second cut started on the right, went around the back, and joined the initial anterior wound.
The head was then twisted powerfully enough to rupture the spinal column below the sixth cervical vertebra. The exposed cord was severed to complete the process of detaching the head from the body.
“Any thoughts on the kind of knife?” Bree asked.
“A substantial one,” Dr. Abbott said. “Three of the John Does in here were big men with muscular necks, and the initial cuts were still very deep. My best guess is you’re looking for a stout knife handle with a razor-sharp ten- or twelve-inch scimitar blade attached. The kind of knife a butcher might use.”
I closed my eyes a moment, thinking about Tanner Oates, the Meat Man. Every one of his victims had been killed by a butcher knife and then decapitated below the C6 vertebra.
“Ready?” Dr. Abbott said.
“As ready as you can be for this kind of thing,” Special Agent Tillis said.
“You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?” Bree asked.
“A few times, but it’s not on my regular diet.”
“You’ll do fine,” Sampson said, and we followed the ME through the double doors.
The air was chilly inside the morgue, a tile-floored, rectangular space with cold lockers for bodies stacked three high the length of the room on both sides.
Abbott said, “Where do you want to start?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We want to look at them all.”
Abbott consulted a chart, went to a locker on the right wall, and drew it open to reveal a thick, opaque plastic evidence bag with a head in it.
“Jane Doe number twenty-eight fourteen,” Dr. Abbott said, lifting the head. “Female, Hispanic, roughly late twenties, brown-eyed, history of dental care.”
Bree and Special Agent Tillis were looking at a laptop. They both shook their heads. “I’m not seeing her here.”
After re-bagging the head and closing the locker, Abbott looked at her chart and went to another locker, this one on the lower level. She squatted down and opened it.
“John Doe number twenty-eight twenty-three,” she said, removing the second head. “African-American, twenties, gold-cap incisors, two scars on the scalp.”
Bree and Tillis studied the head and then the laptop. “Nope,” Tillis said.
Abbott put the head back and pulled the third, an Asian male.
“Oh-for-four,” Sampson said.
It got worse. None of the six heads matched any of the six headless bodies found aboard the sex traffickers’ boat off Florida.
Tillis looked deflated. “I had hopes.”
CHAPTER 70
BREE MOVED TOWARD THE MORGUE door as she said, “It was a good thought. But I’ve got places to be.”
“Not yet,” I said, then I looked at Dr. Abbott. “The FBI stores some of their caseload here, doesn’t it?”
“They do, here and in Alexandria.”
“Are there by any chance three other heads here? One female, Asian? And two males, one Caucasian, one Hispanic?”
“Yes, they’re here,” she said. “But technically, we should have written permission for you to examine them.”
“I was there when all three of those heads were discovered, working as a special consultant to the FBI.”
Special Agent Tillis and Bree nodded in support.
Sampson said, “It’s true.”
“They’re in a separate area. I’ll have to go get them.”
Dr. Abbott was back quicker than I’d expected, pushing a metal cart holding the three heads: the Asian female head put in our car during the Diane Jenkins kidnapping investigation, the male Caucasian head put in the locker in the subbasement of Dwight Rivers’s anthill, and the Hispanic male head that rolled out of Rivers’s Porsche before it blew up.
Abbott opened all three evidence bags, and we stared from the heads on the cart to pictures on Tillis’s laptop.
“My God,” Tillis said, putting her hand to her mouth. “Marty was framed.”
“He was indeed,” I said, walking to the heads, and gesturing to each one in turn. “Carlos Octavio, Ji Su Rhee, and Gor Bedrossian.”
Dr. Abbott frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Sex traffickers whose corpses were found beheaded on a yacht last year. An FBI agent named Martin Forbes is being held for their murders. But now it is clear these heads were all moved around and planted by the real killer while Forbes was behind bars.”
“Unless Marty had an accomplice,” Sampson said.
“Who?”
“M? Pseudo-Craig? How do we know Forbes is not—”
“He’s not,” Agent Tillis said sharply. “This kind of savagery? Taking people’s heads? That is not Marty Forbes. He may be guilty of a lot of things, but this is not anywhere in his makeup.”
“I agree,” I said. “Forbes should get out of that cell.”
Tillis smiled. “That would be a start.”
“There was a finger with an engagement