by Mary Stone
“As a child?” Winter asked, the hair raising on her arms.
Nguyen nodded. “My theory is that whoever killed him and took his brain would have wanted it intact. Rather than a bullet or another type of physical injury, I think they euthanized him in the same way a veterinarian would euthanize a sick animal. John Doe was anywhere from thirty to fifty years old, probably Caucasian.”
“Sick bastards,” Noah muttered.
“Jane Doe, the case from thirteen years ago, she’s got the same autopsy marks as John Doe. A forensic anthropologist estimated at the time that she was between twenty and thirty. Also consistent with John Doe, Jane’s head was split open. The body was too decomposed to tell, but I’d be willing to bet that her brain had been taken too.
“They didn’t make a lot from it at the time, but she had an old head wound as well. Hers was on the back of her head, near the occipital bone. I think it stands to reason that you’ve got two murders with a really distinct pattern, but I’m just here to relay the physical evidence. Making a behavioral sketch is SSA Parrish’s job.”
“Thanks for stopping in, Dr. Nguyen.” Aiden reached out to clasp the man’s hand in a parting shake.
With a grin, Dan nodded. “Always a pleasure working with you guys. I’ll keep you in the loop as to what we find. The autopsy, if that’s what you want to call it, has been a mess, but we’re not leaving any stone unturned. Hopefully, I’ll have more for you guys soon.”
Dan waved to them as he pulled the glass and metal door closed behind himself.
“Well, shit,” Noah muttered.
Aiden suppressed a sigh. “Yeah. ‘Well, shit,’ about sums it up.”
“What do you have so far?” Winter asked.
“Not much.” Aiden stepped behind the wooden podium and flipped open the manila folder. “As we just learned, both victims had similar surgical procedures conducted on their heads. The wounds had started to heal in both cases, so those surgeries were conducted while they were still alive. An autopsy was performed on both victims, but it centered around their head.
“We don’t have a lot here in terms of physical evidence, but these deaths were both really, really specific. The killer has a specific set of skills, and based on how recent John Doe’s body is, they’re still in the city somewhere. They’ve been using lye to dissolve their victims’ bodies for at least thirteen years, and they added water to John Doe’s to speed up the process.
“This is someone who knows what they’re doing, both in terms of the procedures performed during and after the victims’ lives. They know how to destroy identifying evidence, and they know how to keep a person alive after they cut open their head and poke around in their brain.”
“You think we’re looking for a surgeon?” Bree surmised.
“Yes,” he answered. “Most likely a neurosurgeon. This isn’t another Jeffrey Dahmer chopping people up in his bathtub. This is someone with a medical degree, at the very least. Probably someone with specific experience performing surgery on the brain. The surgical tools used to make these cuts and to saw open the skulls were medical grade, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that our surgeon is practicing. They could have been fired for malpractice.”
“Or happily cutting into patients at a hospital right now,” Noah muttered.
Aiden nodded. “It is likely they are still practicing, still seen as a competent physician. Considering the previous head trauma experienced by both victims, there are a couple different ways the killer could have found them. They could’ve looked through medical records and decided they wanted these specific people, or these people could be previous patients of theirs. There’s no doubt here that we’re dealing with a serial killer, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that Jane and John Doe are just two of many.”
Drumming her fingers atop the polished table, Bree glanced over to Noah and Winter and then back to him. “We pull missing persons reports from the past year with a focus on those submitted in the past seven months. Check through those people to see if any of them have any history of traumatic brain injuries. Meanwhile, we look through hospital personnel records to see what kinds of brain surgeons around here have been slapped with malpractice suits.”
“Sounds like we’re sleeping here tonight, then.” Noah leaned back in his chair, his jawline grim. “I hope someone has their own coffee maker because, if we’re all relying on the shit in the breakroom, we’ll be dead before we can find out who John Doe is.”
20
In the past forty-eight hours, Winter estimated that she had managed approximately three hours of sleep. As soon as her head hit the plush pillow of her bed—as opposed to the scratchy couch cushions in the breakroom—she was out. Despite the soft mattress and the warm blankets, her fretful slumber was marked by bizarre, vivid dreams.
Though the digital clock at her bedside indicated she had slept for almost a full seven hours, she felt like she had rested for only two out of the seven. Pushing herself to sit, Winter rubbed her eyes and yawned. She could feel a dull ache at the base of her head, but she wasn’t all that surprised to wake up with the start of a headache after a night of such fitful rest.
Before she could scoot over to swing her legs off the edge of the bed, the room blurred as the pain sharpened to a stab. Months had passed since her last vision, but the sensation was so unlike any other that it was easy to differentiate.
As darkness ate away the edge of her vision, she reached one clumsy hand over to the tissue box on the nightstand. She had only just pressed the balled-up tissue to her nose when the world went black.
Through the dusty glass of an old window, Winter watched a flurry of fat, white snowflakes whip by on a mournful gust of wind. The beige windowsill was specked with dirt, and chips of paint had begun to peel away from the cheap wood.
She snapped her gaze away from the snowy scene as she heard the faint whisper of music. The sound grew clearer as her senses tuned her into the little bedroom, and she soon recognized the song as a popular rock anthem during the late 1990s.
