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  "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."

  Pete shook his head. "Poor thing. Was this recent? I haven't read anything about it."

  "The first attack happened on state land, so we were able to keep it quiet. The second girl's parents shut out the press and the local cops held back the details. There's no story if nobody's willing to talk."

  "What about the third one?" Michael had to ask. "The little girl?"

  Trent filled Pete in on the case. "My opinion is she bit it herself," he concluded. "She's young, ten years old. She must have been terrified. The local PD is good, but they don't have a lot of experience with this sort of violent crime. I think it was probably very hard for them to elicit a statement from her."

  "No doubt," Pete agreed, but Michael wondered why Trent hadn't said any of this earlier. Maybe he had been feeling out Michael, seeing if he could pass the test.

  Shit, Michael thought. He was tired of jumping through hoops. He asked the doctor, "How old do you think this one is?" He nodded to Aleesha Monroe.

  "It's hard to say." Pete studied the woman's face. "Her teeth are a mess because of the drug. Given the hard nature of her life and her prolonged drug dependency, I'd put her in the late-thirties; possibly older, possibly younger."

  Michael looked at Trent. "But not a teenage girl."

  "Definitely not," Pete agreed.

  "So, we've got two teenagers thirty miles away and an old junkie in Atlanta and the only thing linking them is this tongue shit." He tried to stare his meaning into Trent. "Right?"

  Trent's cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen, then excused himself with an apology as he
left the room.

  Pete gave a heavy sigh, covering up the body, tugging the sheet tight over her head. "Messy situation."

  "Yeah," Michael agreed. He was watching Trent through the glass doors, wondering what the fuck was up with the guy.

  "He seems on the ball," Pete said, meaning Trent. "I have to say, it's a nice change of pace seeing one of your compatriots dressed so smartly."

  "What?" Michael asked. He'd been watching Trent, trying to hear the call.

  "The suit," Pete clarified. "It makes an impression."

  "Like a fucking undertaker," Michael answered, thinking Pete wasn't exactly ready to step into a GQ spread. His white lab coats were always starched and clean, but that was because the state took care of the laundry bill. Underneath, Pete generally wore jeans and a wrinkled button-down shirt, his collar wide open, revealing a patch of gray chest hair and a gold medallion that any of the Bee Gees would have been ashamed to wear.

  "It is a tenuous connection," Pete said. "The three cases."

  "You're telling me."

  "But it does give one pause that the tongues were all bitten off. That's not a common twist." He picked up the evidence bag with the tongue and held it up as if Michael hadn't seen it plenty last night. "I'd have to say in all my years doing this job, I've never run across anything similar. Bite marks, yes. I always say if you want scientific proof that we have evolved from animals, you need only look at the average rape victim." Pete placed the tongue beside Monroe's arm. "Bite marks were all over her breasts and shoulders. I counted at least twenty-two. It's a base instinct, I suppose, to bite during a vicious attack. You see dogs and big cats do it in the wild." He chuckled. "I cannot tell you how many nipples I've seen bitten off. Five or six instances of the clitoris being severed. One finger..." He smiled at Michael. "If only these monsters had horns. It would be so much easier finding them."

  Michael did not like the way the doctor was looking at him, and he sure as hell didn't want to hear his opinions on sexual predators. He said, "Tell Trent I'm downstairs when he's finished yapping on the phone."

  He left through the emergency exit, taking the steps at a full trot. His instinct was to get into his car and leave Trent with his thumb up his ass, but he wasn't about to fuck around with the guy. Even if Greer didn't call him on it, Michael knew better than to make an enemy of the well-dressed asshole from the GBI.

  "Where's the fire?" Leo asked. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs smoking a cigarette.

  "Give me one," Michael said.

  "Thought you quit."

  "You my mother?" Michael reached into Leo's shirt pocket and took the pack.

  Leo clicked the lighter and Michael took a deep drag. They were on the garage level of the building. The odor of car exhaust and rubber was overwhelming, but the cigarette smoke burning through Michael's nostrils cut the smell.

  "So," Leo began. "Where's fucknuts?"

  Michael let out a stream of smoke, feeling the nicotine calm him. "Upstairs with Pete."

  Leo scowled. Pete had banned him from the morgue after a predictably ill-timed joke. "I went down to Records."

  Michael squinted past the smoke. "Yeah?"

  "Will Trent's file is sealed."

  "Sealed?"

  Leo nodded.

  "How do you get your file sealed?" Got me.

