CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Paige stood outside the Las Vegas City morgue, taking deep breaths until she could work up the courage to enter. She knew that this next part was going to be hard, and it took several seconds to steel herself for it.
Paige had seen bodies at crime scenes before. She had even seen Sienna Niven’s body, but that didn’t make it easier to walk in there, with the prospect of having to look over three corpses ahead of her. Looking down at her father’s dead form had been the moment that changed Paige’s life and sent her down the path of looking into the world of serial killers. The prospect of having to do it again now with the three victims in this case filled her with a kind of dread.
“Did you lose someone?”
Paige turned to see a young man approaching, heading for the doors. He had a name badge already pinned to his shirt, suggesting that he worked there.
She wasn’t sure how to answer. She had lost someone, but her father’s death wasn’t relevant to this. All that mattered right now was trying to find answers in the case. Paige’s feelings of dread didn’t enter into it.
Except that it was still hard, even knowing that.
Paige took out her badge. “I’m Agent King, with the FBI. I’m here in connection with the murders of Sienna Niven, Mylene Jacques, and Clarissa Bale.”
“Ah, right, sorry,” the young man said. “I’m Michael, one of the coroner’s staff here at the morgue. You just had that look that people get when they have to come here to identify someone they love.”
Paige didn’t want to go into everything in her past that had given her that look. She didn’t want this guy who worked in the morgue to think about her as just another family member of a victim. She wanted him to be clear that she was a highly trained agent, there to do a job.
“I need to see the bodies of the victims,” Paige said.
“You’d better come inside, Agent,” the young man said, and led the way into the morgue.
Inside, the waiting area seemed to be almost like that of a hospital or a dentist, with the same medical feel offset by pastel colors, cheap prints on the walls and magazines left waiting on small tables. It was all much colder than the heat outside, and there was a faint scent that Paige knew was probably formaldehyde.
“If you wait here for a moment,” the young man said, gesturing to some comfortable looking chairs. “I’ll get the coroner to come talk to you.”
Paige sat there, waiting and doing her best to ignore the leaflets set out there offering support, or providing the details of therapists who were no doubt waiting to take the money of grieving families. Paige had spent more than her share of time in therapy after her father’s death. That had been the other part of what had pushed her towards psychology. She’d started out wanting to understand herself, and then had found that she wanted to understand serial killers far more.
She was starting to feel that she might understand this one, but she wanted to be sure. It had all come down to the comment Mark Zint had made about Sienna having a black mark on her face. If Paige remembered correctly, Clarissa Bale had a beauty mark. Mylene Jacques didn’t have an obvious one, but she had been wearing a lot of makeup. That makeup might easily conceal such a thing.
Paige wasn’t sure what it meant, but she was sure that it meant something. First, though, she had to make sure that she was right about her hunch. Doing that meant seeing the body for herself.
An older man came into the waiting area through the door where the younger man had gone to fetch him. He was wearing a slightly old-fashioned suit and looked as if he were getting ready to go to out somewhere rather than work on the dead. He was probably sixty or so, maybe older, with white hair and hands that seemed gnarled until Paige wondered how he was able to hold his medical instruments.
“You’re Agent King?” he asked, sounding slightly surprised by it, as if he still hadn’t caught onto the possibility that women could be FBI agents.
“I am,” Paige said, showing her badge. “I’m one of the agents looking into the murders of Clarissa Bale, Mylene Jacques, and Sienna Niven.”
“I’m Dr. Benjamin, the coroner here. And you’re here because…”
“Because I need to look at them,” Paige said. “There’s something I need to check that might be relevant to the investigation.”
“I’m sorry, Agent King, but as I told Michael, I’m just about to leave for the day.”
That took Paige a little aback.
“Sir, I’m working to catch a killer here.”
“And you want me to believe that, if you get to see the deceased, then you’ll find something that will suddenly allow you to do that?”
Paige nodded. She hoped that if she found a way to explain it, then Dr. Benjamin would help.
“I think I’ve found something about one of the victims that, if it’s true for the others, will help to establish the pattern of the serial killer doing this. That might be enough to let me work out who he might target next, or even find out who he is.”
The coroner didn’t look entirely impressed. “In general, Agent, the way this works is that I’m the one who looks at the bodies of the deceased. You have my preliminary reports on the first two victims, and you’ll have my report on Sienna Niven soon enough.”
Paige hadn’t been expecting any resistance here. She’d been expecting this part to go smoothly, so that she would have her answers quickly.