Criss Cross

Chapter 69

Sampson, Bree, special agent Tillis, and I hustled into the DC Medical Examiner’s office early that afternoon.

Every single one of us was a seasoned veteran of law enforcement. But none of us looked forward to what we were about to do. Dr. Stacy Abbott, a senior ME, buzzed us through and led us down a hallway past the three autopsy rooms.

In nearly every morgue I’ve been in, there’s a distinct disinfectant odor in the air and an odd array of lights, some soft, others harsh, alternating in a way that throws me off a little and makes me slightly nauseated even before I confront a corpse.

I’ve learned to live with the feeling because, in a murder investigation, a morgue is where the dead still speak. It takes a gifted pathologist like Dr. Abbott to hear them. But more often than not, their bodies will yield valuable information in homicide cases.

“How many have you examined so far?” Sampson asked Dr. Abbott before we pushed through the doors into the actual morgue.

“Several,” she said.

“Similarities?” I asked.

“They were decapitated in the exact same way,” said Abbott. She was in her late thirties, a little quirky, but very sharp upstairs.

The ME said the first cut was made from behind, a violent slice across the front of the neck, lateral left to right, and deep, going through the carotid, the larynx, and the esophagus to the spine. A second cut started on the right, went around the back, and joined the initial anterior wound.

The head was then twisted powerfully enough to rupture the spinal column below the sixth cervical vertebra. The exposed cord was severed to complete the process of detaching the head from the body.

“Any thoughts on the kind of knife?” Bree asked.

“A substantial one,” Dr. Abbott said. “Three of the John Does in here were big men with muscular necks, and the initial cuts were still very deep. My best guess is you’re looking for a stout knife handle with a razor-sharp ten- or twelve-inch scimitar blade attached. The kind of knife a butcher might use.”

I closed my eyes a moment, thinking about Tanner Oates, the Meat Man. Every one of his victims had been killed by a butcher knife and then decapitated below the C6 vertebra.

“Ready?” Dr. Abbott said.

“As ready as you can be for this kind of thing,” Special Agent Tillis said.

“You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?” Bree asked.

“A few times, but it’s not on my regular diet.”

“You’ll do fine,” Sampson said, and we followed the ME through the double doors.

The air was chilly inside the morgue, a tile-floored, rectangular space with cold lockers for bodies stacked three high the length of the room on both sides.

Abbott said, “Where do you want to start?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We want to look at them all.”

Abbott consulted a chart, went to a locker on the right wall, and drew it open to reveal a thick, opaque plastic evidence bag with a head in it.

“Jane Doe number twenty-eight fourteen,” Dr. Abbott said, lifting the head. “Female, Hispanic, roughly late twenties, brown-eyed, history of dental care.”

Bree and Special Agent Tillis were looking at a laptop. They both shook their heads. “I’m not seeing her here.”

After re-bagging the head and closing the locker, Abbott looked at her chart and went to another locker, this one on the lower level. She squatted down and opened it.

“John Doe number twenty-eight twenty-three,” she said, removing the second head. “African-American, twenties, gold-cap incisors, two scars on the scalp.”

Bree and Tillis studied the head and then the laptop. “Nope,” Tillis said.

Abbott put the head back and pulled the third, an Asian male.

“Oh-for-four,” Sampson said.

It got worse. None of the six heads matched any of the six headless bodies found aboard the sex traffickers’ boat off Florida.

Tillis looked deflated. “I had hopes.”