The In Death Collection Books 16-20 - J. D. Robb [159]
His long hair was corded back in a shiny ponytail and covered with a cap to prevent contamination of the body. There was a medallion, something in silver with a deep red stone around his neck. His hands were bloody, and his handsome, somewhat exotic face set in stone.
He often played music while he worked, but today the room was silent but for the quiet hum of machines and the spooky whirl of his laser scalpel.
“Every now and then,” he said without looking up, “I see something in here that goes beyond. Beyond the human. And we know, don’t we, Dallas, that the human has an amazing capacity for cruelty to its own species? But every once in a while, I see something that takes even that one hideous step beyond.”
“The throat wound killed her.”
“Small mercy.” Understanding, he lifted his head. His eyes behind his goggles didn’t smile, as they usually did, nor did they show any spark of fascination with his work. “She wouldn’t have felt the rest that was done to her, wouldn’t have known. She was comfortably dead before he butchered her.”
“Was it butchery?”
“How would you define it?” He tossed the scalpel in a tray, gestured with one bloody hand over the mutilated body. “How the hell would you define this?”
“I don’t have the words. I don’t think there are any. Vicious isn’t enough. Evil doesn’t cover it, not really. I can’t get philosophical now, Morris. That won’t help her. I need to know, did he know what he was doing, or was it a hack job?”
He was breathing too fast. To steady himself, Morris yanked off his goggles, his cap, then strode over to wash the sealant and blood from his hands.
“He knew. The cuts were precise. No hesitation, no wasted motions.” He stepped to a friggie, took out two bottles of water. After tossing one to Eve, he drank deeply. “Our killer knows how to color inside the lines.”
“Sorry?”
“Your deprived childhood continues to fascinate me. I need to sit a minute.” He did so, scrubbed the heel of one hand between his eyebrows, up to his hairline. “This one got to me. You can’t predict when or how it might happen. With all that comes through here, day after day, this forty-one-year-old woman with her home-job pedicure and the bunion on her left foot got to me.”
She wasn’t sure how to handle him in this mood. Going with instinct, Eve dragged over a chair, sat beside him, sipped water. He hadn’t turned the recorder off, she thought. It would be up to him whether he edited it or not.
“You need a vacation, Morris.”
“I hear that.” He laughed a little. “I was due to leave tomorrow. Two weeks in Aruba. Sun, sea, naked women—the sort who’re still breathing—and a great deal of alcohol consumed out of coconut shells.”
“Go.”
He shook his head. “I’ve postponed. I want to see this one through.” He looked over at her now. “There are some you have to see through. I knew as soon as I saw her, what had been done to her, I wouldn’t be sitting on a beach tomorrow.”
“I could tell you you’ve got good people working for you here. People who’d take good care of her, and whoever else comes in over the next couple of weeks.”
She sipped the water as she studied the husk of Jacie Wooton, laid bare on a slab in a cold room. “I could tell you that I’m going to find the son of a bitch who did this to her, and build a case that ensures he’ll pay for it. I could tell you all that, and all of it would be true. But I wouldn’t go either.” She rested her head back against the wall. “I wouldn’t go.”
He mirrored her position, head resting on the wall, legs kicked out. With Jacie Wooton’s butchered body on the table a few feet in front of them.
And their silence, after a moment, became companionable.
“What the hell’s wrong with us, Dallas?”
“Beats me.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing he was settling down again. “We love the dead.” When she snorted, he grinned, eyes still closed. “And not in a sick, boink the corpse sort of way, gutterbrain. Despite whoever they