A Requiem For the Dead by Winter Austin

Author:Winter Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
ISBN: 9781964703305
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2024-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

The morgue in the Juniper hospital was Olivia’s domain. Being here without her commanding presence to explain the findings felt horribly wrong to Lila.

The state medical examiner—who had introduced himself as Dr. Victor Bradley—was decent, if not a bit on the stuffy side, and further confirmed what Dr. Pembrook suspected. The victims had their vital, healthy organs removed before death.

“Can you tell if they were alive when it happened?” Lila asked, standing at the end of one gurney bearing the remains of a young male.

“If the organs were harvested for black-market purposes, yes, they would have to keep them alive up until they removed the heart,” the medical examiner answered.

Which meant an expert in the field of surgery. Along with a sterile place set up to remove the organs where they could go unnoticed. That ruled out the shack. Nothing about the building and the tunnel suggested that was the place for operations to remove organs. More like the dumping ground. And a place to move live humans undetected.

“They would need access to some sophisticated equipment to make the setup work,” Kyle said in passing.

Lila inched closer to the deceased male’s head, noting that the medical examiner’s telltale Y incision was not on the youth’s torso. “His chest was left open?”

“Yes. As was the young woman the beetles had not disturbed. The body the insects had been consuming showed similar signs. This could have been a rushed job, or they have never bothered to close the chest cavity after surgery. It would give the beetles primary access to the internal tissue without having to chew through the skin and muscle first. Work their way inside out as it were.”

Absorbing this tidbit, Lila studied the young victim. His skin, not mottled by beetle bites and lividity, was a light tan coloration, his hair dark, nearly black, and his fingernails were jagged, with dirt built up against the nail bed. Who was he? Where had he come from?

“Other than removing their hearts, how did they actually go about killing the victims?” Lila asked.

The ME moved to a tray and picked up a small evidence bag. He passed it to Kyle, who stood closer to him.

“I’m ruling my cause of death as suffocation. I found those fibers in two of the victims’ airways. I was also able to make out some bruising that was not livor mortis around the mouth and nose, which lends strong corroboration to suffocation. It’s also possible the victims were allowed to bleed out and those fibers are from something else, and the bruising was from a tightly fitted oxygen mask.”

“Either way would make the most sense,” Kyle said, passing the bag to Lila.

She saw the two fine, possibly white, fibers clinging to the sides of the plastic case. They could have come from anything and anywhere. Processing those through evidence at DCI would take days if not weeks or months.

“Would the suspects save the blood?” she asked.

“Possibly. Our country and the world at large has seen a drop in blood donations.

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