Whatever his intent, the torture appeared to have been very systematic. There were no hesitation marks in the knife wounds, and the cuts seemed deliberately placed, though the pattern suggested nothing in particular.

Crosses cut into victims were always popular among psychotic killers and had the obvious religious connotations. Initials were not uncommon. He had once worked a case in Philadelphia in which a nun had been savagely raped and murdered in the sanctuary of a church, the word “SIN” carved into her forehead with a penknife.

On this victim the lines added up to nothing, but some were vertical and others horizontal, and he had the feeling the pattern meant something to the killer.

The coroner went to raise one of the victim’s eyelids.

“They’re glued shut,” Mendez said. “The mouth too.”

“Looks like more than once on the mouth,” Vince said, stepping in for a closer look. “Look at the lines, the pieces of flesh missing here and here. I’d guess he glued her mouth shut and at some point during the torture she tore her lips open to scream.”

“Jesus,” Mendez muttered under his breath.

Vince produced a collapsible Polaroid camera from his coat pocket under his surgical gown and snapped a couple of pictures of the lips and of the cuts on the body.

“Can we get some scrapings of the glue from the eyes and mouth for the FBI lab, please?” he asked Mikado then turned to Dixon. “If they can figure out exactly what kind of adhesive it is, and it turns out to be something unusual, that could be helpful.”

Mikado also collected fingernail clippings in a small paper envelope to be sent on to the LA County lab, in case the victim had managed to scratch her assailant at some point. They might be able to get some skin, get a blood type.

“Did you get any trace evidence?” Vince asked.

Mikado cut him a meaningful look. “The body was clean when it got here.”

Vince shot a look at Dixon.

“The funeral home thought they were doing a good deed, cleaning her up,” Dixon said, clearly knowing they may have lost evidence. Any fibers, hairs, or bodily fluids that may have clung to the body were long gone down a drain.

“No sense crying over what we don’t have,” Vince said. “After all the publicity on the Atlanta child murder trial and how trace evidence nailed Wayne Williams’s ass, the more intelligent criminals have started cleaning up after themselves.”

“Maybe we’ll get something on the vaginal swabs,” Mikado offered.

In fact, the autopsy yielded little in the way of evidence. No bite marks that might be matched with a suspect. No marks from any distinctive type of weapon. Lisa Warwick had been strangled with a ligature of some kind, but it had left no marks save bruising, and no fibers of any kind. Some kind of smooth cloth, Vince figured-a scarf, a necktie, pantyhose. Nothing traceable.

There was predictable deep bruising in the muscles of the neck, but the hyoid bone (a small U-shaped bone situated between the base of the tongue and the larynx) was still intact. To Vince’s mind, this, and the lack of bruising caused by fingers, ruled out manual strangulation.

Mikado was unable to raise an eyelid to reveal the almost-certain presence of petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctivae of the eye-a sure sign of asphyxia. And all attempts to remove the lids from the eyes only resulted in tearing of the eye itself.

“Just send the whole mess to Washington,” Vince said, imagining the unpleasant surprise of opening a box to find a pair of mangled eyeballs. “They’ll figure out a way to get to the glue.”

Separating the lips was an easier job. Inside Lisa Warwick’s mouth they found she had bitten her tongue to the consistency of ground hamburger.

Mikado looked inside the victim’s ears and swore under his breath. “Her eardrums have been pierced with something. They’re destroyed.”

“The third piece of our trifecta, gentlemen,” Vince said quietly. “See no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil.”

Mendez turned gray as the images sank in. He went to a trash can marked NO TRASH. ORGANS ONLY and threw up.

Even Dixon, who had seen his share of abject violence, looked undone by this. He turned away, shaking his head. The idea that Lisa Warwick had been literally locked inside her own head with a terror of something so evil was too much to fathom.

Vince would have said a prayer for the girl, born and bred Catholic that he was. But he had not been on speaking terms with God in a very long time. He found a stool off to the side of the autopsy bay and sat down on it, tuning out as Mikado’s assistant turned on the oscillating saw to pop the cap off Lisa Warwick’s brain.

Over the years he had seen so many cases as brutal as this one, and every one of them left him feeling like ten years had been drained from his life. He felt as old as Methuselah, as brittle as bone. He felt as if he would turn to dust and fall to the yellow-tiled floor to be swept up later with the medical waste.

“How do you get used to it?” Mendez asked quietly.

“Kid,” Vince said. “The day you get used to this, turn in your shield and your gun. You won’t belong to the human race anymore.”

“So what are you thinking, darling?” Franny asked. He handed her a glass of white zinfandel and sat down beside her on her back porch steps. “Are you harboring a fugitive in your fifth-grade class?”

Anne drank a good third of the glass. The evening was chilly. They were both wrapped in thick sweaters. They sat close together to share body heat while Franny’s basset hound and cocker spaniel sniffed their way around the backyard, drifting in and out of the pale back porch light.

“Of course not. I just find it unnerving that Dennis may have seen something going on in the woods before yesterday. Are there other bodies out there? What the hell is going on? Now another woman is missing…”

“It’s like yesterday we woke up in a Disney movie, and tonight we’re in a John Carpenter movie,” Franny said. “Maybe Jamie Lee Curtis will play you in our movie.”

Anne looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Will you be my sidekick?”

“Honey, I AM your sidekick.”

“Who will play you in the movie?”

“Richard Gere, of course,” he answered without hesitation. “He’s secretly gay, you know.”

“You think every good-looking man on the planet is secretly gay.”

“No, I don’t. The hot detective from this morning? Definitely not gay.”

“You didn’t see him. How do you know he’s hot?”

He grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “You just told me.”

Heat rushed to Anne’s face. She blamed the wine.

“You should definitely take a run at him.”

“He’s a little busy right now,” Anne said. “So am I. I need to find a way to get through to Dennis. Frank Farman tells me Dennis is fine. He found a horribly murdered woman, but why should that bother him? I guess if it wasn’t the first dead person he’s seen buried in the woods, it’s old hat to him.”

“He probably made it up, honey,” Franny said. “Dennis Farman is a nasty, creepy little shit. He’s been looking up his teacher’s skirts since he was in the third grade. He’s probably got a collection of S and M porn magazines under his bed by now. It’s not a stretch to imagine him making up stories about bodies buried in the woods just to scare other kids.”

Anne sighed, reaching out a hand to touch the nose of Chester the basset hound, who had lumbered up the steps to check on them. “I guess not. He did try to bring a dead cat for show-and-tell one day.”

“No effing way!”

“Oh, yeah. The first week of class. He found it on the road on the way to school, flattened.”

Anne shuddered at the memory of the incident, and at the memory of the look in Dennis Farman’s eyes. She had dismissed it that day, preoccupied with the need to properly dispose of the carcass, but she could see it now in her mind’s eye: a weird kind of excitement that went beyond a child’s natural curiosity.