Atop an overturned milk crate was the clunky, old-school boombox that blasted the well-known tune, and beside the makeshift nightstand, a girl sat cross-legged on a twin-sized bed. The bright greens and blues of the comforter were faded, and the edges were frayed in spots.
As Winter stepped away from the window, the girl’s attention didn’t break away from where it was fixed on the book in her lap. Though she was no older than ten, she wasn’t reading a children’s book or even a comic book.
This ten-year-old kid was reading a full-length novel.
The clatter of a door snapped the little girl’s gaze up to the shadowy hall at the other end of the room. Even in the muddy gray daylight, her green eyes shone like a pair of emeralds. As soon as Winter saw those eyes, she knew who the girl was.
“Autumn,” a woman called, her voice muffled. There was an unmistakable slur to her voice. Whoever she was, she was three sheets to the wind.
Shoving the paperback closed, Autumn scrambled to the end of the mattress to press the power button on the radio with a shaking hand. She scooted back to the corner where the bed met the wall, grabbed a stuffed kitten from the pillow, and clutched the cat to her chest.
As Winter glanced back and forth between the doorway and the young girl, she could feel her heart rate pick up, each beat pushing the chill of adrenaline throughout her body. Autumn was terrified, and now Winter was terrified too.
She wanted to tell herself that she was standing in the middle of an event that had never transpired in the real world, that the fear she felt was a nightmare Autumn had experienced when she was young. But Winter couldn’t so much as entertain the idea.
Whatever in the hell she was watching had happened. Whatever caused the sickly sense of fright to hang low and heavy in the air was real.
A flicker of movement drew Winter’s gaze away from Autumn and over to the doorway, and she took in a sharp breath as the woman shambled into the room.
The re
semblance between her and the Autumn that Winter knew was uncanny, but what surprised Winter the most was how young she looked. She was hardly halfway through her twenties.
“Autumn,” the woman repeated, “why are you looking at me like that?” The query was as weary as it was accusatory.
The dull afternoon light glinted off the tears as they streaked down Autumn’s pale cheeks. With a sniffle, she brushed the droplets away and shook her head.
“You’re drunk.” Autumn’s words were little more than a whisper, and Winter could feel the pinpricks at the corners of her eyes.
There was more melancholy in the little girl’s voice than there ever should have been in someone her age. At ten, Autumn had already seen more pain and suffering than most adults would witness in their entire lives.
“I’m not drunk.” The slur with which she spoke was almost ironic.
Heaving a tired sigh, the woman brushed off the front of her denim miniskirt as she dropped down to sit at the end of the bed. With one hand, she combed the pieces of bleached blonde hair away from her hazel eyes.
“Okay,” she giggled, “maybe I’m a little tipsy.”
In response to the lessened distance between them, Autumn’s grasp on her orange stuffed kitten tightened.
“I’m not going to hurt you, sweetie.” As she reached a hand toward her daughter, Autumn jammed herself farther into the corner.
“That’s what you always say,” Autumn whispered.
If Winter hadn’t been in the midst of a memory, she would have pushed the woman off the bed, punched her in the jaw, or both.
“I know.” Shadows along the woman’s throat shifted as she swallowed.
“Why do you hate me, Mom?”
As the woman shook her head, Winter caught the glassiness in her green-flecked eyes. “I don’t hate you. I’m just, I’m going through a hard time right now. But it’s about to get better. I promise it’s about to get better. We’re going to get better. I’m going to stop using, I’m going to stop drinking. I just had to go out one last time before I got well, okay?”
Autumn’s only response was another quiet sniffle.
“Honey, your dad is going to move back in with us.”
“W-w-what?” Autumn stammered. “When? Why? He can’t, we can’t.” Shaking her head vehemently, Autumn tucked her knees up to her chest. She looked like a cornered animal. If she was frightened of her mother, then she was outright terrified of her father.
“He’s going to help me.” The woman made another tentative move toward her daughter, but when Autumn bristled, she stopped in place. “We aren’t going to drink anymore. We’re going to go back to school, and we’re going to get good jobs. Everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”
Winter half-expected the young Autumn to nod and accept her mother’s reassurance, but the look of abject terror didn’t even lessen.
“You never keep your promises, and neither does he.”
There was a glint of ire behind the woman’s hazel eyes, but before Winter could watch the rest of the interaction play out, the scene shimmered out of existence. When she blinked, she was suddenly outdoors. The stairs to the splintered porch were worn, and a handful of persistent weeds pierced through the cracks in the concrete.
She could tell right away that the girl who walked down the pockmarked sidewalk to the rundown house was the same girl she had just seen. And like the scene in Autumn’s room, Winter knew she was in the midst of another memory.
Tightening her grip on the straps of her purple backpack, Autumn paused before she climbed up the first step. The afternoon sunlight gave her caramel-colored hair a golden tinge, and Winter was reminded that she was not a natural redhead.
Ever since she was a freshman in high school, Autumn had dyed her hair. She had even shown Winter a picture of the vivid purple and blue hues she used before she moved to Virginia to start her postgraduate work.
