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Diana tried to talk through the duct tape, tears spilling from her eyes.

Casey shook his head. “I don’t want to hear you talk. It might ruin it for me. I want to keep the sweet voice in my head from back when you were digging me. It helps me through the difficult time you and I are about to have.”

Diana looked around. The other two were out of view but she could feel their presence behind her. She noticed a ratty mattress on the ground.

Casey’s face took on a devilish look. “But one thing I can’t tolerate is snot and tears. So I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together. When I come back, I want my sweet girl back, you understand?”

He turned and walked through a door at the far endof the room. When he was gone, Diana looked down at her body and realized the material they had secured her with was plastic wrap—clear cooking plastic wound tightly around her torso and legs. It looked eerie and disgusting and suffocating.

PART III

“Have you any idea how much it pains me when you be-

have like this?”

—The Monster

CHAPTER 18

October 2017

Thirteen Months Since Megan’s Escape

Early Monday morning, after a long weekend visiting her parents Friday night and driving to Georgia to see Casey Delevan’s mother, Livia drank coffee and paged through her forensics textbook while the office was still dark and quiet. Her terrible performance Friday afternoon, both in the autopsy suite and the cage, still weighed heavily on her mind. She was determined to prevent it from happening again.

She read and reread postmortem findings in head injury victims. Reviewed anatomy she had long ago memorized, and studied the different effects of bleeding on the brain and midline shifts. She outlined the requirements of a thorough neurological postmortem, the types of tissue samples taken and the techniques used to sequester these specimens. She reviewed skull fractures, and the different patterns of bone disruption that allowed a medical examiner to make educated guesses about the weapons used to cause the damage.Then she picked up a giant book titledClinical Therapeuticsand painstakingly reviewed pharmacology, specifically covering drug-to-drug interactions in the geriatric population. She rediscovered scores of medications with long, rambling names she vaguely remembered from medical school and committed them to memory. Finally, she studied cerebrovascular accidents—strokes— and the examination techniques that best uncover them when they are not as obvious as a large vessel bursting the middle of the brain.

When she finished, Livia still had thirty minutes before the office would fill with staff. She topped off her coffee and pulled Megan McDonald’s book from her bag. Sitting at her desk in the fellows’ office, she skimmed through the final chapters. She imagined her mother and father lying in bed, fingers tracing along the same book looking for clues that might tell them what had happened to their daughter. There too, in Livia’s mind, was Barb Delevan’s house with drawn curtains and the smoky haze and a half-spent vodka bottle. Her parents’ picture-still house Friday night bore a striking resemblance to Barb Delevan’s home—a place and its residents stuck in the past, unable to partake in the present.

The thing that prevented her parents and Barb Delevan from moving forward was the same relentless undercurrent of energy that prevented Livia from clear-minded thinking. It was the need for answers. The absence of closure was a tether anchored soundly to the past that caused an anachronism as time slowly chugged by—days and weeks and years—incarcerating a sliver of the soul while life continued on.

Livia turned the last page of Megan’s book when she heard her name being called.

“Paging Dr. Cutty,” Kent Chapple said from the hallway. “We are officially ready to roll.”

Livia looked up from the pages.

“Time to roll, Doc,” Kent said. “Call came in overnight, we’ve gotta hit the road.”

Throughout the year of training, each fellow was required to participate in two weeks of ride-alongs with the morgue investigators, formally termed Medicolegal Investigators, where they would observe scene-investigation techniques as well as the process of body sequestration. It was a week away from the morgue, strategically placed throughout fellowship to avoid burnout. During the course of autopsying 250 bodies in twelve months, every fellow needed a break. Livia was up first, and after Friday’s dismal performance in the cage, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Livia shuffled papers on her desk, gathered them and dumped them—along with Megan’s book—into the bottom drawer as Jen Tilly and Tim Schultz came into the office. She stood up and, wearing jeans and a blouse in lieu of scrubs, grabbed her black windbreaker that heldOCMEin yellow lettering on the breast andMEDICAL EXAMINERacross the back.

“See you guys,” Livia said.

“Good luck,” Jen said.

“Don’t kill anyone,” Tim said.

“Funny, Tim. Hope your stomach’s okay this week.”

Livia waved and was gone.

“Heard Colt opened fire on you in the cage last week,” Kent said as they walked the hallway.

“Good news travels fast.”

Kent laughed. “People are calling it a massacre.”