of waiting for an answer, Wallace Noble let out a hacking cough that emerged from deep within his chest.
“Goddamn these cigarettes,” he muttered before taking a hearty drag. “Things are going to kill me soon.”
“Why don’t you quit?” Cassie asked.
Wallace exhaled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils, like an angry bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “I’ve spent almost forty years looking at dead folks and determining their cause of death. Frankly, it gives me comfort already knowing the cause of mine.”
With a half cough, half chuckle, he dropped the cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with the toe of a wingtip.
“Now let’s go take a look at poor George.”
Nick and Cassie followed him inside, where they passed a small waiting area before entering a long hallway painted the same color as pea soup. At the end of the hall, they made a right and stopped at the door to the autopsy suite. There they wrangled into autopsy gowns and slipped shoe covers over their feet. Then it was into the autopsy suite itself.
George Winnick’s corpse was already out and lying uncovered on a stainless steel table in the center of the room. The halogen lamp hanging over it cast a wide halo of light onto the skin, turning it a shade of white so bright Nick had to look away until his eyes adjusted.
“Is there an obvious cause of death?” he asked.
“Nothing jumped out at me so far,” Wallace said. “When I cleaned him up a bit, I found marks on his arms, legs, and forehead.”
“What kind of marks?”
Wallace shrugged. “Off the top of my head, I’d say they were rope burns.”
Nick shot a sidelong glance to Cassie, who was already taking notes. Since killers who bind their victims are usually smart and organized, the rope burns suggested a high level of planning. Right away, both of them knew this murder wasn’t a spontaneous act.
“As for what killed George,” Wallace continued, “I don’t think we’ll know that until we open him up.”
He handed Nick and Cassie latex gloves before snapping a pair onto his own hands. “What are you guys looking for anyway?”
“The stitches,” Nick said as he put on the gloves and approached the table. “We need to see if it resembles the handiwork of another killer who sews up his victims.”
“The Betsy Ross Killer, right?”
“He’s the one.”
“Why does he sew them up?” Wallace asked, both fascinated and repelled at the same time.
“I’ll get back to you after I catch him and ask him.”
Wallace and Cassie joined him at the examination table.
“I only found stitches on two places,” the medical examiner said. “One’s at the neck. The other spot was the lips.”
Nick saw both areas. The lips had been sewn shut in a wide cross-stitch pattern. On the neck, the stitches were close together, sealing up a small gash.
“What do you think?” he asked Cassie.
She gingerly placed a finger at the wound and ran it along the thread.
“At first glance, it certainly looks like the work of our guy,” she said. “But the lips—that’s unusual.”
The Betsy Ross Killer had never gone for them before. Until Mr. Winnick, he had stayed away from the face entirely.
Nick reached into his jacket and removed a small digital camera. When he bought it, the clerk at Radio Shack told him about all the “awesome” vacation photos he’d be able to take with it. That was a year ago, and so far, corpses were the only things the camera’s lens had seen.
Leaning over George’s body, he took a picture of the lips, the flash from the camera filling the room in a quick burst. Nick took five more shots from various angles, as the medical examiner watched. Each flash of the camera caused him to flinch.
“What happened to his eyes?” Cassie asked.
Nick stopped taking pictures long enough to look at George Winnick’s eyes, where a small line of red circled each socket.
“That’s where the pennies were,” Wallace said. “Placed right over the eyes.”
“But why the red marks?”
“The coins were frozen to the skin. I had to use hot water to pry them off.”
“Do you still have them?” Cassie asked.
The medical examiner nodded. “They’re in my office. Tagged and bagged and ready to be examined.”
Nick raised his camera again and moved on to the neck. He crouched down next to the table and snapped off another five shots.
“I need you to remove the thread,” he told Wallace. “And save it. We’ll need to examine that, too.”
Wallace obliged by picking up a pair of suture scissors and carefully slicing through the thread, one stitch at a time. The gash widened, although no blood dripped out of it. The blood had all settled by that point.
“Here you go,” Wallace said, tugging the thread from the skin and dropping it into an evidence bag that Cassie had waiting for him.
He then moved out of the way, letting Nick and his partner get an unobstructed view of the wound. It was a clean cut, smooth along the edges. There was no hesitation involved. The killer had done it in one careful slice.
“I’m thinking scalpel,” Cassie said. “That incision is too clean for a knife, no matter how sharp it is.”
“That’s a change,” Nick added. “The Betsy Ross victims had ragged wounds.”
Cassie nodded in agreement. “That’s because there was rage involved. He was angry when he did the cutting. But this wound is different. It’s clinical. Detached.”
Nick had a better word to describe the wound. Precise. Who ever had caused it chose that spot for a reason.
Free of the stitches, the incision widened like a toothless smile. Nick raised his camera and fired off a few shots. He zoomed in. On the camera’s display screen, the depths of the wound came into sudden, startling focus. Nick saw an artery—most likely the carotid—bulging just beyond the parted curtain of flesh and fat. Colored a pale purple, it was marred by tiny lines of black.
Nick lowered the camera.
“I think there’s more stitches.”
He backed away as Wallace Noble swooped in. Using a small hook, the medical examiner gently tugged the artery until it emerged from the open wound. In the harsh light of the examination room, it was clear that Nick was right. The artery had been sliced open as cleanly as George Winnick’s neck had been. And just like the neck, the wound had been sewn shut with tight loops of black thread.
