Maggie Ross met Elizabeth at the entrance to the morgue's autopsy room. "It's him," she said by way of greeting.

"Steven Foreman?"

"Yes, we matched his DNA to that found in samples from his razor and bathroom. It was challenging to get the gentleman here, and some members of his gang said it was their job, not ours."

"That's what his vice chief told me."

"You went to see him? At the clubhouse?"

Elizabeth looked at her wife long and hard. "At an extraordinary clubhouse in Lancaster," she replied with a smile.

Maggie pressed her lips together with a nod. "All right." She turned to the autopsy table. "Let's get to the deposed club boss. Let's say a few words about the dog first, though."

"I'm all ears."

"There was a small rug next to the dead animal, and it has DNA traces of the possible killer, which we also found elsewhere throughout the apartment."

"Do we know any more details about who it might be?"

Maggie took a deep breath and shook her head. "No, still not."

"Then we'll have to check with the FBI. Wouldn't it be strange if this killer didn't have a criminal record and his DNA wasn't stored somewhere?"

Maggie swung her head a little. "But it could also be that these people are flying in a contract killer from overseas. He comes in, shoots the victim, collects thousands of dollars, and takes off again. Before the cops wake up, he's long gone."

"But a professional wouldn't kill his victim in such a roundabout way," Elizabeth replied with furrowed brows. "And then cut out the heart, too."

Maggie clicked her tongue briefly. "You're probably right about that. So --" She turned back to the carpet. "The rug has DNA traces of the perpetrator and bite marks from the dog."

Elizabeth looked at the evidence, drawing her brows together, then narrowed her eyes. "Then maybe he wrapped the rug around his arm so the dog would bite into it? What do you think?"

"I agree," Maggie replied. "We can clearly tell what kind of jaw it was from the bite marks. Unfortunately, in our line of work, we don't just deal with animal bites, but human bites, too." Elizabeth had experienced such cases as well. There were even parents who bit their children. "Watch out, biting parents," the redhead always commented.

"The bite marks," the doctor continued, "match the jaw of the dead dog." She lifted the clear evidence bag containing the pen with a bloody brain and tissue residue stuck to it.

Elizabeth looked at the pen. "That means when the dog bit it, the killer stuck the pen in its eye?"

Maggie nodded slowly. "That's consistent with our research, including the dog's DNA."

Elizabeth looked at her wife for a long moment. "This man must be ice cold."

"Yes, and this is the second time we've had a body here in the autopsy room along with a dog. Remember?"

Elizabeth shook herself inwardly. "Unfortunately, yes." When she first started with BPD, she had once watched an attack dog being dissected for biting a toddler to death on the playground. The dissection was primarily to determine whether the dog's owner, a pimp, had amphetamines in the animal, but this hadn't been the case. Instead, they had found half-digested parts of the child's face in the dog's stomach, which the dog had devoured. The facial skin in the dog's stomach was still one of the most gruesome images burned into her memory during Elizabeth's police career.

Maggie looked at her wife with a long frown and took another deep breath. "So much for the dog. Now we get to the owner."

Steven Foreman's body lay naked on the autopsy table. The MEs had extended the original incision in the chest cavity to include the classic Y incision: one down from each collarbone and then vertically from the chest to the pubic bone. All organs had been removed.

"Let's look at the head on CT first. We pushed him through the CT before the autopsy, of course," the doctor said, directing her wife to the computer where the images were reconstructed. She called up a three-dimensional image of the skull. "Here we see a skull fracture and subdural hemorrhage, bleeding under the hard meninges."

Elizabeth looked at the scan with furrowed brows. "Did the killer hit him over the skull with an iron bar or something?"

Maggie raised her shoulders and sighed. "Well, we're dealing with massive force against the victim, in this case, the victim's head. It doesn't have to have been an object, though; it may have been a very hard hit to the head. In any case, the victim suffered a severe traumatic brain injury with bleeding inside the skull. At the same time, there was brain swelling from the injuries. No different than if you bruise something and the affected area on your body swells. At some point, the pressure would have caused the brain stem to become pinched." Maggie pointed to another CT image of the skull on the monitor. "In a case like this, you must remove parts of the skull bone. The medical profession calls this uncapping. The purpose of this is to reduce the pressure in the cranial cavity; otherwise --" She looked at her wife for a long moment.

