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tools, each falling into a metal dish with a clang .
    “Any signs of sexual assault?  I doubt we can tell with Abigail, unless the burns to the genitals were a forensic countermeasure.”
    “That’s what’s weird.”  She snapped on a surgical mask.  “I found signs of forcible penetration on two of the girls, and one was a bloody mess.  Post-mortem, thank God for them.  Spermicide inside both.  The others weren’t sexually violated.  At least not that I can definitively prove.”
    John watched the scalpel slide over Abigail Black’s chest plate with practiced precision.  “Either this is the criminal profile of fractured schizophrenic, or there are multiple offenders.  A ring of men with varying perversions.  A necrophile has no use for a living body.  He wouldn’t keep them alive for three weeks if he were only interested in sexually assaulting corpses.”  Each new bit of information that turned up was more troublesome than the last. 
    The coroner dropped the bloody scalpel in a metal bin and buried her hands in Abigail’s gaping chest.  “You mean something like human trafficking? Multiple men involved in their torture, each with their own methods?”
    “I can’t say with any real certainty until I speak with the woman in charge.”
    The coroner pulled her hands from inside the bloody canyon with the sound of a plunger. John felt his eye twitch.
    “My assistant will give you my findings.  I’ll let you know when I’m finished, unless you want to stick around?”
    The pale, flabby lump that was Abigail Black’s heart plopped into a metal basin.  No, he’d rather not stick around to view the dissection of a twenty-six year-old woman.
    You’re getting less fun with each passing year , the voice in his head grumped.

FOURTEEN
     
    A knock tears me from my recollections.  Lisette isn’t happy.  She flings the door open like it’s personally pissed her off and shouts at the visitor. “We’re fucking busy, goddamnit.  How many times do I have to say it?”
    “Her boyfriend wants to see her.”
    She throws me an over-the-shoulder glance.  My eyes stretch to globes and I mouth Oh, please, God no . Jack knows when something’s wrong.  Of course everything is wrong now, but he’d make me tell.
    And telling Sergeant Lisette is hard enough.  
    “Now’s not the time. I’ll let you know when it’ll be okay.”  She lets the door slam in the intruder’s face and makes her way back to the chair.  “Did Abby tell you where she’d been abducted?”
    “She tutored kids Wednesday nights.  She didn’t charge their parents.  Her sessions were in an open room at her church.  Said he took her from the parking lot.”
    Lisette nods and reaches up to tie her Abby Gold hair into a ponytail.  “Her husband said she liked to do that.  She helped a few special-needs kids and their parents, too.  He told me she loved children.  It sounds like she was a really nice person.”
    Being a nice person didn’t assuage the guilt she felt so acutely. She told me before she died it was just part of being Catholic and mustered a half-laugh, but nothing was funny.  
    “Let’s pick up where we left off.”
    ***
    “Shhh,” I tell Abby.  She falls silent. 
    There it is again.  That noise.  A little mechanical whir . I’ve heard something like that before.  It’s a motion-activated camera.
    Miking the room isn’t bad enough.  He’s spying on us too. 
    “Fuck me, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this dickhead has cameras?”
    That sounds like an interesting gangbang, but I don’t comment.  “I didn’t know for sure until later.  I saw them in the corner of the ceiling.”
    She rubs the dusk-purple shadows kissing the skin beneath her eyes.  “Sorry.  Keep going.”
    I whisper so softly I wonder if Abby can hear.  “He’s got cameras.  They must have night-vision.”
    Her hair whips my cheeks as she cranes her neck in a futile search for the lens. “What are we supposed to be?  Lab