The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag

of the alignment of broken bones and the delicacy of torn flesh, handling the head like a basket of eggs. The most significant finding on this side of the victim was a small tattoo on the left shoulder, a couple of Chinese characters that meant nothing to anyone present. Liska took a photograph of the mark with her iPhone.
    After the initial visual examination, Möller chose to go to the skull, to carefully dismantle the puzzle pieces of shattered bone in order to extract what was left of the brain to be weighed and examined. He then moved on to the torso and, with an artist’s hand, drew the scalpel down the body, creating the Y incision: shoulders to sternum, sternum to groin.
    Kovac tried unsuccessfully to tune out the sound of the garden loppers snapping the ribs from the breastbone, and the mechanical cranking of the rib spreader opening the chest cavity. After the literally hundreds of autopsies he had observed during his career, those sounds still got to him worse than anything else, except perhaps the smell of a burn victim or a floater. Something about cracking a chest made him see himself on the gurney and start rethinking that occasional cigarette.
    Möller lifted out the internal organs one by one, weighed each, inspected each for signs of organic disease and physical injury. The information was logged and recorded.
    The assailant’s knife had remarkably missed the vital organs and major blood vessels. There had been significant bleeding into the body cavity, but the damage was not so much that she would have died quickly from it.
    “So she could have been alive when she came out of that trunk,” Liska said.
    “It’s not likely, but she probably wasn’t dead due to the stab wounds,” Möller qualified.
    “If she didn’t bleed out,” Kovac said, “what killed her?”
    Möller ignored the question. Homicide detectives were to medical examiners what four-year-old children were to overworked mothers.
    He opened the victim’s esophagus to find chemical burns. He lifted the lungs from her chest and placed them in the hanging scale, shaking his head.
    “The lungs are heavy and wet,” he said. “Inhalation of acid fumes damages the mucous membranes and causes pulmonary edema—a buildup of fluid.”
    “She was alive when the bastard poured the acid on her,” Kovac said, anger burning through him just as the acid must have burned through this poor girl’s flesh.
    “Worse than that,” Möller said as he continued his work. “She aspirated the acid itself. There is lung tissue here which has basically been digested.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Kovac muttered.
    He jammed his hands at his waist and walked away from the table, his own lungs hurting as he tried a few deep breaths. He had learned long ago never to mentally put himself in the victim’s place. Therein lay the road to alcoholism. But it was difficult not to imagine the horror this girl had suffered in her final moments—held down, stabbed, acid raining down on her. It was difficult not to imagine her screams as her flesh burned and her panic as she gasped for a breath and sucked the caustic chemical into her airway.
    Without a word to anyone, he walked out of the autopsy suite into the hall and just stood there.
    He was by all descriptions, including his own, tough, hardened by long years looking at dead bodies and the wretched things people did to other people. He just needed a moment to regroup, to clear the anger from his head, to take the information of this autopsy and compartmentalize it into the relevant fact file in his brain.
    He heard the door open behind him. Liska walked around in front of him and leaned back against the wall with her arms crossed. She didn’t say anything. They both just stood there, breathing in and out, neither of them feeling the need to fill the silence.
    Finally, Kovac heaved a sigh and said, “She probably wasn’t conscious by the time the killer poured the acid on her. The stab wounds . . . She’d lost a