Free Cut Dead by Mark Sennen Page B

bodies are still more than just skeletons.’ Nesbit paused, and noticing Savage swallowing a gulp, he smiled. ‘Something to look forward to, hey?’
    ‘Can’t wait,’ Savage said as she ran her eyes over the corpse again, thinking the dried mud resembled the war paint of some primitive aboriginal warrior about to go into battle. Except this woman wasn’t going anywhere. Not without her head.
    ‘Tricky to determine what exactly killed her,’ Nesbit said as he began a preliminary examination, dictating a few notes as he worked his way around the body. ‘Possibly the decapitation, but as with Mandy Glastone, the first victim, we can’t know if that caused death or not.’
    He indicated to one of the mortuary technicians to wash down the body and soon water was sluicing the mud away, revealing the odd cuts across the torso, some lines curving this way and that, some going straight across and meeting or bisecting each other. The other technician began to take pictures, the light from the flash sparkling in the flowing water.
    ‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ Hardin said, speaking for the first time. ‘Dan bloody Brown?’
    Savage had to concede the patterns were like nothing she’d seen before. For all she knew they could well be some ancient language, hieroglyphics written on skin instead of stone. Although that didn’t make much sense.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you are leaving a message you don’t bury it away six foot under.’
    ‘Why do it then?’ Hardin shook his head and moved closer. ‘Unless you’re a bloody loon.’
    ‘I think with this killer that’s a given, sir.’ Savage turned to Nesbit. ‘Do the older bodies have the cuts?’
    ‘In places, yes,’ the pathologist said. ‘The skin is not intact so if the markings were ever as extensive as these ones they are gone now.’
    ‘Then I think the act was the thing, not what resulted.’
    ‘Interesting theory.’ Hardin cocked his head, as if trying to view the markings from a different angle. ‘So we’d be wasting our time trying to deduce anything from them. They’re meaningless.’
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘No, Charlotte, I know you didn’t,’ Hardin said. ‘There’ll be some photographs somewhere of Mandy Glastone, but if I remember rightly there were more cuts on her.’
    ‘So this latest attack is less frenzied? Strange, as a serial killer develops he often goes further.’
    ‘But these aren’t frenzied, are they?’ Nesbit said. He picked up a plastic spatula and traced one of the cuts. It curved from the side of the woman’s left breast down to the belly button and around her waist in a sweeping, graceful arc. ‘These are, I hate to say … artistic?’
    ‘Done with care?’ Savage said.
    ‘No care for the victim, obviously, but care for the precision of the line, yes.’ Nesbit looked up at Savage. ‘We considered the cuts with the Glastone woman, wondered about the date, the summer solstice. Some sort of ritual. To be honest, back then I thought it was the stuff of fiction, but …’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘This girl. The two others. Could be something to ponder.’
    ‘Was she …’ Savage began to think on Nesbit’s words. Had the girl been sacrificed? Perhaps tortured? ‘Was she alive?’
    ‘See there and there and there?’ Nesbit indicated dark brown splodges on the abdomen. ‘Blood has come from all the cuts but here it has flowed rather more freely and stained the skin. That couldn’t have happened after death.’
    ‘Shit,’ Hardin said. ‘I just remembered why I don’t like attending these things. I’ll need a couple of extra glasses of sherry this evening.’
    ‘You’ll be lucky to get home in time for drinks, Conrad. We’ve a few hours to go before I finish up.’ Nesbit glanced at Hardin and then across to Savage. ‘If it’s any consolation she might not have been conscious when the cutting took place, but unless the killer tells us we’ll never know.’
    ‘We can hope though,’ Savage