rest of the lunch break descended into a string of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ as her female colleagues begged to be introduced to any hunky mates her boyfriend might have, and Paula forgot all about the Candle Cake Killer until home time. It was when she was pulling out of the car park and joining the main road that she noticed a battered pickup truck. The truck had every right to be on the road, of course, and there was nothing particularly odd about it.
Except she’d seen the very same vehicle driving down her street when she left for school that morning.
Back at Major Crimes by mid-afternoon Savage took an unwanted call from Hardin. Due to technical issues at the hospital the first post-mortem had been delayed from the morning. He and Garrett had been due to attend, but the DCI had left to conduct a media briefing. Would she like to take his place?
Savage didn’t think she had much choice in the matter so she said ‘yes’.
‘Of course, ma’am,’ Calter said when Savage had hung up. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to be at home with your feet up with the newspaper and a glass of white in your hand, would you? Not when the alternative is watching a decomposing corpse being sliced and diced.’
Savage returned to her car and drove the short distance to Derriford. As was customary, when she arrived at the mortuary Nesbit greeted her with a joke.
‘Ran out of coins for the meter,’ he said, peering over the top of his glasses and giving a little smile. ‘The result being the entire refrigeration system has ceased to function. We’ve been having to stuff ice bags into the drawers to keep everything sweet. My PM schedule has gone haywire. The best thing to happen is if people would stop dying.’
It appeared as if the pathologist was only half-joking, because to one side of the main anteroom several wall panels lay on the floor and two technicians fiddled with a bundle of multi-coloured wiring and circuit board. A cleaner mopped a puddle of brown liquid from around the base of one of the big body storage cabinets and Savage wondered if the odour assailing her nostrils wasn’t even more acrid than usual. In Nesbit’s office Hardin sat munching on a biscuit, oblivious to the smell, steam curling from a cup of coffee.
‘Good to see you, Charlotte,’ Hardin said as she entered. ‘Long time since we’ve done one of these together, hey? Makes a nice change from paperwork.’
Lovely, Savage thought. Much better than wine and a newspaper.
Hardin wiped some crumbs from his mouth, took a final slurp from his cup and rose from his seat. The two of them returned to the anteroom where Nesbit was scrubbing up at a sink.
‘What did you mean Saturday night,’ Savage asked him, ‘when you said you’d seen this sort of thing before?’
‘Exactly that.’ Nesbit dried his hands and then pulled on gloves. He looked at Savage. ‘Mandy Glastone. Tangled in some unlucky fisherman’s line, she’s pulled up from the murky depths of a pool on the river Dart on Dartmoor. Those marks … we thought at first they’d been made by crayfish, although a biologist doubted it. Then I wondered if they could have been caused by a thin piece of monofilament moving back and forwards in motion with the river current. Once she was on the table though I could tell she’d been cut with a knife. A sharp knife.’
Nesbit gestured with an arm and the three of them walked through into the PM room proper. The cadaver was already in position, the waft of the fans failing to do much to take away the despair in the air. Savage regretted not bringing any mints with her, the feeling doubling when she approached the body.
‘Remarkably well-preserved, isn’t she?’ Nesbit said. ‘Considering she has probably been dead for a fair number of months.’
If this was well-preserved then Savage didn’t think she wanted to see the other two bodies. She peered at the corpse on the table. The woman was partly still covered in sludge, the mud drying to a light grey. The angular shapes of the bones rose as the translucent skin sagged around them like papier-mâché on a wire frame. In places subcutaneous fat had slipped down and collected in weird globule-like formations. Cellulite for zombies.
‘As long as a year?’ Savage said, thinking of the date fast approaching.
‘Possible. The anaerobic conditions have slowed the decomposition process. No air equals no bugs and no microbes. It’s why the other two bodies are still more than just skeletons.’ Nesbit paused, and noticing Savage swallowing a gulp, he smiled. ‘Something to look forward to, hey?’
‘Can’t wait,’ Savage said as she ran her eyes over the corpse again, thinking the dried mud resembled the war paint of some primitive aboriginal warrior about to go into battle. Except this woman wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her head.
‘Tricky to determine what exactly killed her,’ Nesbit said as he began a preliminary examination, dictating a few notes as he worked his way around the body. ‘Possibly the decapitation, but as with Mandy Glastone, the first victim, we can’t know if that caused death or not.’
He indicated to one of the mortuary technicians to wash down the body and soon water was sluicing the mud away, revealing the odd cuts across the torso, some lines curving this way and that, some going straight across and meeting or bisecting each other. The other technician began to take pictures, the light from the flash sparkling in the flowing water.
‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ Hardin said, speaking for the first time. ‘Dan bloody Brown?’
Savage had to concede the patterns were like nothing she’d seen before. For all she knew they could well be some ancient language, hieroglyphics written on skin instead of stone. Although that didn’t make much sense.
‘No,’ she said. ‘If you are leaving a message you don’t bury it away six foot under.’
‘Why do it then?’ Hardin shook his head and moved closer. ‘Unless you’re a bloody loon.’
‘I think with this killer that’s a given, sir.’ Savage turned to Nesbit. ‘Do the older bodies have the cuts?’
‘In places, yes,’ the pathologist said. ‘The skin is not intact so if the markings were ever as extensive as these ones they are gone now.’
‘Then I think the act was the thing, not what resulted.’
‘Interesting theory.’ Hardin cocked his head, as if trying to view the markings from a different angle. ‘So we’d be wasting our time trying to deduce anything from them. They’re meaningless.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, Charlotte, I know you didn’t,’ Hardin said. ‘There’ll be some photographs somewhere of Mandy Glastone, but if I remember rightly there were more cuts on her.’
‘So this latest attack is less frenzied? Strange, as a serial killer develops he often goes further.’
‘But these aren’t frenzied, are they?’ Nesbit said. He picked up a plastic spatula and traced one of the cuts. It curved from the side of the woman’s left breast down to the belly button and around her waist in a sweeping, graceful arc. ‘These are, I hate to say … artistic?’
‘Done with care?’ Savage said.
‘No care for the victim, obviously, but care for the precision of the line, yes.’ Nesbit looked up at Savage. ‘We considered
