Fuller stood abruptly.

“But come on, you’ll see for yourself. She’s right over here.”

In the time it took for Dorsey and Andrew to stand, Fuller had made it across the room and was standing in front of a drawer in the wall. He pulled the door open, and the body of Shannon Randall slid out on its slab. He waved the agents closer.

Dorsey stood over the body and found it alarmingly difficult to look down, as if seeing Shannon Randall in the flesh would make this nightmare undisputedly true. If this was indeed Shannon, her father was in the deepest shit of his life.

She looked down, and thoughts of her father’s predicament faded completely. She saw, not the child whose murder her father had sought to avenge, but a woman whose life had been taken from her in a violent manner. The corpse was not unlike others she had seen before. The skin dry and a particular shade of gray. The hair lifeless and matted where the skin from the skull had been peeled back. Eyes open and glassy, sightlessly staring into Dorsey’s.

Traces of black mascara had flaked onto the skin under the eyes. For some reason, Dorsey’s eyes kept returning to those flecks. To her, those tiny flecks were the only signs of life, the only indication that this had been a living, breathing woman before something terrible had happened to her. It was all she could do not to reach out and brush them from Shannon ’s face. In her mind’s eye, Dorsey could see Shannon preparing to go out that night-that night she could not have known would be her last-putting on her makeup, applying mascara as she must have done thousands of times before. As Dorsey had done many times herself. As so many women do. It made the victim unexpectedly familiar, and Dorsey forced herself back to the task at hand.

Shannon Randall had been five feet, three inches tall, slim, with muscular legs and arms, and hair dyed red. Dorsey’s fingers curled unconsciously into her own long, naturally red curls. She recalled from the photos of Shannon at fourteen that her hair had been light brown, and wondered whether she’d changed the color to make her stand out more on the street, or if it was part of a disguise she’d adopted long ago.

Which brought Dorsey back to the first question that had gone through her mind when she’d heard Shannon Randall had been alive for the past twenty-four years: What had happened to this girl on that long ago night? Had she run away, and if so, from what? From whom?

“You can see where the knife went in around the gunshot wound-right here, here, and here.” Fuller pointed with the scalpel he’d picked up from a nearby tray. His voice brought Dorsey back, reminded her why she was here.

“Doctor Fuller, do you have some gloves we could use?” Andrew asked.

Ever the gentleman, Fuller offered a box of latex gloves first to Dorsey, then to Andrew. They each took a pair and pulled them on.

Andrew leaned close to the chest and studied the wounds.

“May I?” he asked, and reached for the scalpel. Fuller handed it over, and watched from the opposite side of the table while the agent probed gently at the dry gray flesh to the left of the Y incision from the autopsy.

“Yes, there it is,” he murmured. “You can see where the bullet entered, right here, but you really have to look for it. As you said, it’s almost as if the killer tried to cover up the bullet hole.” He looked up at Doctor Fuller. “Why would the killer try to disguise the cause of death?”

“Knowing the answer to that could be a clue to who the killer is.” Fuller nodded, then paused and added, “Then again, maybe not. Sometimes, you just don’t know what’s significant and what’s mere coincidence. Could be the killer was covering up, could be he just wasn’t watching what he was doing.”

“Even though he was doing it slowly enough to make very clean, very even wounds.”

Fuller nodded. “Right. Still, as you know yourself, things aren’t always what they seem.”

Dorsey studied the still figure for a long moment, her eyes trailing the length of the left arm, then moving down to the thigh, then to the opposite side of the body where her gaze lingered on the right thigh and arm. Andrew watched her without comment. When she raised her eyes to his, she said softly, “She was a cutter.”

“You saw that, too?”

“Probably used a razor blade-see how very thin the scars are?” She pointed with a gloved index finger to the lines that went up and down the woman’s arms and the tops of her thighs like the pale, uneven rungs of a ladder.

“Judging by the scars, I’d say she’d been doing it for a very long time,” Andrew noted. “Some scars have long healed, some have been reopened more than once. Some recently, I’d say.”

“Interesting that it appears she might have stopped for a while, then started again.” She pointed to several long marks on Shannon Randall’s upper thigh.

“Right. These are fresh. And here, on her upper arm, close to her shoulder?” Andrew studied the scars intently. “Almost all of the others are old.”

“I noticed those,” Fuller nodded, “but I don’t recall having had this type of thing before. Read about cutting, but haven’t ever seen it firsthand. We don’t get a whole lot of kids in here, not like this. Most young people have left town, moved on before they reached this age.”

“She cut for a long time, then stopped long enough for all those old scars to heal over and stay healed. Then something happened to make her start cutting again.” Dorsey seemed to mull it over. “So maybe whatever caused her to start cutting in the first place, whatever it was she’d gotten over sufficiently that she didn’t feel she had to hurt herself anymore-somehow, that whatever was back in her life.”

Both men stared at her. She stood up straight and pulled off the gloves.

Andrew did the same, turned to Doctor Fuller. “We really appreciate your time, Doctor Fuller.”

“Anytime, Agent Shields. I’m going to have to release the body to the family soon-thought they’d be wanting it sooner than this, frankly. I suspect there’s some kind of to-do going on right about now, what with the young lady having been a hooker and one of her sisters being a preacher-”

“Her sister?” Dorsey frowned. “I thought her father was the minister.”

“He had been, up until just a couple of years ago. Car accident left him paralyzed. Heard all about it from the director of the funeral home up there in Hatton, where the Randalls are from.” Fuller covered the body with the sheet and slid the shelf back into the refrigerated drawer. “Hit and run. Car ran him off the road, then disappeared. Never even stopped. They figured it must have been a drunk driver. The man never saw it coming, apparently. Hasn’t walked since. It was the youngest daughter who took over the church.”

“I think I remember more than two children in the family,” Dorsey said, trying to think back to her early teens when the story was fresh in her mind.

“There are three sisters. Four daughters altogether. Oldest’s a state senator up in South Carolina now-she’s the one who identified the body. Another sister does something on television. And of course, the minister. Can’t recall the funeral director saying much more than that.”

“Quite an accomplished family,” Andrew remarked as he and Dorsey headed toward the door.

“Yes, so it would seem.” Fuller peeled off his gloves and dropped them into the wastebasket next to his desk. “It’s had me wondering how a girl from a family like that ends up like this girl did.”

“Girls from all kinds of backgrounds end up like Shannon Randall, Doctor Fuller. There’s no easy answer why,” Andrew replied.

“True enough.” Fuller nodded.

“What was the sister’s demeanor when she came to make the identification?”

“Solemn, I’d say,” the doctor replied after pondering the question for a moment. “Sober. Respectful.”

“Emotional?”

“No, wouldn’t have called her emotional.” Fuller shook his head from side to side. “She didn’t cry, just sort of looked at the body for a while. Asked me to raise it on the left side at the shoulder, and I did. She leaned down to take a look, and said something under her breath like, ‘Yes, that’s it.’”