'Well, Miss McGyver, I am so sorry you had such a rotten night last night, but let's see if you can tell us a little about what happened.'

With her hair tied up under her Mighty-Ducks scrub-cap, Lanie picked up her scalpel and began her Y-cut on Melissa McGyver. She'd already input the salient data into her Audiovox recorder and taken scrapings and clippings for the CSU lab; now came the gooey part. The gentle strains of Jack Johnson on the stereo in the background to keep her company while she worked, noting and detailing the condition of Melissa's insides.

As Lanie found nothing but a healthy woman in her mid-forties who'd once had a C-section, her thorough autopsy was barely three hours long, and she was finishing her Y-cut restitch when Adam came in, eyes sombre.

'Hey Doctor Parrish-Robbins. Charlotte McGyver, Melissa's daughter is here.'

'Okay. I'll have her ready in a moment.'

Lanie snipped the delicate blue thread, and used the mortician's tricked of a marble in the right eye socket so Charlotte wouldn't have to see her mother's face mangled. When she was ready, she pulled the white sheet over Melissa's head before going to the door. She braced her hand on the door, took a breath before opening it.

'Miss McGyver,' she said solemnly to the pretty brunette whose eyes were glass and red-rimmed. 'Please come with me.'

Adam ushered her in, and Lanie saw Charlotte had a death grip on Adam's arm, her chest rising and falling in shaky jerks. Lanie stood on one side of the table and carefully yet swiftly pulled the sheet down just to Melissa's shoulders. Charlotte closed her eyes, swayed on the spot before burying her face against Adam's sturdy shoulder.

'Mama,' she whispered. 'Oh, Mama, what the fuck happened?'

'That's what my partner and I are going to find out, Miss McGyver,' Adam replied smoothly, giving Lanie a subtle signal she could recover the body.

Lanie watched him, impressed how he was understanding and sympathetic to the woman without being too emotional with her yet not distant and cold either. He was exactly what he appeared to be - a good cop.

'He's way taken, Miss McGyver,' she murmured to the deceased, 'but you should know that your murder investigation couldn't be in better hands. He learned the hard way what it means to be a good cop and there is no one finer in this city looking out for you. Except maybe my girl Katie, but she trained Adam, so there you have it. Time to say goodnight for now.'

Lanie opened the door to the refrigerated body storage unit and wheeled Melissa's body in. She closed the door and closed her eyes, let herself pray a moment. 'Dear God, please please please never let my babies see me like that.'

She puttered around, collecting her tools to be sterilized or disposed of, plugged her Audiovox into her computer station and was downloading her notes into the speech-to-text software when Ryan and Adam came back in. 'Hey, how's Charlotte doing?'

'She'll pull it together because she wants answers almost as much as we do. Speaking of answers.'

'I have a prelim for you, but there's not much to tell in there. She was in good health with no signs of cardiac disease, she was a nail-biter, she didn't use a diaphragm or IUD for her birth control and she didn't drink or smoke to excess.'

'What about the eye?'

'As I said on scene, it was removed post-mortem and fairly cleanly,' Lanie replied, reaching for her water.

'Are we looking for someone with medical training,' Adam asked, sincerely horrified by the idea.

'I said cleanly, not skillfully. The killer used a single smooth edged instrument and...you can read it in my report,' she decided when Adam turned the colour of wallpaper paste at the mention of how the eye was removed.

'Thank you, Lanie.'

'You sound just like my son when you do that, Detective Brennan.'

'Which one?' Ryan chuckled. 'You've got two.'

'Both of them.'

Adam's phone rang and he stepped away to take the call, leaving Ryan and Lanie to watch after him for a moment. 'How's he doing,' the pathologist asked and Ryan nodded.

'He's still getting his confidence up, but he's smart and he doesn't miss a trick. He's good with the weepers, too.'

'Well...'

'Well what?'

'Given what Lindsay's been through, he'd have to be good at that right? I don't just mean her being raped a year before they started dating,' Lanie clarified, 'or did you not hear what her parents put her through when they came to visit?'

'Espo told me when I was in Ireland they had a visit from the in-laws that ended in tears and heartache, but Adam hasn't said anything about it.'

'Oh.' As Lindsay had dished about it on a girls' night shortly after Valentine's Day Lanie was well informed but she was also smart enough to know when to break the vows of girl-silence. This was not one of those times, so she simply shrugged it off. 'I'm sure when Adam's comfortable talking about it, he will.'

Ryan nodded, then straightened up when Adam came back in. 'What have you got?'

'The first call was Lindsay, letting me know she'd be late for dinner. The second call was the suspicious documents tech in the lab. They want to see us pronto.'


The CSU lab housed in the Twelfth precinct was laid out not unlike the Homicide bullpen, Ryan noted - it was organized in an E-shape, with each row split into rooms for different specialties. This particular morning, Adam and Ryan headed up the middle leg of the E to find Tai Sung, an eagle-eyed Korean man with a square, friendly face and a brain organized like a computer.

'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said in his clipped accent that occasionally came off as snooty. 'I'm impressed with your punctuality.'

'We just left the morgue where Melissa McGyver's only child confirmed her identity. We want to get this solved as quickly as possible,' Adam replied in just as smooth a tone.

'Very well. Shall we?'

Tai gestured to his work-bench, where he had the sheet unfold and pressed between two sheets of acetate. 'I've sent blood samples for analysis to the lab already. Fortunately for us, the paper is mostly intact because it was lying on the side of the body

'How'd you hear that?' Ryan asked, though anyone with a working brain in CSU would have already passed on a juicy detail or two already.

'Colleagues chattering around the water tank,' he replied, deliberately goofing on the phrase. 'But clever banter isn't why you came running at the spedd of light to my office is it? No, you want to know about that paper.'

'Anything you've got would be useful,' Adam told him with just an edge of imploring.

'It came from a bible. Book of Revelations, rather ironically. The edge of the paper tells me it was cheaply bound but the paper itself is top quality parchment. Now for the magic light show. Here.' He put on a pair of orange plastic goggles, gave similar pairs to Adam and Ryan. 'You'll need these.'

He flipped off the lights and held up a tool, shone it over the sheet until he pointed to something in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

'Is that a watermark?' Ryan asked incredulously.

'Not just a watermark, a very specific one.' Tai turned off the light, flipped on the regular overhead fluorescent. He reached for a printout and gave them a sad look, almost one of condolence. 'I would not want to be you right now.'

Adam looked at the paper, saw the crest of the watermark and the crest on the paper were identical. 'So this page came from a bible belonging to the Pure Spirits Christian Commune. Why is that so scary?'

'Have you not seen the Dateline specials on those people?' Ryan asked him. 'They are something else.'

'Is it a cult?'

'Not a cult, per se. There's no handing over life-savings in exchange for being beamed aboard the mother ship once you taste this Kool-Aid for me. More like a, we prefer to live in God's eternal grace free of the sins of modern man, type-deal.' Ryan shrugged in a non-committal gesture. 'Do you have an address from their website, Tai?'

Tai swiveled his chair around to his computer and called up the necessary webpage where he'd gotten the watermark picture from. 'This says they are based just north of the city, in Dorwich.'

'The tannery place. Interesting,' Ryan mused as they waited for the printouts and the copy of Tai's report for their own file. 'Thanks Tai, you're a diamond, bro.'

'Tell that to my husband next time you see him.'

In the elevator on their way to the garage, Adam shifted on his feet. 'Okay, I'm going to through this out there, make of it what you will. What if we drafted Lindsay, my Lindsay, into helping us with this new religious angle?'