Free Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) by Carol O'Connell

stitches . . . that’s your work.”
    “I always pitch in on high-profile cases.” Did that sound defensive? Apparently so.
    Kathy’s eyes lit up—only an illusion of flickering eyelids, but a good one. She had something on him; she wanted him to know it. “No, this time it’s different.” In the sweep of one hand, she covered the length of his closing stitches. “This is almost like . . . embroidery.” The detective looked up to catch him—at what? Now she was distracted by a line of stitches that intersected his autopsy cuts. “So my perp’s a slasher.”
    “Not exactly. He cut her open and—”
    The naked corpse was attracting sideways glances from a morgueattendant, who had entered the room all too quietly to collect the dead. Dr. Slope ripped the sheet from the young detective’s hand, and he covered the body again to protect the nun’s modesty.
    A sign of weakness.
    A game point lost.
    Kathy watched in silence as the interloper was waved off and told to “Come back later.” He knew the detective had long suspected this minion of serious leaks to the press, but then—she suspected everyone of something, including his pathologists and, of course, himself. When the door had finally closed on the departed attendant, she looked down to stare at a pocket of the doctor’s lab coat.
    Might she have a paranoid conviction that he was holding out on her? Oh, yes. Always. He looked down to see only a tip of the cellophane bag protruding from the suspicious pocket, and he had to wonder how many volumes of information she had extrapolated from that.
    He pulled out this piece of evidence, properly tagged for chain of custody. The plastic identity bracelet bore the name of the nun and the hospital where she had been a patient. “Sister Michael was in town for diagnostic tests. I spoke to her attending physician. The day she went missing, she should have been in surgery to stem the leak of a brain aneurism. She was in pain, but she postponed the operation. She mentioned some pressing family business. Her doctor didn’t get any details.”
    And Kathy said, “She wanted to visit her mother while she still had strength to deal with a crazy woman.”
    This added more depth to his collected lore of the dead nun—scientific and not. “Sister Michael checked herself out of the hospital on Friday morning. She was expected back in the afternoon.” He was looking forward to playing his hole card, the one obvious aspect of the nun’s smile that he could back up with evidence. Though the essence of the smile bewildered him. Something familiar. What had he missed?Sometimes he felt that he was close to grasping it—like now—and it eluded him again. As if to some guilty purpose, the thought sprouted legs and ran away.
    Kathy Mallory had lost interest in the nun’s corpse. She turned to the other dissection tables, the three bodies left naked and with less lovely embroidery, obviously the work of other pathologists on his staff. “What about them? Same cause of death?”
    “By that, I assume you mean heart failure—due to the fact that their hearts were cut out of them.”
    “Trophies?”
    So she had not yet spoken to CSU. This butchery was news to her. But the theft of body parts was a hallmark of the unbalanced killer, one who would leave the messiest tracks to his door, and this possibility should not have disappointed her—yet it did.
    “The hearts have to be kept quiet.”
    “Not a problem.” He had already gone to some trouble to ensure that no leaks would be made to the news media. “So . . . things in common. Except for the nun, they all had tape residue around their hands and feet. No food in the stomach. Signs of dehydration.” He glanced at the row of tables beyond this one. “Those three had antemortem knife wounds. I can’t tell you if the killer’s sadistic or just impervious to suffering.”
    She examined marks on the arms of the middle-aged man, the purple bruises left by fingers and