The scene was getting more and more crowded. Katherine had arrived, followed shortly by Nick.

"Is Wolfsen at BPD yet?" Elizabeth wanted to know.

Nick pursed his lips and nodded. "We don't want him to delete any data from the laptop quickly. Because we'll need that if we want to get to the body supplier." He glanced at Katherine. "That makes sense, doesn't it?"

His wife nodded slowly. "He knows we're going to ask him some uncomfortable questions."

Then all eyes turned to the dead man. Maggie had opened her suitcase and flipped open her laptop. Now she let her eyes roam the corpse examiningly, in her gloved hands a pair of tweezers and a small flashlight with which she shone into the chest cavity. Then she looked at the wounds where the limbs had been severed and announced. "He did a good job."

Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together. "Excuse me?"

Maggie looked at her briefly. "I mean professionally. He took the arms and legs out of the joints. First, he neatly cut the skin and muscles, opened the joint capsules, and cut the tendons and arteries. It's how you do it when deboning animals in the slaughterhouse."

"They call that deboning?" said Nick, furrowing his eyebrows. "Look at that."

"He severed arms and legs postmortem," Maggie continued, shining her light on the wounds. "No bleeding under the edges of the wounds."

"How long has the man been dead?" Elizabeth sighed.

Maggie looked at her wife with a frown. "Between twenty-four and thirty-six hours. I can't say exactly yet. Anyway, the rectal temperature is no longer meaningful. It has already adjusted to the ambient temperature. But the death marks are only partially removable, which speaks for one to a half days of lying." She paused dramatically but then continued. "I'm afraid I can't say anything about the extent of rigor mortis in the limbs. I need arms and legs, and I don't have them." She shrugged and looked again at the arm and the legless torso and grinned a little. Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Katherine walked to the head end of the torso and pointed to what had once been a head. "This one looks less professional," she said, "How do we explain it? On the one hand, an almost surgical approach, and then this blind frenzy of destruction? That's richly unusual in terms of modus operandi."

Maggie craned her neck to compare the direction of the cuts on the chest and abdomen without coming into contact with the body. "Kate's right about that, and we have different cuts on the torso here, too."

"In what way?"

"At one point, the perpetrator opened the rib cage and removed the heart. When he did this, the victim was still alive. Later, post mortem, the incision was extended diagonally downward toward the abdomen to remove the liver and kidneys."

"How did he die?"

"Probably when his skull was crushed," Maggie explained with furrowed brows as she looked up.

Elizabeth approached the body. Bloody brain matter oozed from under the shattered skull bone.

"He took the heart out just before," the ME continued. "There is still some tender bleeding around the edges of the wound. From there, the cut may have been inflicted just before death occurred. But it may also be that the heart was still beating a moment after he crushed his skull. In either case, both violent impacts occurred in quick succession."

Elizabeth frowned thoughtfully. "So almost simultaneously?"

Maggie pressed her lips together and nodded gently.

"But gently is mostly," Katherine said, "that we have different modi operandi, isn't it?"

Maggie looked closely at her sister-in-law and nodded slowly. "Yes. The way the perpetrator crushed his skull doesn't match professional deboning. And the wound edges of the cuts on the upper torso that he taught the victim to be able to remove the heart are much too irregular than the cuts in the abdominal area that was necessary to get at the liver and kidneys."

"So sloppy work on top and clean work on the bottom?" asked Nick.

Maggie nodded again. "Something like that."

"Great," Elizabeth said, turning as she heard heavy footsteps. Chief of Detectives Jane Rizzoli came down the basement stairs accompanied by one of the officers.

"My dear Maggie," the chief said when she saw the body. "Are you already autopsying the body right at the scene? Proficient!"

Maggie smiled at the tasteless joke. "Wasn't necessary at all. Here the culprit has already taken some of the work off my hands. Not quite the way I'd do it, though."

Jane stopped before the body for a moment and pinched her lips together. It wasn't something even she, as chief, saw too often. "We found an arm already?" she asked.

The redhead nodded slowly. "The right arm is already with us at the morgue, and the probability that the arm and the body will match is pretty high. So all that's missing is the left arm."

"You've done a great job of matching that. Two legs are missing, too, though."

"And some organs."

"Cause of death?"

"Most likely the severe craniocerebral trauma. The killer stomped his head to a pulp." Maggie took off her gloves and dropped them in a trash bag. "Just before that, he ripped out or cut his heart. Maybe even while the victim was still alive."

Jane's eyebrows drew together, and she pursed her lips. "And the arms and legs?" She eyed the very cut edges on the arm and leg joints.

Elizabeth raised her shoulders. "We have no idea why he did this, maybe he sells the body parts to pharmaceutical companies every time."

Katherine had stared ahead, brooding, for a while. "On the Internet," she said, "there's a legend of live sex toys. This refers to young girls with their arms and legs cut off, turning them into living sex dolls."

Elizabeth looked at her sister long and furrowed her eyebrows in horror. "What?"

"Those Lolita sex toys?" asked Nick. "Supposed to exist on the Dark Web. But do they come as men?"

Katherine slowly raised her shoulders and pulled the corners of her mouth down.

"This one as a sex toy?" Jane shook her head and pointed to the body. "I don't think there's any way in hell anyone would want to slide over this scumbag. No matter how kinky he is and how few arms and legs our dead friend here has."

Katherine raised her eyebrows briefly. "Anything's possible."

"Sure," her mother replied, "anything is. The only question is whether it helps us. Some people have sex with their vacuum cleaners, but they're not helping us here either."

"Those people exist," Maggie spoke up again, and everyone glanced at her. "A former college friend who now works in urology told me about one who --"

"Thank you, Maggie," Jane cut her off. "To the point. Do we know who the victim is yet?" She looked at the redhead.

"Not yet. He didn't have any ID on him. We'll collect a dental status once we get to BPD. DNA samples we'll take then, too."

"Let's go then."

The officer came downstairs again. "We have a friend of the victim here," he announced.

Jane's eyebrows drew together in surprise and skepticism at the same time. "How are we going to do that? We don't even know who the victim is yet."

The officer shrugged as he looked at the chief. "The man claims he knows."

Jane took a long look at the young man and raised her shoulders. "Well, let's go talk to him."