Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [512]
She bolted up in bed, straining against the leather and twisting to get a better view, making herself look despite a fresh panic and the urge to flee. On the shelf above her were three skulls, hollow eye sockets staring out at her.
Oh, dear God! Why? What was this place?
She tried to focus on what was in the jars across the room, but it was too far to see anything more than blobs. Then she stared at the jellyfish in the aquarium next to the bed. They were transparent, illuminated from the backlighting, floating on the surface. There was nothing else in the aquarium. No little rocks at the bottom, none of the colorful greenery. She pulled herself closer for a better look. Did jellyfish always float on the surface like that?
Then in the light she noticed that both jellyfish had numbers imprinted on their surfaces. A string of numbers like a serial number, some sort of identification.
“Oh, my God!” Suddenly, she recognized them from a visit she had made to a plastic surgeon. These weren’t jellyfish at all. They were breast implants.
CHAPTER 27
Dr. Stolz didn’t bother to hide his displeasure. Maggie saw the scowl he gave Sheriff Watermeier—it was the third or fourth one of the day, Maggie had lost count. The sheriff announced he needed to leave but that she was welcome to stay. For a brief moment she expected Stolz to forbid it. But how could he? Instead, he muttered something into his mask about outsiders. Maggie got the impression he didn’t just mean her, but Watermeier, as well.
She wasn’t sure why she stayed. The only reason she was here was to identify Joan Begley. Perhaps she hoped that this victim, this woman, might be able to provide some answers of where Maggie could start looking for Gwen’s missing patient.
She watched from beside the stainless steel table. Her hands stayed in her pockets beneath the gown. It was an effort to keep them from helping, part instinct and part annoying habit. Already once she had reached for a forceps, stopping herself before Stolz could see.
He was slow. Slow but not necessarily meticulous. In fact, his movements seemed a bit sloppy, slicing here and there around the edges of the body cavity, reminding Maggie of a fisherman severing all the linings before gutting a fish in one swift scoop. It wasn’t the usual reverence she was accustomed to seeing medical examiners use. Perhaps it was simply a performance for her benefit. At first she worried that he would use the less-popular Rokitansky procedure where all the organs come out at once—one block of the internal system—instead of the Virchow method where each organ was removed separately to be examined.
She watched him cut with his elbow bent, hand zigging back and forth, a strange, almost sawing motion. But then she was relieved to see his gloved fingers reach in and scoop out the lungs, one at a time. First the right lung, which he plopped on the scale, then he yelled over the utensil tray to the recorder on the counter, “Right lung, 680 grams.” He dropped it into a container of for-malyn and scooped up the left one. “Left lung, 510 grams. Color in both, pink.”
Maggie disagreed. She wanted to mention that the left lung was not quite as pink as the right, but kept quiet. It wasn’t enough to note. No signs of foul play, at least none that had affected the lungs. In the killer’s mutilation to get at the breast implants, he hadn’t even punctured the lungs. And there wasn’t enough discoloration to indicate that the woman had ever been a smoker. The darker pink of the left lung may have only suggested that she had spent a good deal of her life as a city dweller.
Dr. Stolz picked up a needle and syringe off the tray, looked it over, then exchanged it for a larger one. He inserted the needle into the heart, drawing blood into the syringe. The heart showed definite signs of being punctured by the killer. Maggie could easily see a cut that