by ILLONA HAUS
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“Just brought in Dante Toomey’s main runner,” Kay said.
“You caught that little squirrel?”
“Let me tell you, Quortez Squirl is not so little.”
“Well, I hope he ended up looking worse than you. Hey, Hollywood,” he said to Curran, nodding at the rookie’s stained shirt, “and who’d you arrest this morning? Your coffee cup?”
He was sure Curran shot him a look from behind the Oakley wire-framed sunglasses as he drew the edges of his trench coat together.
“So, what have you got?” Kay asked.
“Might be nothing but a school prank,” he said, leading her and Bobby across the field to where the residential yards backed onto the school property. “We have a witness. Says he was letting his cat out. I haven’t talked to him yet, but the responding officer says the guy saw someone at this spot. Looked like they dumped something, then headed back to a white panel van and drove off.”
“Jesus.” Finn heard Curran behind him. “Is that … is that someone’s heart?”
“Very good, Hollywood. You get an A in anatomy.”
Kay squatted several feet from the base of the tree, examining the organ, then lifting her gaze to scan the open fields, the front of the school, and the tracks in the melting snow.
The fist-sized organ glistened dully in the gray light. Smears of blood caked the exterior membrane and stained the snow around it, and where the aorta and arteries had been severed, the edges appeared to be drying.
Kay was silent as she studied the scene. In the past year of partnering with her on more than a dozen cases, Finn had learned how Kay worked. Respected it. That quiet fierceness. The calculation of every angle in a case, like she was playing a game of chess, moving each piece with obsessive deliberation.
Eventually, she pointed to the dozen or so drops of blood in the snow around it. “He must have dumped it from a container or a bag. What time did the witness see this guy?”
“Five. The school lights aren’t aimed out this far, so it was pretty dark. Wasn’t till daybreak, apparently, that he got curious. I guess he’s a birder. Says he used his binoculars, then came to see what it was.”
“Look at the snow around it,” she said, leaning in closer. “The edge of it. It looks melted.”
“Like it was still warm when he put it here,” Finn finished for her. “Christ, Kay, what is this? Some kind of cult thing? You ever see anything like this before?”
She shook her head, pointed to the trail of prints heading back to the school. “Are those the perp’s?”
“Have to be. The witness walked in from his backyard.”
Kay scrutinized the trail. “Ground’s pretty sloppy here,” she said. “I doubt we’ll get any kind of casting.”
She came back to the heart.
“Maybe it’s from a transplant clinic or something,” Curran suggested.
“No,” Kay said. “Look at the cuts. Those aren’t surgical. This heart was butchered out of someone.”
“Well, how do you know it’s even human, and not some pig’s heart from the school biology lab or something?” Curran asked.
“It’s not a pig’s heart, detectives.”
Officer Luttrell had returned with the witness. “This is Jonathan Durso,” she said.
Durso was a small man, with nervous eyes spaced too close together and set too deep in his narrow face. He pushed a pair of glasses farther up his nose and shifted his weight from one foot to the next, his suede-leather deck shoes soaked from snow.
“Dr. Durso,” the man corrected Luttrell. “And that is not from a pig,” he repeated, hugging himself from the cold. “In a porcine heart the left atrial appendage is of comparable size to the right. With this one, the left is appreciably smaller. Also, the shape is wrong. That, detectives, is human.”
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
Prologue
1
2