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Concentrate on business. I opened my eyes. “Why the restraints?” My voice was breathy but clear. I glanced down at the body, then back up, giving Doctor Evans the most complete eye contact I’d ever given. I’d stare at him until I memorized the light crows-feet around his eyes, if I just didn’t have to keep looking at what lay on the bed.

“They keep trying to get up and leave,” he said.

I frowned, not that he could see it under the mask. “Surely, they’re too hurt to get far.”

“We’ve got them on some very strong painkillers. When the pain dies down, they try to leave.”

“All of them?” I asked.

He nodded.

I made myself look back to the bed. “Why isn’t this just a case of a serial . . . not killer. What would you call it? A serial . . .” I shook my head. I couldn’t think of a word for it. “Why was I called in? I’m a preternatural expert, and this could have been done by a person.”

“There are no blade marks on the tissue,” Doctor Evans said.

I stared up at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that no blade did this because no matter how good they are at torture, there are always telltale signs of the instrument used. You’re right when you say the bodies of the victims have the best clues, but not these bodies. It’s almost as if their skin just dissolved away.”

“Any corrosive agent that could take someone’s skin and soft tissue like nose and groin wouldn’t just stop at the skin. It would keep eating through the body.”

He nodded. “Unless it was washed off immediately, but there’s no residue of any known corrosive agent. More than that, the body isn’t patterned on an acid burn. The nose and groin were torn away. There are signs of tearing and damage that aren’t present elsewhere. It’s almost as if whoever did the skinning, skinned them then tore off the extra pieces.” He shook his head. “I’ve traveled all over the world to help catch torturers. I thought I’d seen it all, but I was wrong.”

“Are you a forensic pathologist?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“But they’re not dead,” I said.

He looked at me. “No, they’re not dead, but the same skills that let me judge a dead body work here, too.”

“Ted Forrester said there were deaths. Did they die from the skinning?” Now that I was “working,” the room didn’t seem so hot. If I concentrated very carefully on the business stuff, maybe I wouldn’t throw up on the patients.

“No, they were cut into pieces and left where they fell.”

“Blade marks on the cut-up bodies, I assume, or you wouldn’t have used the word cut.”

“There were marks of a cutting tool, but it was like no knife or sword, or hell, bayonet that I’d ever seen. The cuts were deep but not clean, something less refined than a steel blade was used.”

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. The blade didn’t cut through the bones, though. Whoever cut the bodies up pulled the bodies apart at the joints. No human would have the strength to do that, not multiple times.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“You really think a human being could have done this?” he asked, motioning at the bed.

“Are you asking me if a person could do this to another person? If you travel the world testifying in cases of death by torture, then you know exactly what people are capable of doing to each other.”

“I’m not saying a person wouldn’t do this,” he said. “I’m saying I don’t think it would be physically possible to do it.”

I nodded. “The cutting and tearing, I think might have been human, but I agree with the skinning. If it were done by a human, then there would be tool marks of some kind.”

“You say tool marks, not blade marks. Most people assume it takes a blade to skin someone.”

“Anything that holds an edge can do it,” I said, “though it’s slower and usually messier. This is strangely clean.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes, that’s a good phrase for it. As horrible as it is, it’s still very neatly done, except for the extra tissue that was removed. That was not neatly done, but brutally done.”

“Almost like we have two different . . .” I kept wanting to say killers, but these people were still