Everyone went silent for a moment.

Hunter thought back to how long he’d spent going over every inch of the crime-scene pictures of Laura Mitchell. Just like Kelly Jensen, she didn’t have a scrape on her.

Hunter’s attention shifted to Kelly’s hands and his brow furrowed. Every one of her nails had been filed, witch-style. As pointy and as sharp as possible.

‘Did you find anything under her nails, Doc? Why are they so . . . claw-like?’

‘Good spot, Robert,’ the doctor agreed. ‘And the answer is – I’m not sure why. But I did find something under them, yes – some sort of dark copper-colored dust. It could be clay or brick dust, maybe even dry dirt. Again, we’ll need to wait for the lab results to be sure.’

Hunter bent down and examined Jensen’s hands more closely.

‘I’ll put an urgent tag with anything related to this case that gets sent to the lab,’ the doctor reassured them. ‘Hopefully we’ll start getting results in a day or two. But unfortunately, due to the severity of her internal injuries and the amount of blood that was discharged, we won’t be able to establish with any certainty if she was raped or not. If there was any trace of it, it’s been washed away by her own blood.’

The entire room seemed to tense with those words.

Doctor Hove walked over to the metal counter and retrieved something from a plastic tray. ‘Now this is the cause of it all, and it’s as grotesque as it’s ingenious,’ she said, returning to the autopsy table. The strange metallic object she was holding was about eight inches long, a quarter-inch wide and two inches deep. At first glance it looked like several long and narrow slices of metal stacked up on top of each other like a deck of cards.

There were curious looks all round.

‘This is what the killer placed inside her,’ the doctor said, her voice a touch sadder than before.

The curious looks turned into confused frowns.

‘What?’ Captain Blake spoke first. ‘I don’t know what that is, Doc, but it sure as hell isn’t what we saw through that X-ray machine of yours.’

‘Not in this state, no,’ the doctor agreed.

‘And what in God’s creation does that mean?’

Doctor Hove moved back to the other side of the autopsy table, putting some distance between herself and the other three.

‘What this is, is a weapon like I’ve never seen before. Here we have a stack of twelve quarter-inch-wide razor blades held together by a very strong and potent spring mechanism. These blades are laser sharp. And when I say laser sharp, I mean a Samurai sword cuts like a baseball bat when compared to these.’

Hunter rubbed his eyes and shifted uncomfortably.

‘I don’t get it,’ Garcia said, shaking his head. ‘As the captain said, that isn’t what we saw. So what did you mean when you said not in this state, Doc?’

‘You obviously remember what we saw inside her body when we used the X-ray machine, right?’ Doctor Hove clarified. ‘Big, triangular shape with a rounded base? Something like a large protractor?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘OK, how do you suppose the killer managed to get that inside her? You’ll have to agree that its rounded base was way too wide for it to be simply inserted into her body.’

Hunter let out a deep, heavy breath, his eyes back on the object in the doctor’s hands. ‘Some sort of spreading knife.’

Captain Blake’s attention swung to Hunter. ‘Some sort of what?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ the doctor confirmed, showing everyone the long and thin metal object again. ‘In this closed format, the killer would’ve had no problems inserting this thing into her before sewing her shut.’

The shiver Garcia had fought off as he entered the building returned, and this time he was powerless against it.

‘Once inside,’ the doctor continued, ‘this happened.’ She held the object by one of its tips using only her thumb and index finger. With her other hand’s forefinger she clicked an almost invisible button at the top of it.

WHACK.

Forty-Eight

Caught completely by surprise, everyone jumped back.

‘Shit!’ Captain Blake let out in a high-pitched voice, bringing a hand to her mouth.

‘Holy crap, what the fuck?’ Garcia’s hands shot up towards his face in a protective reflex.

In a fraction of a second, with a loud metallic thwack, the blades on the object in Doctor Hove’s hands had snapped open exactly like a Chinese hand fan. Every shocked eye in the room was on it, and though their mouths were half-open, not a word was uttered. Doctor Hove carefully placed the object down on Kelly’s stomach, its narrower tip just touching her pubic bone.

‘This is about the position this thing was found inside her,’ she finally said, her voice quieter, her tone darker than before. ‘As you can see, the area it covers is almost the entire width of her abdomen.’

Captain Blake let go of the breath she had been holding for the past minute.

‘As I said,’ the doctor moved on, ‘these blades are laser sharp on both edges. The springs that were used to smack them open are small but very powerful. Able to generate several pounds of pressure. Probably the equivalent to someone hatching down with a meat cleaver. This thing sliced through everything in its path.’

She indicated a large female body organ diagram on the wall behind her.

‘Her urethra, bladder, cervix, uterus, ovary, vaginal cavity, everything in her reproductive system was mutilated instantly. The blades also managed to rip through muscle, her appendix and part of her large intestine. Her pelvic bone was chipped. There was no way she could’ve survived this. The internal hemorrhage she suffered was . . . unthinkable, but death wouldn’t have been instantaneous. The pain she went through is something that even Satan would’ve had trouble imagining.’

Hunter ran a hand over his mouth. ‘How long?’

‘How long did she suffer for?’ The doctor shrugged. ‘Depends on how strong she was. A matter of minutes, probably. But to her I’m sure it felt like days.’

All eyes returned to the object the doctor had placed on Kelly’s stomach.

‘So how does this thing work again?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘Simple,’ the doctor said, picking it up. ‘The blades are way too sharp for anyone to touch them, so moving them back to their starting position could pose a problem, but there’s a retracting mechanism built into it.’ She indicated a round screw just a couple of centimeters from the object’s base – the side that held one of the ends of the blades together. Using a screwdriver she retrieved from a glass-fronted cabinet, Doctor Hove began to turn it slowly. As she did, the blades started retracting behind each other, closing the fan-like knife. Less than a minute later they were all stacked up like a deck of cards just like before.

‘The trigger is this button,’ the doctor indicated it with her finger, ‘very similar to the ones you see in click pens.’

They all moved closer to have a better look.

‘So if this thing went off inside her, who clicked it on?’ the captain asked.

‘Well, I said the trigger is very similar to a clicking pen mechanism, but not identical. The difference is that this one is much more sensitive. I also said this was an ingenious piece of work. Check this out.’ She stepped back, holding the strange knife just as she had moments earlier. This time, instead of clicking the trigger with her finger, she simply jerked it down about four inches, as if shaking a cocktail shaker, but only once.

WHACK. The knife fanned out with a metallic thud once again.