Hollywood Notorious: A Hollywood Alphabet Thriller Series (A Hollywood Alphabet Series Thriller Book 14) by M.Z. Kelly

arrangements for Bernie to wait in a technician’s office while we all gathered in the autopsy suite. While Brie laid out scalpels, saws, swabs, bags, and toxicology supplies, she told us about the autopsies of the two shooting victims.
    “One of my colleagues, Dr. Mumford, completed the autopsies of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Hanks about an hour ago. Both victims died of multiple gunshot wounds. It’s noteworthy that the entry wounds were posterior, all 9mm rounds. It would appear they were shot from behind, with the shots having been fired from the approximate direction of where our female victim was located.”
    “You mean, somebody shot them from a hundred yards away?” Darby asked.
    “No, as I said, the direction was approximate, but the range would likely have been much closer.”
    “Meaning that when somebody was finished with the girl, they unloaded on our rappers,” Darby concluded.
    Brie leveled her eyes on him, glanced at me, and then looked back at him. “That’s one of the possibilities.”
    “Maybe it was just a matter of someone being in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” Buck suggested to his partner. “Our suspect was leaving the girl and came across the others.”
    “If that was the case, why not just disappear into the fog and let them shoot it out? He had no skin in the game.”
    “Could be Duncan or Hanks saw him and he didn’t want to leave any witnesses.”
    Darby was mumbling something about idle speculation as Brie went about her business. Seeing our victim in the bright lights of the autopsy suite only served to make her injuries all the more horrific. Brie took photographs and recorded her observations during the initial examination of the body, noting that the skin had been denuded in all areas, except the victim’s head, arms, and chest. She also made note of the fact that victim’s head, arms, and armpits appeared to have been shaved, prior to death.
    Brie then took several photographs of the victim’s face and the associated artwork. I was struck by the precise nature of the painted image: a skull on a skull. I realized whoever had painted the victim must have had some formal art training. Contacting the local art schools and colleges would be more of the legwork required to work the case.
    “The victim has a ragged incision in her upper chest,” Brie said into the microphone as she turned her attention to the victim’s injuries. “Preliminary examination in situ revealed that the heart has been removed. I’m now going to make a y-incision and examine the thoracic area.”
    We all watched as the victim’s chest was further opened, her ribs were cut using a Stryker saw, and the chest cavity was entirely exposed.
    “The interior chest cavity is…” Brie paused and turned away from the microphone. She looked over at me, the pitch in her voice rising. “The killer left us a message.”

TEN
     
    Brie reached inside our victim’s chest and removed a small, square piece of paper. It was brown and almost translucent, like a piece of parchment paper.
    “What the hell does it say?” Darby asked.
    Brie shook her head. “I’m not sure. It’s some kind of strange writing. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
    I looked over her shoulder as she placed the paper on a tray. I’d never seen anything like the writing either, and had a thought that it might be Latin or something similar.
    “We’ll have to dust it for prints and then find a language expert to take a look,” Brie said, placing the paper into an evidence envelope.
    After using the overhead camera to take some close-up photographs of the paper, Brie continued with her examination. She finished up about three hours later and met with us in a small conference room, where she went over her findings.
    “Let’s begin with the approximate age. Providing the photograph found at the scene is our victim, based on the general dentition and bone structure, it looks like she was in her early twenties.
    “Rigor was