Chapter 7
HARPER-RAYN
“What in the ever-loving fuck is this?”
Horror pulses through my veins as I take in the corpse before me, completely mutilated by some kind of blade.
I’ve never seen anything like it. I have documented more than my fair share of stab wounds, but this is different.
There are slices cut from the man’s skin, his arms, face, neck, and thighs—all of this before I’ve even had a chance to cut him out of his clothes.
Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down and get on with my job.
I wasn’t hired to be the bitch who runs away screaming .
. . the other night excluded. I’m a professional, and while this is one of the most horrendous things I’ve ever seen, I can take it.
I’m sure there will be a day when I see worse, but for now, I need to do the job I was trained to do.
Putting aside the unease, I look closer at the wounds covering his body before grabbing my camera to properly document every single marking on his skin.
I get the rest of my tools prepared and quickly get used to the idea that tonight’s shift is going to run long.
This isn’t the kind of autopsy that will be over in the standard four hours.
This one will keep me here well into the morning.
“Okay,” I tell the body, taking a DNA sample of his saliva and locking it into a jar. “Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell happened to you.”
I start cutting through his shirt when it becomes clear that the blade markings left on his chest are spelling something out and my movements become quicker, needing to know what it says.
After reaching the bottom of his shirt, I carefully move the fabric aside.
Then as I take in his bare chest, I suck in a disturbed gasp.
“What the actual fuck?” I murmur, reaching for my camera again. “Smile for the camera? Who the hell did this to you?”
I shake my head as I try to comprehend the type of bastard who would leave a message like this on somebody’s skin, and for what purpose? Who is this kitten and why does it have to smile for the camera? Is there something much deeper to all of this?
A shiver sails down my spine, and I can tell the motive behind all of this is going to be despicable.
We’re not dealing with the usual run-of-the-mill opportunistic killer.
This guy was precise. He planned all of this.
All of these markings on the victim were done postmortem, and while I’m glad the victim didn’t have to suffer through that kind of torture, I can’t help but wonder how fucked up one must be to mutilate a dead body to send a message.
I draw my gaze away from the deeply etched words on his skin and begin removing the rest of his clothes.
I fold everything neatly and slide it all into separate evidence bags, along with his shoes, wallet, and jewelry—confirming this was definitely not a mugging gone wrong.
Every article has to be meticulously photographed and documented, and once all of the nitty-gritty is out of the way, I can focus on the body.
I start from the head and work my way down, documenting every last gash on his body. I measure the length and depth of each one, and as I reach his chest and start documenting the letters etched into his skin, my stomach clenches.
This is fucked up.
I’ve been working for almost an hour when I finally make my way down his left arm.
I’m barely even halfway through my external examination, and there’s not even a hint about how this man was murdered.
Usually, by this point in my external examination of a murder victim, there would be a clue, some kind of glaring marker to give me a good idea of what happened, but on this man, there’s nothing, and I don’t like it.
Continuing down his arm, I reach the top of his hand and notice similar carvings on his fingers below each knuckle.
My brows furrow, and I lean in closer, trying to decipher the markings only to realize they’re letters, just like the ones on his chest. This is another message from the killer.
Grabbing a piece of paper, I write down each letter, and after thoroughly checking the left hand, I move onto the right, finding five more. By the time I’m done, I have ten odd letters, but as I look at them, I can’t quite decipher what they mean.
Whatever happened to a simple gunshot to the chest? Why do people have to do shit like this? It’s fucked up, and then some poor doctor has to spend hours examining some killer’s handiwork. Who the hell put this system into place? Surely, it had to be a man, right?
I try to move on from the carvings on the fingers, but my gaze keeps bringing me back to the ten little letters scrawled on the paper. There’s something about them, something familiar, but I can’t quite figure it out.
My stare shifts from the paper back to the letters on the left hand.
“What if I’ve been reading it wrong?” I muse to my victim. People generally read from left to right, but if the killer was standing over the victim, the letters would have been written from his point of view. It’s flipped.
I need to be reading this from right to left.
My brows furrow as I hastily grab my pen and start reversing the letters.
My brain works faster than I can move the pen, and I only get halfway through before it becomes abundantly clear what the letters spell out, and I can’t physically keep going.
Harper-Rayn.
My hands start to shake, and I drop the pen so quickly, it clatters to the autopsy table before rolling and falling to the ground. Is this . . . Is this supposed to be a message for me?
“No. No. No. No. No,” I begin to chant, unease pounding through my chest like poison. I had foolishly begun to convince myself that the bullshit that happened during my last shift was a one-off, that maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. But this? Fuck.
Whoever this guy is, he’s escalated quickly. It’s one thing to stalk a woman at work and leave her a black rose on the autopsy table, but to kill a man just to send a message? This is too much. I didn’t sign up to be involved in this guy’s bullshit.
