Page 19 of Hide and Seek
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’shandiwork. 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 autopsytable, 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.
