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She and Ella took a seat on two rickety wooden stools that doubled as waiting room chairs. The building had a homey feel at least, like a country cottage that just happened to be full of dead people. It was certainly one of the less-populated morgues she’d been to in her life, as ironic as the fact was.
Beside her, Ella’s leg jittered like she’d just injected herself with caffeine. The rookie was doing that thing again: getting too involved, getting lost in her head. This wasn’t a game of Clue. This was real lives being lost. Every victim was a real family’s tragedy.
“Reel it in, Dark. Your legs look like a candle in the wind.”
Ella dug her fingernails into her thighs and sat still. “My mind’s on overdrive is all.”
“Yeah, but no need to take it out on this lovely cobblestone floor.”
“You mentioned the Mimicker earlier,” Ella said. “What if our unsub was inspired by him? Maybe a Mimicker version two? New and improved. The original Mimicker’s been in the news recently. Suicide attempt.”
“I heard. Let’s hope he tries harder next time.”
“What if our guy saw the news and tried to avenge him in some way? You know how deluded these psychotics can be.”
“Take a break from your brain, Dark. Our perp isn’t a psychotic. This isn’t random or chaotic. This is as staged as it gets. He sees the world exactly the same as me or you, he’s just a little more desensitized to things.”
When Ripley first started in the FBI thirty years ago, she’d always been a connoisseur of the psychopath mind. She believed she could always identify a psychopath based on a few key factors, a skill she still held today. What fascinated her most was their numbed sensations to the world, and it scared her that she sometimes felt her own reactions mirrored that of an everyday psycho. Passiveness towards death, easy detachment from the victims. It hadn’t always been this way, but a lifetime of dealing with these people had clearly rubbed off on her.
The receptionist waved to the agents from behind her wooden desk. “You can go through now,” she said. “Room 31-B.”
The agents went down a corridor, rows of steel doors on either side. The building smelled more like a show home than a medical facility, Mia thought. She knocked on the door to the designated room and turned the handle.
The room was heavy with the scent of fluoride, invading her senses like a tidal wave. A masked technician peered up from a medical table, dressed head to toe in dirty white scrubs. In front of the doctor, the bodies seen in the crime scene photographs lay on two steel slabs, filed next to each other in a neat line, barely resembling human figures anymore. These were the eighth dead bodies Mia had seen in the past 24 hours, so she had to really dig deep to find that wavering sense of empathy. Just another reason she had to get out of this job.
“Thank you for coming,” the technician said. A middle-aged brunette, late forties perhaps. She pulled off her mask to show a glowing smile, despite the circumstances. If there’s one thing Mia would miss about this profession it was the upbeat nature of medical workers despite their close proximity with the dead. These kinds of jobs evoked a morbid sense of humor in the workers, herself no exception. “I’m Dr. Frost. You might want to put some surgical masks on before you head over here. These things smell like death.”
There it was. The comment seemed lost on the rookie, but she was only a year in. Give it time, Mia thought.
“Used to it,” Mia said as her partner decked herself in masks and gloves. “Can we start at the most recent victim?”
Dr. Frost took out her surgical pointer and aimed it at the woman who now lay in two halves. This was a first in Ripley’s career. She’d never seen a completely bisected body in the flesh before.
“This woman is named Eliza Matthews, 22 years old. She’s a local in this town. I’ve actually seen her riding her bike through the nature trail along the way a few times. She lives on Almond Street.”
“Eliza,” Ripley said. She turned to Ella whose jaw was a lot lower than normal.
“Eliza. Elizabeth. It’s pretty close,” Ella said.
“You were right. He’s copycatting these crimes to the nth degree.”
“Copycatting?” the technician asked before retreating. “Sorry, I’ve never seen a murder victim in this town before. I saw tons when I was in Baltimore, but zero around here.”
“Just a working theory. Do you know how the perp carried out this mutilation?”
The doctor ran her pointer along the torn flesh across her midsection. “One thing’s for sure, these cuts weren’t made by hand. A machine did this.”
“A machine? Like a saw or a DIY tool?”
“Doubtful. More like a CNC or a lathe machine. Everything is uniform and precise. If your culprit had used a manual tool, there’d be a lot more fluctuations in the cuts. It’s also very, very difficult to saw through human bones with a hand tool. It would be like sawing concrete. Not to mention it would take hours, and this woman has been dead less than a day.”
“Do you know an exact time of death?” Ella asked.
Bad question, Ripley thought. No coroner could give an accurate time of death, and any that said they could were lying. There were too many variables: weather conditions, insect activity, body storage before being dumped.
“Afraid not. Too hard to tell. All I’m positive is that she was killed within the last 24 hours.”
Ella nodded. “What about the face cuts?”
