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there. I’d swear at least a few of the internal organs were placed, arranged, and very carefully.”
    With no discernible emotion, Purcell said, “Like the heart on the end of the diving board?”
    “Yeah. I imagine a shrink could have a field day with that. Just like they could write a paper or two on why he decided to wrap twelve inches of her small intestine around that rosebush and why exactly half her liver is lying in the center of the birdbath over there. We haven’t found the other half yet.”
    Purcell drew a breath. “Shorty, how much of her
isn’t
here?”
    “Well, a lot, really. The tip of that one finger is the only bone we’ve found. A lot of skin, but it’s in pieces, like everything else. Most of the internal organs are here, including some brain matter.”
    “He gutted her
and
opened her head.”
    “Looks like. We haven’t found any scalp so far, but there’s what looks to me like an ax or hatchet mark in the stone of the pool coping, and that’s where we found the brain matter.”
    “The knife couldn’t have…?”
    “Nah, it would have taken something with a lot more heft and a solid edge. Hatchet is about as small as I’d go, and it would have to be a good sharp one. Could be something larger, but the cut in the stone is only about four inches from end to end, and the edges are distinct, so I wouldn’t think it’s any sort of long, curved blade. My money’s on an ax or a hatchet.”
    “We didn’t find either.”
    “Not so far. Maybe that was his personal toy and he didn’t want to leave it behind.”
    “Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”
    “There were a couple hairs in that cut as well, not obvious because of the gore. Too bloody to make out the color now, but, well, once we get back to the lab, at least we’ll know a bit more about her. Again, I’m no profiler, but I think he probably didn’t mean to leave any hair at all, so the little we found may turn out to be important.”
    Purcell stared rather fixedly at the end of the diving board over the red-tinted pool, where the heart of a murdered woman still lay, and Shorty thought he was holding on to his mad with both hands and a hellacious willpower.
    “The fingertip,” the sheriff said at last. “Enough for a print?”
    “It’s enough.”
    “Good. Get me that print, Shorty. And every other bit of information you can, including your own theories and suppositions. I even want to hear your guesses. Understood?”
    Shorty didn’t bother with a verbal okay, just nodded and moved a bit quicker than was normal for him to get back to doing his job. Mad made a dandy shield, he thought, but Marc Purcell’s mad was beginning to smolder.
    He didn’t want to be close when it finally exploded.
     
    S
he knew.
    Marc wondered if this was what Dani had dreamed, and hoped to hell it wasn’t. Not this.
    But she had known something bad would happen, or had already happened, and this was about as bad as Marc ever wanted to see.
    Except that he had a leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him this was just the beginning, that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. Dani had looked worried, which was unusual enough; she didn’t give away much and never had. But, even more, he had felt her anxiety, like a jolt to the gut, and the sudden reawakening of that old connection had caught him off guard.
    So off guard that he had said more than he’d intended to about his own feelings.
    “Marc? Sorry about that.” Jordan sounded as queasy as he looked, his complexion pasty and his eyes sick. “But I just don’t think—”
    “Go back to the station,” Marc told him, pushing aside everything but the job he had to do. “Check if we have prints on either Bob Norvell’s wife, Karen, or the Huntley girl, Becky. If we don’t have them on file, send a couple of teams with kits to their homes and get them there.”
    If anything, Jordan looked sicker. “The families are bound to ask why. What do I say to them?”
    Marc