The Lady Who Cried Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) by Lauren Carr Read Free Book Online

table that was covered with a white sheet.
    “No problem,” David said.
    “Are you okay?” Dr. Washington asked Mac with concern. “You look flushed.”
    Mac ignored David’s grin. “I guess I had the heater up too high in the car when I was running late.”
    “Oh, is that all?” Her lips curled into a smirk. “I thought it was something a little more intimate.”
    While David burst out laughing, Mac said, “Can we get on with this?”
    The medical examiner turned serious. “Cause of death was stabbing. I counted forty-six stab wounds with the concentration in her stomach and some strikes in her chest.”
    “Was there any sign of sexual assault?” David asked.
    “You had to ask me that.” The medical examiner looked at him for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. “Can’t be conclusive because of the extent of the mutilation. I did find semen—enough for a DNA sample. However, the bruising and tearing could be due to the attack that resulted in her murder, and not rape. The sexual activity could have been completely consensual.”
    “And then things went bad afterwards,” Mac said.
    “In addition to the dismemberment, he gutted her from the ribcage down to the pelvis and took her uterus.”
    “Her what?” David asked.
    “Uterus,” Doc Washington repeated the word. “Her female organ.”
    While David gazed at her in shock, Mac asked, “Could she have been pregnant? Archie said Khloe was making a big deal on her social media sites about a huge announcement in that interview. Maybe she was going to announce that she was pregnant, and the father wanted to stop that. So he killed her and took the uterus with the fetus.”
    “That’s sick,” David said.
    “We already know our killer’s sick,” Mac said.
    The medical examiner was shaking her head. “According to the blood tests, she wasn’t pregnant.”
    “Does it look to you like the killer had medical training?” Mac asked her. “Did he know what he was doing when cutting her?”
    “No,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “The cuts were frenzied. Sloppy. Not precise. I saw a lot of rage in them. He basically hacked out the uterus when he took it.”
    David asked both the seasoned detective and medical examiner, “Have you ever seen something like this before? A killer who guts the woman and takes the uterus?”
    Mac was staring down at the sheet under which Khloe Everest’s dismembered body rested. “I have seen similar cases. Usually it’s a man who hates women, plain and simple. I once caught a killer who didn’t care who the woman was—he would hunt them like animals and butcher them because he simply hated their sex.” He grinned. “But we got this guy’s DNA from his semen. Is it in the system?”
    She smiled. “Oh yes.”
    “Great,” Mac said. “Then this can be an easy case.”
    “No, not that easy,” she said. “The same DNA was found on two other bodies listed in the database, but the donor has never been identified.”
    “That means this guy has killed two other women,” Mac said.
    “The first one is Amber Houston.”
    “Where do I know that name from?” David asked.
    “She disappeared the month before Khloe staged her abduction,” Mac said. “Her body was found in a garbage bag in a motel dumpster.”
    “Like Khloe, her body was dismembered, and her uterus taken,” the doctor said. “There’s no way this is a copycat, because the dismemberment and uterus were never made public.”
    “So it’s the same guy,” Mac said. “The DNA matched for a third victim?”
    “Los Angeles,” she said. “Twenty months ago. Tiffany Blanchard. She was a model. Her body was found in a garbage bag dumped over a hillside on the beach. Dismembered with her uterus missing. In all three cases, the killer had sexual relations with the woman before stabbing her to death, mutilating and dismembering her bodies, and then taking her uterus.”
    “We have a serial killer,” David said.
    “Yep,” Mac said,