"Otherwise, there will be irreversible brain damage?" the detective added.

"No, death will result," Maggie replied, "since all vital centers are in the pinched brain stem."

Elizabeth glanced at the sawn-open damage on the autopsy table. "Uncapping pretty much sums it up." Sometimes even the detective couldn't resist a silly quip.

"Indeed. We open the skull every time we do an autopsy, and it's just that by then, unfortunately, the patient is dead and has none of the pressure relief."

Elizabeth looked at the body, at the cuts on the arms and open chest. "The killer made those cuts on him," she said, "and ripped out the heart. Was the man still alive then?"

Maggie looked at her wife in anguish. "Yes. We have what we call bleeding on all the edges of the wounds on both the arms and chest cuts. These are clear vital signs. Dead people don't bleed, Liz. This one was bleeding, so he was alive. Here --" She pointed to a cut on the sternum that was largely congruent with the ME's later cut. "Here we see the cut that the perpetrator used to cut through the skin and muscle."

"And how did he get through the ribs? He was trying to get to the heart, wasn't he?"

"Yes." The sternum with the rib attachments was at the foot of the body in the organ tray. "The killer cut through the ribs. Probably with a hunting knife or some other sharp, heavy weapon simultaneously."

"You can cut ribs?" Elizabeth stepped closer to the body. "I thought you guys always use those rib cutters around here."

"These?" The redhead held up one of the rib shears. It looked like a cross between a pair of chorus-clad pinchers and hedge clippers and had made it onto the covers of various thrillers for its morbid, cold aesthetic.

"Look here." Maggie directed her wife to a display skeleton in the anteroom of the autopsy room and tapped the skeleton's ribcage. Elizabeth knew this skeleton was real and held together by wire loops. "This is where the so-called cartilage-bone boundary runs. See? And toward the sternum is pure cartilage material. This cartilage area of the ribs is about 1.6 inches to 2 inches wide." Maggie again tapped the ribs of the skeleton. "In this skeleton, which is real bone, the cartilage has been replaced with plastic because the original cartilage dissolves as the bones dry out. See?" She pointed to the space in between. "If you apply enough pressure with a sharp knife, you can make a strong cut through the cartilage between the ribs and take out the sternum with the rib attachments in one piece."

"Then why do you use these rib shears when you dissect, Mags?"

"Because otherwise, the knives would get dull very quickly. And then I'd get in trouble with my assistants because they'd have to keep sharpening the knives. Also, it's easier to slip with a knife and cut yourself, and then you might end up on one of those tables yourself. Or you might catch the organs underneath and possibly damage evidence. I sometimes use that technique anyway; the cut is just faster."

"I see." Elizabeth glanced alternately between the skeleton and the corpse. "But not with one of our knives from our kitchen, right?"

Maggie rolled her eyes.

Elizabeth smiled briefly but then grew serious again. "It's likely that the killer was concerned with getting the whole thing done as quickly as possible."

"I can imagine that, too," Maggie replied with pursed lips and a nod. "Maybe he couldn't wait to have the heart in his hands finally. To capture the other man's heart, you might say."

Elizabeth had to grin. "You may be a sweetheart to me. So let's review for the record. The killer first disabled the dog, fractured Foreman's skull in hand-to-hand combat, and took him out that way."

"And thoroughly." The doctor nodded.

"Then he cut the marks into his flesh. And the last thing he did was cut open his chest, remove his sternum, and cut out his heart."

"I'd say that's what happened."

"And all that while he was alive?"

Maggie looked at her wife in anguish. "Yes, the heart was still beating when it was cut out."

Elizabeth shivered. "And the heart itself --"

"Is still gone," Maggie said with raised brows.

Elizabeth looked at the cut-up body on the autopsy table for a moment. The dead man, she thought. The dead man, the killer, and the heart. Where was the heart? Could it be that the killer had taken it? But what was he going to do with it?

It was high time to talk to Katherine.