Station?"
As Anderson approached Apartment 56-C, she saw a harassed-looking Tek-Judge emerge from inside it.
"A Psi-Judge, huh?" He regarded her with a sour expression. "You'd think if they were sending another Judge to trample all over my crime scene, somebody might've mentioned it to me at least. I'm still working the blood evidence on the carpet in the apartment hallway, so be careful of what you tread on." Jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the apartment behind him, the Tek-Judge began a familiar refrain. "The crime scene's in there. I warn you though-"
"If I've eaten anything recently I might want to give it a miss?" Anderson said. After the tetchy way he had greeted her, she found the startled expression on his face priceless. Evidently, she had guessed his next words correctly. "What? You're surprised I took the words right out of your mouth?" Smiling cheerily at his confusion, she pushed her way past him. "Haven't you heard? I'm psychic. I'd have thought the Psi Division uniform would be a dead giveaway on that one."
Leaving the Tek-Judge grimacing in ill humour behind her, Anderson moved into the apartment. Finding blood spray splashed against a wall halfway along the hallway, and a set of bloody footprints and drag marks on the floor leading to the kitchen, she paused to inspect them. Killer must have struck the first blow here, she thought, and then dragged the victim into the kitchen. Satisfied with her reading of the evidence, she followed the line of footprints towards the kitchen.
Inside, she was forced to concede that the Tek-Judge had been right in trying to warn her as to what lay ahead. As crime scenes went, it was a bad one - worse even than the blood-soaked living room she had seen in Frank Assisi Block earlier in the night. Standing in the doorway of the apartment's cramped kitchen, Anderson found she was staring at the mutilated body of a woman lying spread-eagled on her back on the kitchen table. The woman's throat had been cut open and her blouse torn away, the latter revealing a torso peppered with stab wounds, while her ribs were exposed by a long ragged incision that had peeled back the skin, either side of it from her collar bone to her groin. Like the Assisi crime scene, there was blood everywhere. Though to Anderson's mind, the most gruesome sight of all was the large, round piece of red-brown flesh lying incongruously on the draining board of the sink, beside a haphazardly stacked pile of dirty dishes.
"You're looking at the victim's liver." A Med-Judge stood over the dead woman's body, minutely examining the wounds with a mediscanner. Raising his eyes from his work, he followed the direction of Anderson's gaze as she stared at the draining board. "The killer removed it post-mortem, along with a length of her small intestine. There's a mass of blood and tissue clogging the outflow pipe for the waste disposal unit in the sink. Looks like the killer tried to use it to dispose of the intestine. Could be he was planning on getting rid of the rest of the body in the same way, until the unit became clogged and he was forced to abandon the idea. Of course, strictly speaking, deciding exactly what was in the perp's mind is more your area than mine." Turning to face Anderson, the Med-Judge extended his hand and offered it to her. "The name's Noland. You must be the Psi-Judge they assigned to perform a psychometric scan on the crime scene?"
"Anderson." Looking down at his proffered hand, she saw it was covered in blood. "Not to seem squeamish, but do you mind if we don't shake hands? I don't like to get blood on the uniform unless I absolutely have to."
"What? I... No..." Looking to his own hand for a moment, he shrugged and smiled in embarrassment. "Sorry about that, occupational hazard. I'm on permanent attachment to Forensic Pathology. When you spend as much time as I do delving around inside dead people's guts, it gets so you don't notice the blood any more."
"Yeah, I can see how that could
Catelynn Lowell, Tyler Baltierra