

Doctor Hove gloved up and approached the table. Hunter and Garcia followed, each grabbing a pair of latex gloves themselves.

The doctor positioned herself on the other side of the table from the two detectives and pulled back the sheet, revealing Nicole Wilson’s naked body. Her skin had begun to turn a pale, ghostly shade of white. Her eyes had sunk deeper into their sockets, and her thin lips had now lost all color. Her hair looked wet and messy, with some of it sticking to the sides of her face. Clearly visible was the large Y incision that started at the top of each shoulder, ran down between her breasts and the front of her stomach, and concluded at the lower point of her sternum. A second large incision had also been made around her head, running across the top of her forehead to open her cranium, which indicated that her brain had been examined. Hunter found that a little peculiar, but he knew the doctor would explain it in due time. Both incisions had been stitched up with thick, black surgical thread. All that gave Nicole’s body a plastic, Frankenstein-mannequin look, a far cry from the person she had once been.

As the white sheet was pulled back, Hunter and Garcia paused, looked at each other for a split second, then back at the body. What caught them by surprise wasn’t the ugliness of the two incisions, or the roughness of the black thorn-like stitches. They had seen those more times than they cared to mention. What had made them pause was the incredible number of open wounds that covered most of the victim’s torso and thighs. They all looked to be fresh lacerations, probably no more than three to four days old, varying in sizes and orientation – some were horizontal, some diagonal, some vertical.

‘What the hell?’ Garcia breathed out.

‘I know,’ Doctor Hove agreed. ‘I was as surprised as you are when I undressed the body as I prepped it for the post mortem earlier today.’

Both detectives approached the table, bending down slightly to have a better look at the cuts.

‘What we have here is a combination of two types of wounds,’ the doctor announced. ‘As you can plainly see, they all vary in size – the smallest being just over an inch long, and the largest measuring five and three quarter inches. No two lacerations are the exact same size.’

She placed her fingers over the sides of one of the cuts and pressed it down, spreading it open.

‘None of the cuts is deep enough to have reached a major organ, artery or vein.’

She repeated the process with a couple more cuts.

‘They’re essentially all flesh wounds.’