My chest heaves, and I do what I can to calm myself.
I’m here alone. It’s just a message. There’s no shivers sailing down my spine, so as long as I’m safe here in this building, then there’s no reason to panic.
I need to finish my job, scrape every ounce of potential DNA off the body, and have it personally delivered to the lab.
Detective Gray needs to catch this guy, and if I don’t follow through on my part, then locking up this bastard is only going to take longer.
There’s no time for me to freak out. I need to keep my cool.
With shaking hands and a new resolve to finish what I started, I grab my ruler and pick up where I left off, checking over every last carving left on the body and documenting them with perfect precision.
Only as I work, my attention is drawn back to the message left on this man’s chest.
Holy fucking shit.
Am I the fragile little kitten? Is this message for me, too? Am I being watched?
Dread sinks heavily into the pit of my stomach, and as my back stiffens, I can’t help but look around the morgue.
There are cameras everywhere, exactly the same as the surveillance cameras throughout the rest of the hospital.
But the one in the far back that has a view of every last inch of the morgue flashes with a blue light, and I know deep in my gut that’s the one.
He’s been watching me. All this time.
The overwhelming need to throw up rocks through my body, but I hold it back, determined to see this through. I’m no longer just afraid of this guy, I’m fucking determined. Not to mention, I’m nobody’s fragile little kitten.
Turning my back on the camera, I focus on my work, being extra thorough as I document everything.
Once the front is done, I turn him over, and the cause of death becomes a little clearer.
There’s a massive cut on the left side of his torso, right below his ribs, that’s currently being held together by medical-grade staples.
“What the fuck did this asshole do to you?” I ask my corpse as I look over the wound and take note of the horrific bruising surrounding it, telling me that this injury happened while he was still alive.
I let out a heavy breath and get busy, and just like his front side, it takes me almost another two hours to document every last gash in his skin.
When I finally get to the internal part of the autopsy, I’ve never been so relieved.
Only, there’s a stark curiosity booming through my chest from the massive wound on the victim’s back.
Why is it there, and why does it feel so important?
With shaky hands that piss me off, I take my scalpel and make my Y incision, cutting deeply from both shoulders and down through the center of the chest, distorting the message left there. I go right down to the pelvis, and the moment I fold back the skin, I realize that something isn’t right.
All of the internal organs have been shifted around, each one of them showing visible signs of trauma, but on top of that, there’s also a foreign object here. Something long, partially hidden within the rib cage, but it’s covered in blood, making it impossible to decipher.
My brows furrow, that wicked unease growing by the second.
What the hell is this?
After documenting the foreign object and taking multiple photographs from different angles, I reach back into the body cavity, and as my hand slips up into the ribcage, I immediately notice that the lungs are displaced. A shiver sails down my spine, and I try to ignore it as I focus on the object.
Curling my hand around it, I carefully remove it, but there’s something so familiar about how it feels in my hand. Is this a—fuck.
A rose.
My chest heaves, fear doubling down, and as I release the object onto the autopsy table, it becomes as clear as day. It’s a black rose, just like the one that was left here the other night on this very autopsy table.
Tears well in my eyes as I come to the realization that this man was murdered simply for the sick need to send me some fucked-up message, and he wasn’t just killed in a humane way.
He was slaughtered. Sliced open while still alive only to have to feel his organs being cut out.
At least the good news is that he would have quickly bled out and wouldn’t have had to deal with the pain for long.
I can’t even imagine the type of agony this man has suffered through.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him as the tears roll down my cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
Wanting to give him the respect he deserves, I swallow over the lump growing in my throat and continue with my work, vowing to do whatever I need to catch this asshole.
Carefully removing each organ, I examine them thoroughly, weighing and measuring before taking detailed notes on any irregular markings.
I find his lungs smashed down into his abdomen, and they mostly look okay.
This man was fit and clearly took care of himself.
He wasn’t a smoker, and his lungs generally appear healthy.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that they were disturbed within the body.
What kind of sick fuck plays around with someone’s organs? Was killing him not enough of a thrill? At least it seems like the victim was already deceased by the time the killer got around to playing surgeon on the lungs.
I work on autopilot, mentally trying to distance myself from the work in front of me, but the moment my hand gently curls around the heart, unease settles deep in my gut. Hearts usually have a smooth texture, but I can feel the deep gouges under my fingers.
My brows furrow and I slowly pull the heart out of the chest cavity, and the moment I place it down on the examination table, horror rocks through me.
More carvings stare back at me, and despite how unsettling the first ones were on the skin, this takes it to a whole new level.
I swallow over the growing lump in my throat, and as my hands shake, I lean in closer and do what I can to decipher the words.