Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [586]
She glanced at Racine, expecting her to be just as impatient with Stan. Instead, Racine looked distracted, her eyes examining the shelves of specimen jars and containers. Maggie watched the young detective tighten her gown’s belt and check out her shoe covers, then go back to the room’s contents. Her focus seemed to be anywhere and everywhere except on the head Stan finally had unwrapped and was now propping up with his makeshift device.
The maggots had retreated deep inside, huddling to keep warm. As a result, the woman’s eyes were now clear, staring straight ahead, her tangled hair plastered to one side of her head. Suddenly, a cloud of steam escaped from her opened mouth. And despite it being packed with the slow-churning worms, it looked almost as if the poor woman were taking one last breath.
“Jesus.” Racine had noticed, despite her attempt not to look. “What the hell was that?”
“The little bastards’ metabolism can keep them about ten to fifteen degrees higher than their surroundings,” Stan explained. “It’s similar to walking outside on a subzero day and seeing your own breath, the clash of warm with cold.”
“Pretty freaky,” Racine said.
Maggie noticed that this time Racine’s eyes didn’t leave the woman’s face, as if she didn’t dare look away for fear of missing the next “freaky” revelation. She couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before Racine would be checking her shoe covers again. Would it be the removal of the eyeballs or that sucking sound when the brain is pulled out after the top of the skull is sawed off? She actually found herself feeling bad for Racine. She wanted to tell her to think about ocean waves and listen for the sound they make lapping against a white sandy shore. Something, anything tranquil that would calm her nerves and settle her stomach. It had worked for Maggie during her first autopsy, a gunshot blast that ripped away the victim’s face, leaving behind what seemed like a cavernous hole of bloody cartilage and shredded tissue. The waves had been crashing in her head by the time the M.E. had finished.
“Let’s get started,” Stan said, grabbing a pair of forceps and a scalpel from his tray, “before these bastards start climbing up our arms and legs.”
Maggie saw Julia Racine’s face go white. That’s when she realized what Racine’s real problem was. So it seemed they had something else in common, because it wasn’t the autopsy Racine was dreading. It was the maggots.
CHAPTER 13
Omaha, Nebraska
Gibson McCutty sat in front of his computer screen, watching the clock in the lower right corner—watching and waiting. He was exhausted and trying to find something, anything, to take his mind off last night. The game wasn’t supposed to start for another twenty minutes, but some of the players checked onto the site early.
The game was by invitation only. He still remembered the day he received the e-mail. He had been depressed and angry, surfing Web sites, searching for answers, when suddenly the e-mail came through with an address he didn’t recognize. He almost deleted it as spam except that the call name caught his attention: TheSinEater. It sounded like something from a game of Dungeons and Dragons, something that promised, or rather suggested, to take away his sins.
Could it be that easy? Play a game and feel better? Sorta like going to confession in cyberspace. And the message had been simple, easy, enticing:
DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?
The rules were strict, though, prohibiting players from exchanging any personal information and using only their given code names. But before each game they were allowed to chat, to discuss strategy and talk about their characters, sometimes slipping in information about themselves disguised as information about their characters.
Not everyone participated in the chats; some rambled, some threw in only a comment here and there, others just sat back