Wake to Darkness by MAGGIE SHAYNE Read Free Book Online

nodded and walked around the body, giving it a wide berth so as not to disturb evidence. Not that there would be any. Mason was already certain the killer had stayed up on the road and never set foot down here. Still...
    “Oh, shit.” He could see the front of her now. The dress was torn from the hem up to her neck, flapping up and down in the frigid wind. She was cut all to hell and gone—gutted, it looked like. Then he looked again. Someone had cut two sides of a triangle into her skin, with its topmost point dead center just below her breasts, then peeled it back so the flap was lying folded over on her belly. He could see the edges of her rib cage and a gaping, frozen, deep red void he would rather not have seen.
    It fit perfectly with what Rachel had described.
    “Not another mark on her,” Piedmont said. “A fucking odd way to commit a murder.”
    “She have any ID on her?”
    “No, but we knew you had a missing woman matching her description, right down to the blue dress. So...”
    Mason knelt and looked at the woman’s hands. There wasn’t so much as a broken nail. No bruising on her, none that was visible, anyway. “No signs of a struggle, no defensive injuries?”
    “Not that I could see. You?”
    Mason shook his head, then looked at the area around her. “There are a lot of weeds and brush down here. Enough to conceal her a little until someone got close enough to notice.”
    The guy snapping pictures stopped snapping. “I think I’ve got all we need. The ME’s here. You can let him take her.”
    “Bag her hands, just in case,” Mason said. She was pretty—or had been once. She’d died with her eyes open, but there was nothing in them now. No expression, not of horror, not of peace. Nothing. They were lifeless and shrunken, no longer even resembling human eyes, more like a pair of cloudy grapes long past their prime.
    A team came down the hillside with a gurney and a body bag. Mason lowered his head. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marissa. If you are Marissa, and I think you are. We’re gonna get whoever did this. I promise you that.”
    Then he straightened and picked his way back up the steep embankment, moving at an angle to get better footing in the fresh snow. As he walked, he was tapping keys on his cell phone, keying in “location of the human pancreas” in the search bar. Then he clicked on Images, and saw that the pancreas was between the left and right sides of the rib cage and partially behind, tucked up against the liver.
    That was where she’d been cut, where there was a gaping hole. Right where Rachel had dreamed of being cut, of having something torn from her body while she was still alive.
    He hadn’t told Rachel which of his brother’s organs his missing soccer mom had received. He’d deliberately left that part out because he didn’t want to influence her visions. It would be like contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces around that might later be mistaken for actual clues.
    Marissa Siorse, his missing person, had been a pancreas recipient. The ME would tell him for sure, but he was pretty certain that body down there was missing its pancreas. And if she was Marissa, that organ had originally belonged to his dead brother.
    He didn’t want to think that Eric had come back from the dead to reclaim his parts from beyond the grave. But he hadn’t wanted to think that his brother had found a way to continue his serial killings from beyond the grave, either, and he’d been wrong. Eric’s crimes had been repeated by two of his organ recipients, men who, as far as Mason could tell, had been perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens prior to their transplants.
    It’s not the same. This organ recipient is the victim, not the killer.
    He told himself that, but the icy dread in the pit of his stomach was colder than the December wind freezing his ears.
    * * *
    Joshua teased me to come out sledding with him until I finally gave in. It looked as if Jeremy and Misty were