Stone Maidens Read Online Free PDF

magnification capabilities. “These were taken yesterday by the local coroner’s office in Blackie, Indiana.”
    Eisen flicked off the lights. The projector lamp flooded bright white against the screen, which transformed a second later into the nasty purple streaks of a ruptured throat. An abraded cheek showed partially under a browned oak leaf.
    “He’s right-handed,” Prusik said, displaying the next slide, which showed the second victim’s abdomen. “He cuts while lying over them, which may explain the trace paint fragments recovered on the chest and lower abdomen. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
    Prusik’s collecting team, led by Bruce Howard, would retrieve whatever clues they could find at and around the crime scene, including the leaf foundation surrounding the area in which the body had lain, as requested by Leeds Hughes, Prusik’s DNA expert. But she realized that with the body’s removal might have gone useful DNA evidence. Though genetic analysis was a rapidly advancing and sophisticated science, DNA was easily contaminated by rain or ungloved tampering. If Prusik’s team was lucky enough to uncover any uncontaminated DNA substance, it would be checked against those in the national indexing system, which included samples from most convicted felons. Following the postmortem examination, Prusik would intervene by federal preemption, taking jurisdiction from the local police, who had few resources for investigating the bizarre killings that now stretched over half of Indiana.
    “Same abdominal technique?” Eisen asked, removing large-framed glasses too big for his pudgy face. He breathed on each lens and wiped them clear on his lab coat. Two horizontal purple dents scored his cheeks where the rims had rested.
    “Yes.” She used a laser pointer. “Judging from the decomposition, it’s likely the girl was killed the same day she was abducted, making it around the Fourth of July. Entomology suggests he killed her where we found her and didn’t move the body. I’ll get to that a bit later. Notice the clench marks along the neck.”
    Murmurs arose among the team. The next slide was taken from directly above the unclothed torso. The dazzle of leaf colorlooked tarnished next to the vividness of the remains. It hushed the room. Following it was a side view of the torso that would have required the cameraman to lie prostrate at close range. Prusik dialed in 10X magnification along the long knife cut, which shimmered iridescently.
    “What do you think, Pernell?” She upped the magnification thirty times, the maximum, and focused the lens on one particular organism. A nifty striped millimeter rule ran along the bottom edge of the frame to better gauge scale.
    “Family of Calliphoridae for sure—its Latin binomial is
Lucilia sericata
—the green bottle fly, a common variety of blowflies that oviposit or lay their eggs under shade and next to running water. In July heat, it’s likely adult females would lay eggs within twenty-four hours of death, with pupae hatching maybe eight or nine days after. The larva there has darkened already, an advanced pupa stage, and looks to be around nine millimeters in length, which means it’s been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-six days since the adult female oviposited. Of course, until we take it back to the lab, it’s only a best guess.”
    “Thank you, Pernell,” Prusik said. “So clocking the time of death by the stage of larval development of these maggots found feeding on the corpse puts it sometime during the first week of July, as I suspected.”
    The next slide showed a mix of adult green bottle flies and larvae that were feeding along a gaping seam in the victim’s left side. The flies were gathered in a feeding frenzy as if they had been glued in place. The slit ran from the eleventh rib straight down to the hip bone.
    Prusik ran the laser light over one fuzzy patch of nearly transparent larvae caught in the act of voraciously gobbling the cadaver—the