Anatomy by Carolyn McCray

CHAPTER 1
    Detective Nicole Usher gulped despite having every intention
not to gulp. You didn’t get your gold badge without seeing some things. Gross
things. Horrible things. Things no one should ever have to see.
    Yet the body that lay before her, before them all, was just wrong .
It wasn’t so much that the killer had dissected the woman, flaying open her
chest and abdomen. Or that he had carefully teased ligament away from bone. The
thing that made her force back bile was the series of little labels stuck into
the vital organs.
    Liver. Kidneys. Ovaries… Each word written in the victim’s
own blood.
    That was what made her gulp again and look away.
    Around her, the crime scene was barely contained chaos, with
every acronym in the book accounted for. EMTs, CSIs, MEs, FDs, PDs. Given that
this was the serial killer’s sixth victim, when the call came over that another
body had been found, all hands, whether they were needed or not, came on deck.
    Nicole glanced to her partner, Ruben Torres, the lead
detective on the case. All answered to him, which was what he wanted. What he
had wanted for a long time. Their city was large enough to have its fair share
of murders, but small enough that they didn’t have a Major Crimes division.
Instead, the department had one detective that they turned to for their most
difficult cases, the Captain’s go-to detective.
    For decades, that had been Hatachi Nogamori. But after a
long-overdue retirement, the door was thrown wide open, and Ruben had been the
first to charge through. To Nicole’s eye, he had the skills, knowledge, and
ambition to fill Hatachi’s shoes.
    Now, though, with his jaw muscles rippling, Nicole wasn’t so
sure that Ruben was all too enthused that he had stepped up to the plate. She
knew the disgust on his face wasn’t from the gore. Even though the sun was
going down, the mid-summer heat rose from the alley’s pavement, bringing with
it a smell—so strong that you could taste it—of a poorly ventilated butcher’s
shop, which someone had tried to clean up with formaldehyde.
    The heady aroma turned Nicole’s stomach, but she was pretty
sure it didn’t bother Ruben. He’d seen a tour in Iraq before the Green Zone was
established. Her partner didn’t ever talk about his time in the Middle East,
even to her, which pretty much convinced Nicole of exactly how grueling the
tour must have been.
    A flash of light cut through the dusky night.
    Nicole blinked several times as the CSI photographer stepped
around her and took another shot.
    Ruben, too, seemed startled out of his thoughts, and
grumbled, “Just make sure these pictures aren’t leaked to the press.”
    The older photographer frowned, setting the heavy camera
down against his potbelly. “We’re all here to do a professional job.”
    Ruben bristled at the CSI’s tone. She knew her partner’s
frustration. Those leaked pictures had revealed the one detail of the crime
that they had been holding back…the organ labels. Now every crackpot in the
city was claiming credit for the murders. It had taking days, if not weeks, to
disprove their statements, sucking precious time and resources away from
finding the real killer.
    Before Ruben could counter the older man’s statement, Nicole
pointed to the roof of an adjacent building. “Speaking of the press…”
    An especially intrepid cameraman and news anchor were
peeking their heads over the roof.
    “Damn it!” Ruben barked, then turned on his heel toward a
group of uniformed policemen. “If you are going to gawk, at least secure the
perimeter!”
    The cluster of blue uniforms scattered in the wake of
Ruben’s anger. Which was so unlike her partner. Ruben was usually the good cop,
negotiating the politics of the detective’s bullpen like a fish in clear water.
Most of the men he’d just chastised were poker buddies.
    Nicole stifled the instinct to lay a hand on his arm in
comfort. While their relationship was no secret, she knew that the boys’