style="font-size:15px;"> “Six days,” Piedmont said.
“Look like she was dead before she was dumped?”
Piedmont nodded and walked around the body, giving it a wide berth so as not to disturb evidence. Not that there would be any. Mason was already certain the killer had stayed up on the road and never set foot down here. Still...
“Oh, shit.” He could see the front of her now. The dress was torn from the hem up to her neck, flapping up and down in the frigid wind. She was cut all to hell and gone—gutted, it looked like. Then he looked again. Someone had cut two sides of a triangle into her skin, with its topmost point dead center just below her breasts, then peeled it back so the flap was lying folded over on her belly. He could see the edges of her rib cage and a gaping, frozen, deep red void he would rather not have seen.
It fit perfectly with what Rachel had described.
“Not another mark on her,” Piedmont said. “A fucking odd way to commit a murder.”
“She have any ID on her?”
“No, but we knew you had a missing woman matching her description, right down to the blue dress. So...”
Mason knelt and looked at the woman’s hands. There wasn’t so much as a broken nail. No bruising on her, none that was visible, anyway. “No signs of a struggle, no defensive injuries?”
“Not that I could see. You?”
Mason shook his head, then looked at the area around her. “There are a lot of weeds and brush down here. Enough to conceal her a little until someone got close enough to notice.”
The guy snapping pictures stopped snapping. “I think I’ve got all we need. The ME’s here. You can let him take her.”
“Bag her hands, just in case,” Mason said. She was pretty—or had been once. She’d died with her eyes open, but there was nothing in them now. No expression, not of horror, not of peace. Nothing. They were lifeless and shrunken, no longer even resembling human eyes, more like a pair of cloudy grapes long past their prime.
A team came down the hillside with a gurney and a body bag. Mason lowered his head. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marissa. If you are Marissa, and I think you are. We’re gonna get whoever did this. I promise you that.”
Then he straightened and picked his way back up the steep embankment, moving at an angle to get better footing in the fresh snow. As he walked, he was tapping keys on his cell phone, keying in “location of the human pancreas” in the search bar. Then he clicked on Images, and saw that the pancreas was between the left and right sides of the rib cage and partially behind, tucked up against the liver.
That was where she’d been cut, where there was a gaping hole. Right where Rachel had dreamed of being cut, of having something torn from her body while she was still alive.
He hadn’t told Rachel which of his brother’s organs his missing soccer mom had received. He’d deliberately left that part out because he didn’t want to influence her visions. It would be like contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces around that might later be mistaken for actual clues.
Marissa Siorse, his missing person, had been a pancreas recipient. The ME would tell him for sure, but he was pretty certain that body down there was missing its pancreas. And if she was Marissa, that organ had originally belonged to his dead brother.
He didn’t want to think that Eric had come back from the dead to reclaim his parts from beyond the grave. But he hadn’t wanted to think that his brother had found a way to continue his serial killings from beyond the grave, either, and he’d been wrong. Eric’s crimes had been repeated by two of his organ recipients, men who, as far as Mason could tell, had been perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens prior to their transplants.
It’s not the same. This organ recipient is the victim, not the killer.
He told himself that, but the icy dread in the pit of his stomach was colder than the December wind freezing his ears.
* * *
Joshua teased me to come out sledding with him until I finally gave in. It looked as if Jeremy and Misty were hitting it off just fine, but being teenagers, they were unwilling to bundle up and take him out themselves. I told them I thought they were both assholes—I said it lovingly, don’t judge me—then dressed as warmly as possible, borrowing some gloves from Mason’s closet, and took Josh out there myself. Well, me and Myrtle, that is. She was almost as eager as Josh was. Besides, I needed something to wipe the nightmare, which I knew in my gut was more than just a bad dream, out of my mind.
The air was cold, sunshine bright, snow pristine. I could see my breath in big clouds every time I exhaled. It was good. Clean. Just the prescription I needed. I hadn’t seen much snow since my vision had been restored. It had only snowed once or twice so far this winter, and of course I’d been blind for the previous twenty. So I was taking it all in and loving it, like I did every new visual experience. And yeah, that made it tough to maintain my inner cynic, but I figured a few months of childlike wonder was to be expected and would pass soon enough, you know, like a bad bout of food poisoning.
Sighted people don’t appreciate their eyesight nearly enough, in my opinion. Those who’ve always had it, I mean.
We trooped up the hill, dragging a pair of red plastic toboggans behind us, Josh talking a mile a minute about the karate lessons he wanted to sign up for and all the things on his Christmas wish list, while Myrtle trudged right beside him, paying such close attention it was as if she understood his every word. She adored the kid.
We reached the top. Josh situated his sled, then turned to Myrtle and said, “You want to ride, Myrt?”
“Josh, she won’t sit still. She’ll wipe you out for sure.”
“I’ll hold her,” he said. He didn’t precede it with “Duh,” but he might as well have. “Come on, Myrt. Get on here with me.”
“She won’t like it, Josh,” I said, as Myrtle responded to his voice and plodded right over to him. She sniffed the sled thoroughly, then lifted her paws and stepped on board in front of him. “She’s blind. She’ll be scared.” If someone had said that about me, I would have punched them in the eye. I was being overprotective, and I knew it.
“I’ll hold on to her. Come on, Rachel, she shouldn’t miss the fun just ’cause she can’t see.” He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around my dog. Myrt was facing straight ahead with her teeth showing and her tongue hanging out. She knew something exciting was about to happen. I recognized that look. She was eager. Up for anything as long as her eleven-year-old buddy was involved.
“How are you going to steer?”
Josh tightened his arms around Myrtle, then reached one-handed for the rope handle threaded through the nose of the sled, which children everywhere use to fool themselves into thinking they have a modicum of control as they rocket down steep, snowy hills. Myrt whined uncertainly, and he let go of the rope and scooted forward. “You’re gonna have to ride with us and steer,” he told me with a smile.
“No way am I going to fit on that th—”
“There’s room. C’mon, Rache, please? Try it. Just once.”
I heaved a gigantic sigh
