Jackson Crow, nor had he been there when an entire facility was dedicated to one pursuit.
There were eight gurneys in the room. Each had a sheet draped over the length of a body.
One sheet was almost flat. He assumed it covered a victim who was little more than bones.
One of the bodies had already been in the morgue, along with those of Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. Five others had been exhumed. They walked from gurney to gurney with Dr. Frazier Gaylord, medical examiner. He carried a clipboard with his notes on the remains of Chelsea and Tara—and the unknowns. The unknowns, of course, had been buried by the county and exhumed by the county, but they had numbers rather than names. Gaylord was thorough in his discussion of each one. Logan kept silent as he followed Jackson and Kelsey. The first body was skeletal and the second had no discernible features. Medical reports indicated that all the women had been between twenty-two and thirty-five; none had borne children. Hair proved to be of every color. Five had been Caucasian and two were Hispanic. One, according to Gaylord, was Asian—Logan didn’t ask what had given him that impression. The girl still had a pretty face beneath the damage and decay. “Or possibly American Indian?” he suggested.
“No, I believe she was Chinese,” Gaylord told him. “Based on the set of the skull and the cast of the eyes. There’s enough left…as you can see.”
Kelsey O’Brien hadn’t said a word. He liked that about her. If she had a question, she asked it. If she didn’t, she listened. Absorbed.
“I’m puzzled as to why you’ve put these deaths together,” Gaylord mused, looking at Jackson Crow, “since the cause of death isn’t consistent.” He glanced at his notes. “There are nicks on this woman’s skeletal remains, suggesting that she was stabbed to death. Broken hyoid bone in the next one suggests strangulation. The young woman over there—” he pointed to the farthest gurney “—was drowned. So, we have, in our collection of Jane Does, two strangulations, three stabbings and a drowning. And, then, of course, we get to the bodies of the two young women who have been identified, Chelsea Martin and Tara Grissom. This is a big city, and that means big-city crime. These poor souls might have encountered any member of the criminal element. Or they might have been murdered by someone in a fit of anger.”
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