  They both smoked for a minute, silent in their thoughts. Michael looked down at the floor, which was covered with cigarette butts. The building was strictly nonsmoking, but telling a bunch of cops they couldn't do something was like telling a monkey not to throw its shit.

  Michael asked, "Why'd Greer call him in? Him specifically, I mean. This SCAT team, whatever the fuck it is."

  "Greer didn't call him." Leo raised his eyebrows like he was enjoying the mystery. "Trent was sitting in his office when Greer got to work."

  Michael felt his heart start beating double time in his chest. The nicotine was getting to him, making him light-headed. "That's not how it works. The state boys can't just come in and take over a case. They have to be asked in."

  "Sounded to me last night like Greer was gonna ask him anyway. What's the big deal how it came down?"

  "Never mind." Despite Leo's disgusting people skills, the man knew a lot of people on the force. He had made an art out of developing contacts and could usually get the dirt on anybody.

  Michael asked, "You able to find out anything about him?"

  Leo shrugged, winking his eye against the smoke from his cigarette. "Sharon down in Dispatch knows a guy who dated a girl he worked with."

  "Christ," Michael hissed. "Next you're gonna tell me you gotta friend who knows somebody who's gotta friend who—"

  "You wanna hear or not?"

  Michael bit back what he really wanted to say. "Go."

  Leo took his time, rubbing his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, taking a drag, then letting it out slow. Michael was two seconds from throttling him when Leo finally provided, "The news is that he's a good cop. Doesn't make a lot of friends—"

  "No shit."

  "Yeah." Leo chuckled, then coughed, then smacked his lips like he was swallowing it back down.

  Michael looked at the cigarette in his hand, his stomach turning.

  Leo paused, made sure he had Michael's attention. "He's got an eighty-nine percent clearance rate."

  Michael felt sick, but not because of the smoke. In its infinite wisdom, the Federal government had called for measuring the clearance rate—the number of solved cases—in each police agency so that some pencil pusher in Washington could track the progress on his little charts. They called it accountability, but to most cops it was just a shitload more paperwork. Any idiot could have predicted that this would cause a massive pissing contest among the detectives, and Greer fed into it by posting their numbers each month.

  Trent had them all beat by about twenty points.

  "Well," Michael said, forcing himself to laugh. "It's easy to solve a case when you take it over from some cop who's already done all the work."

  "This SKIT thing is new to him."

  "SCAT," Michael corrected, knowing Leo was trying to bait him but unable to stop playing.

  "Whatever," Leo mumbled. "What I'm saying is, Trent was working major crime before he was tapped."

  "Good for him."

  "He had a huge case a few years back with some gal over in kiddie crimes."

  "Gal got a name?"

  Leo shrugged again. "Couple of guys were snatching kids down in Florida, swapping them back and forth with their buddies in Montana.

  It was all going out of Hartsfield; they were moving them through there like cattle. Your buddy's team cracked it open in a month. Gal gets a big promotion, Trent stays where he is."

  "He was head of the team?" Yep.

  ""Why didn't he get promoted?"

  "Have to ask him that."

  "If I could ask him, I wouldn't be here talking to you."

  Leo's eyes flashed, like his feelings had been hurt. "That's all I got, man. Trent's a straight arrow, knows his job. You want more, you need to call somebody downtown and find out yourself."

  Michael stared at his cigarette, watching it burn. Gina would kill him if she saw him smoking. She'd smell it on his hands as soon as he got home.

  He dropped the butt onto the ground, grinding it in with his heel. "Is Angie still working Vice?"

  "Polaski?" Leo asked, like he didn't quite believe his ears. "You don't wanna go fucking with that pollack."

  "Answer the fucking question."

  Leo took out another cigarette and lit it from the first. "Yeah. Last I heard."

  "If Trent comes looking for me, tell him I'll meet him back down here in a few minutes."

  Michael didn't give Leo time to answer. He ran back up the steps to the third floor, his lungs rattling in his chest by the time he opened the door. Vice was a mostly nighttime endeavor, so half the squad was in the room filling out paperwork from last night's sweep. Angie had obviously worked cat
ch. She was wearing a halter-top that stopped three inches above her belly button and a blonde wig was splayed on her desk like a dead Pomeranian.

  He waited for her to look up, and when she did, she wasn't exactly happy to see him. As Michael walked over, she leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs under a skirt so short he looked away out of decency.

  "What are you doing here?" she demanded. "Jesus, you look like hell."

  Michael ran his fingers through his hair. He was sweating from the sprint up the stairs. The smoke was still in his lungs and he coughed something that sounded like a death rattle. Christ, he'd be joining Ken in a wheelchair if he kept this up.