“I think the perpetrator is probably a well-educated man,” Trent said. “Probably in his mid- to late-thirties. Unhappy with his job, unhappy with his home situation.”

Michael held his tongue. In his opinion, profiling was a load of shit. Except for the well-educated part, Trent could be talking about most of the men in the squad. Throw in banging his next-door neighbor and he’d be describing Michael.

“The files show a clear pattern of escalation,” Trent continued. “Cooper, the first girl, was attacked outside a movie theater; quick, efficient. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes and all of it was out of range of the theater’s closed-circuit cameras. The second, Anna Linder, was abducted right off the street. He took her somewhere—she’s not sure where—in a car. He left her right outside the gates of Stone Mountain Park. Park police found her the next morning.”

“Any tire tracks?”

“About twelve hundred,” Trent answered. “The park had just started its annual Christmas lights show.”

Michael had taken Gina and Tim to see the lights. They went every year.

“DNA?” Michael asked.

“He wore a condom.”

“Okay,” Michael said. So he wasn’t a moron. “What does this have to do with my girl last night?”

Trent narrowed his eyes, like he wondered if Michael had heard a word he said. “Their tongues, Detective.” He slid the reports back over. “They all had their tongues bitten off.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The tongue is basically like a piece of tough steak,” Pete Hanson said, slipping on his latex gloves. He stopped, looking at Trent. “I take you for a runner, sir. Is that correct?”

Trent didn’t seem surprised by the question. Being on the job for twelve years, Michael figured the man had been around his share of eccentric coroners.

He answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Long distance?”

“Yes.”

“Marathons?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so.” Pete nodded to himself, like he had scored a point, though Michael had noticed that Will Trent hadn’t volunteered any information about himself.

Pete went back to the corpse lying on the table in the center of the room. Aleesha Monroe’s body was draped in a white sheet, her head exposed. The third eyelash was gone, the makeup removed. Thick sutures lined her forehead where her scalp and face had been peeled back to examine her skull and remove her brain.

“You ever bitten your tongue?” Pete asked.

Trent didn’t answer, so Michael said, “Sure.”

“Heals pretty quickly. The tongue is an amazing organ—unless it’s severed, that is. At any rate,” he continued, “biting through the tongue is not a difficult endeavor.” He rolled back the sheet, showing the top of the Y-incision but stopping just shy of baring Monroe’s breasts.

“Here,” Pete said. Michael could see deep black bruises over the woman’s left shoulder. “The distribution of the livor mortis tells us she died where you found her. On her back, on the stairs. My guess,” Pete said, “is that she was beaten, then raped, and in the course of the rape he bit off her tongue.”

Michael thought about that, pictured her on the stairs, her body lax at first as she endured the rape, then tensing, convulsing in fear as she realized what was going to happen.

Trent finally spoke. “Can you get DNA off the tongue?”

“I imagine I’ll get a significant amount of DNA off her tongue, given her profession.” Pete shrugged his shoulders. “And I’m sure the swabs from her vagina will reveal a cornucopia of suspects for you, but my guess would be that your perpetrator used a condom.”

“Why is that?” Michael asked.

“Powder,” Pete answered. “There was a trace of cornstarch on her right thigh.”

Michael knew that rubbers were often packed in powder to make them easier to use. All the condom makers used the same ingredients, so there was no way of tracing it back to a single manufacturer. Not that knowing whether he used a Trojan or a Ramses would narrow the search.

“I’m guessing it was lubricated,” Pete added. “There were also traces of a compound not inconsistent with nonoxynol-9.”

Trent seemed to find this interesting. “Were there any traces of this on the stairs?”

“Not that I found.”

Trent surmised, “So, he must have had sex with her somewhere else, probably inside the apartment, before the struggle in the stairway.”

Michael tuned them out. A whore like Monroe wasn’t going to waste her hard-earned money on extravagances like lube and spermicide. Better to just grit her teeth and save the cash. Deal with the consequences later.

Michael said, “The condom must have belonged to the doer.”

Trent looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered Michael was in the room. “That’s possible.”

Michael spelled it out for him. “The doer didn’t mean to kill her. Why bother with an expensive condom, right?”

Trent nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

“Well.” Pete broke the silence. “As I was saying…” He went back to his lecture, opening the woman’s mouth, showing the stub where her tongue used to be attached. “There aren’t any major arteries in the tongue, barring the lingual artery, which spreads out like the roots of a tree, tapering at the ends. You would have to go into the mouth a few inches to get to it, in which case you couldn’t use your teeth.” He frowned, thinking for a moment. “Picture a dachshund trying to fit his snout into a badger hole.”

Michael didn’t want to, but he found the image playing in his mind, the yippy bark echoing in his ears.

“In this case,” Pete continued, “the incision separated the frenulum linguae from the organ, bisecting the submandibular duct.” He opened his own mouth and lifted up his tongue, pointing to the thin stretch of skin underneath. “The removal of the tongue in and of itself is not a life-threatening injury. The problem is, she fell onto her back. Perhaps the shock of the event or the various chemical substances in her body affected her. Subsequently, she passed out. Over the course of a few minutes, the blood from the severed tongue engorged her throat. My official cause of death will be asphyxiation due to the blockage of the trachea by blood, causing respiratory arrest, secondary to exsanguination from the traumatic amputation of the tongue.”

“But,” Michael said, “he didn’t mean for her to die.”

“It’s not in my purview to imagine what goes through a man’s mind when he is biting off a woman’s tongue, but if I were a gambling man, and my ex-wives will tell you I am, then yes. I would guess that the attacker did not intend for her to die.”

Trent said, “Just like the others.”

“There are more?” Pete asked, perking up. “I’ve not heard of any cases similar to this.”

Trent told him, “There are two girls that we know of. The first had her tongue bitten, but not completely severed. It was sewn back on and she was fine—relatively speaking. The second lost her tongue. Too much time had passed to safely reattach it.”