By the time Winter pulled herself from the short reverie, Autumn had opened the tarnished front door. In spite of the shouts she heard from inside the house, or perhaps because of them, Winter didn’t hesitate to follow the girl.
A blond, muscular man with a handful of tattoos printed on each arm stood beside a plush couch, and in front of him was Autumn’s mother.
Her hair was now a deep, chocolate brown, and the dark circles beneath her eyes were more pronounced. Maybe she had made good on her promise to quit drinking, but whatever her new substance of choice, Winter suspected its effects were far worse.
Try as she might, Winter couldn’t focus on the words the two hollered back and forth at one another, but without warning, the man snapped one arm up to crack the back of his hand across the woman’s face. Reflexively, Winter covered her mouth to stifle the sound of her sharp gasp.
Autumn’s words were just as indistinguishable as her parents’ as she set her books atop the coffee table to rush over to her mother.
“Go to your room, Autumn!” the man ordered, jabbing an index finger at a set of stairs beside the entrance to the kitchen.
“Leave Mom alone!” Autumn returned as she positioned herself between the two adults.
“Get the hell out of here!” His voice was just below an outright shout.
“Fuck you, Jeff!” the young girl shot back. “Why don’t you just leave? I know that’s what you want to do anyway, so why don’t you just get it over with?”
“I’m your father, Autumn,” he grated in response. “You’d best watch your damn mouth, you hear me?” His green eyes had narrowed, and his dangerous expression made the hair on the back of Winter’s neck stand on end.
“Whatever you’re going to do,” Autumn ground out, her tone strained, “just get it over with, you piece of shit!”
Curling his right hand into a fist, Jeff took a swift step forward, arced his arm backward, and swung.
At the precise moment the blow landed on Autumn’s cheek, Winter felt a searing pain just above her forehead. Autumn’s lids fluttered closed, and with a sickening crack, her head struck the corner of the sturdy, wooden coffee table.
If Winter didn’t know better, she would have thought she had just witnessed Autumn Trent’s death.
But before the pool of blood could grow, before the mother’s shrieks could echo through Winter’s ears, the scene changed again.
The environment was calm and tranquil, a far cry from the chaos of the cramped living room she had just left. Autumn held the same stuffed kitten to her chest as she pulled up the blankets on her hospital bed. White gauze wrapped around her head, and to her side, the light of the television glinted off a metal IV stand.
Winter’s breath caught in her throat as the heavy door cracked open.
Vision or not, if either of Autumn’s parents walked through the doorway, she would find a way to push them back out.
To her relief, the visitor was a middle-aged woman clad in navy blue scrubs and a white lab coat. The corners of her amber, gold-flecked eyes creased as her gaze met Autumn’s. Brushing away a piece of blonde hair that had fallen over the girl’s forehead, she made her way to the cushioned chair beside the bed.
“Dr. Schmidt,” Autumn greeted, a portion of the doctor’s warm smile reflected in her face. “I didn’t think you were going to be here. The nurse told me I’d be doing all the rest of my checkups with her or a different doctor.”
“Maybe some of them,” Dr. Schmidt replied, her smile unfaltering. “But I always like to check in to make sure my patients are okay after surgery.”
Autumn nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
As the doctor asked the young girl a series of questions, the rest of the room faded to a listless gray.
By the time the darkness crept back into the edge of Winter’s vision, everything other than Dr. Schmidt was black and white.
Winter sat bolt upright and sucked in a deep breath. The headache was gone, and not even a twinge of the sharp, stabbing pain had been left behind. Only a smudge of red dotted the tissue, but when she looked t
o the digital clock, she groaned.
She might have only been out for fifteen minutes, but she and Noah had agreed to carpool to work in an effort to save a little cash. They made decent money, but scholarships or not, Winter still had her fair share of student loans to repay.
If she had been unconscious for fifteen minutes, that meant Noah was fifteen minutes ahead of her.
As she hastened through her morning routine, Winter mulled over the events she had just watched. There was still no doubt in her mind that the visions were memories, and that those memories indeed belonged to Autumn Trent.
But why?
So far, all her visions had been relevant to a case. Even without the profile put together by Aiden and Bree, Winter knew Autumn wasn’t responsible for the body they’d found earlier that week.
The Jane Doe case was more than thirteen years old, and as smart and capable as Autumn was, Winter doubted the woman would have been able to pull off a brain surgery turned murder when she’d just been fifteen.
So, why had Winter just watched three distinct snippets of Autumn’s past? If Autumn wasn’t the perpetrator, then it meant she was…
“Shit,” Winter spat as she unlocked the screen of her phone.
If Autumn wasn’t the perpetrator, then she was a potential victim. Like Kayla Bennett, like the armored car personnel in the Presley case, or like Bree in the Kilroy investigation.
I’m in the parking lot, Noah had written.
Her fingers flew across the screen. Be right there. I need to talk to you.
She was so wrapped up in the possibility of a cold-blooded murderer gunning for her friend that she hadn’t considered how the sentence “I need to talk to you” might have been construed.
