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at the clear plastic bag on the tray, holding a flat, reddish brown wedge of flesh. The color ran from her cheeks, and the torrents of cold air from the ducts overhead suddenly seemed colder.
    36
    James Grippando
    “You think the tongue came out before she was dead, then.”
    “Actually, it wasn’t completely removed until I did the examination.”
    Victoria shot him a look of concern.
    “The killer had taken it better than three-quarters of the way,” said Ackerman, slightly defensive. “That’s what made the State Attorney call you in the first place, thinking it was connected to these tongue murders in the news. It was just hanging by a shred. I took it the rest of the way to inspect the wound.”
    “All right,” she said. “But this is important: Do you think the killer did his part before or after death?”
    “I’d say it was perimortem —at or near the time of death.
    We’ve got various signs of torture. Look here,” he said as he turned one of the hands palm up. “Nails dug into the skin on the inside of the palms. She actually punctured the skin and drew blood. I’d say digging in that deeply is consistent with sustained, excruciating pain—the kind of pain you might expect to be associated with someone trying to rip the tongue right out of your mouth.”
    “We’ve seen that on a few of the other victims,” Victoria said quietly. “What about time of death?”
    “She was starting to swell with gas buildup. A few blisters had already formed under the skin, and fluids were leaking from her nose and vagina. So I fixed the time of death sometime on Friday, figuring she’d been dead maybe two and a half days. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time.”
    Victoria nodded. His conclusions seemed sound, but she suspected that his estimation of the time of death 37
    THE INFORMANT
    was no doubt influenced by newspaper reports that Gerty Kincaid was last seen alive on Friday morning.
    Dr. Ackerman carried on about livor mortis patterns and the details of his examination for another twenty minutes, until Victoria announced it was time to leave.
    She and Sheriff Dutton walked in silence to the parking lot. The sun had just set. Gray skies were turning black, and the temperature had dropped even further. Tiny drops of water on the hood of the squad car had actually frozen.
    “Is he any good?” she asked casually as they piled into the car.
    Dutton switched on the heater, but it blasted only cold air. “Who, Dr. Ackerman? Best damn pathologist in Georgia—maybe even the whole southeastern United States. Doesn’t have some goofy nickname, like the Grim Reaper or Dr. Blood and Guts, and he doesn’t eat ketchup sandwiches while doin’ his autopsies, neither.
    Just because he’s originally from south Georgia don’t mean he’s some backwoods flunky you see in a made-for-TV movie.”
    “I wasn’t implying he should be dressing deer. Don’t take this too personally, Sheriff, but you seem to get awfully defensive every time I ask you a question.”
    He paused, seeming to measure his response as the squad car came to a halt at the corner of Oglethorpe and Second Avenue. “Me—defensive? Maybe. But I think it’s more along the lines of those women who say they have to work twice as hard to get half as much. When it comes to law enforcement, a small-town cop’s probably a lot like being a woman in the FBI. Nobody thinks you can play with the big boys.”
    38
    James Grippando
    Victoria smiled with her eyes. She wasn’t sure she liked him, but she suddenly understood him.
    He lit up a cigarette. “I mean, people must ask you all the time why a woman like you would want to chase serial killers for a living.”
    “Yeah,” she said, smiling thinly. “Sometimes after knocking off a bottle of Mylanta for dinner, I even ask myself that question.”
    He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Why do you do it?”
    She stared out the window, said nothing for a long moment, then turned back to him. “For the