i 13e44e81ff362920 by T L Read Free Book Online Page B

one”—she pointed to a bloody seam running just below the chin—“transected the internal jugular vein. He would have bled out in three minutes, tops.”
    “Very Basic Instinct.”
    She shook her head. “No way. Ice picks make distinctive puncture wounds. This was more like a dagger, or a glass shard. Something long and slender, but with uneven edges. That’s why the tissue is so abraded.” She frowned. “It’s strange, though. See this wound on the left cheek?”
    I looked closer. It was shaped like a bloody leaf, as if someone had pierced the flesh with an arrow-head. Pink muscle tissue was visible, and, beneath that, small white notches of bone.
    “Someone really went to town,” I said.
    “This wound is different from the others. They aren’t exactly clean cuts, but the sharp-force trauma seems more evenly distributed. This looks more like the result of a wild animal attack. Something with talons.”
    I remembered seeing the body of Mia’s aunt, Cassandra, lying on the autopsy table with a similar wound. The vampire Sabine Delacroix had reached into her thoracic cavity and torn it apart with her bare hands, through brute strength alone. I shivered slightly and looked away.
    “A vampire could have done it. A powerful one.”
    “True. But I’m not entirely convinced that it wasn’t done with a secondary weapon. Something larger, flatter, but still sharp.”
    “It’s weird.”
    “Tess, ‘weird’ is a pretty vague adjective in our line of work.”
    I returned my gaze to the body. “Ordeño had serious power. He was a skilled necromancer with years of experience, and he had access to destructive and entropic forces that I can barely wrap my head around. How could someone get close enough to tear his face apart like this?”
    She shrugged. “Everyone falls eventually, no matter how powerful they are. Maybe it happened too quickly for him to raise an adequate defense.”
    “Or maybe he trusted his attacker.” I let my hand hover an inch above Ordeño’s ruined throat. “The first wound could have easily incapacitated him. Adrenaline kicks in, and the blood pumps blood even faster, not realizing that it’s all just spilling onto the floor. It was probably over before he even knew what hit him.”
    “Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.” Tasha reached into a cabinet and withdrew a black ALS handscope, which looked like a bulky, industrial-strength flashlight. She switched on the scope, and the 12V cooling fan inside began to hum softly. “You know, they call this thing ‘portable, ’ but it feels like a bowling ball.”
    I chuckled. “It’s better than the previous model, with the big dial that reminded me of my parents’
    old color TV.”
    Tasha handed me a pair of protective glasses. Then she hit a switch on the wall next to her, and the autopsy suite went dark, save for the cone of blue light shining from the handscope’s xenon lamp.
    She passed the light slowly over Ordeño’s body, from head to toe. Then she switched to an orange filter, and, after that, a red filter.
    “Nada.” She turned the lights back on. “Not even a stray hair. No biological stains of any kind that I can make out.”
    “If only we had a filter that measured materia on a body.”
    Tasha gave me a sly look. “You know—”
    I leaned in close. “Lab gossip?”
    “Just a rumor. I heard that Miles Sedgwick was working on a pilot project with Ben from DNA and Linus from Ballistics.”
    “That seems like an odd team.”
    “I know, right? Supposedly, they’re trying to design some kind of crystalline lens for detecting minute traces of materia within tissue samples. It has something to do with Raman spectroscopy, but that’s a little beyond my ken.”
    I wanted to ask her if Raman spectroscopy had anything to do with Ramen noodles, which I found quite tasty. But it seemed like one of those questions that was best left unasked in public.
    I also wondered if Derrick knew about this alleged collaboration.