Al Zaid's body was already in the cooler. Maggie opened one of the refrigerated compartments and pulled out one of the drawer-like couches. The cold of the refrigeration unit hissed around them, making Elizabeth forget for a few seconds about the still fairly hot late summer.

"He also gave him multiple fractures of the vertebrae," Maggie said, looking at the investigators. "He may have broken his back above his knee, as a wrestler is always suggesting in their shows."

His killer his victim's back over his knee; it flashed through Elizabeth's mind.

Maggie took a long look at her wife and frowned. "Only here it was brutal reality, and his spinal cord was crushed in the process." She closed the cooler again. "Since we closed the back again, of course, I'll show you the fractures of the spine in our CT reconstruction."

She led Elizabeth and Katherine to the computer in the corner of the autopsy room. The machine was in front of a leaded glass screen through which they could see the CT in the next room. From the computer, they could contact the person in the CT using the keyboard and a speaker. Even after multiple requests, Maggie's objection that she would only have corpses in the CT that were undoubtedly not breathing again had not interested her bosses.

Maggie called up a 3-D reconstruction of the thoracic spine on the screen, showing three vertebrae fractured multiple times. "The fractures have crushed the spinal cord." The redhead switched to a cross-sectional view, which showed that pieces of bone had penetrated the spinal cord. "The result: spinal shock and paraplegia."

Elizabeth furrowed her brows thoughtfully. "He was still conscious, though?"

Maggie nodded gravely. "Yes. His legs were certainly paralyzed, and he probably couldn't use his arms either because of the spinal shock, so the killer had a puppet, so to speak, to do what he wanted without having to restrain his victim. The vertebral fractures are all powerfully underbled. This means that he lived for a while. Instead of tying him up, the killer paralyzed him. And then he could do whatever was on his mind to him." Maggie shook her head. "I don't believe it. Instead of tying him up, he broke his spinal cord."

What an inhuman monster, the detective thought with a deep frown. "And there are the cuts again." She picked up the autopsy report with corresponding pictures and looked at the already slightly grayish skin of the corpse.

Maggie bit her lower lip and nodded. "Yes. One on the chest next to the heart, or rather where the heart normally is, and another on the left upper arm and two on the right."

The detective looked closely at the strange cuts and frowned again. "So he keeps carving the same symbol into the bodies? Over and over again?"

Maggie looked at her wife for a long moment and nodded wearily. "Yes. A death mark, if you will." She pointed to the pictures of the wounds with a metal rod. "As I said, all these wounds were inflicted on the victim while he was still alive. We have slightly underbled wound edges, even though the bleeding was stopped very quickly."

"By the onset of death?" asked Katherine with furrowed brows; at that moment, the sisters were more alike than they admitted to each other.

Maggie looked at the two women and nodded again. "With the onset of death, the blood circulation stopped."

"And why is the perpetrator doing this?" asked Elizabeth her wife, looking closely at the redhead. "To cut this symbol into the flesh, I mean again and again. And different numbers of times, too. So far, there has been a mark on all the corpses, albeit with varying frequency. With Al Zaid, it's so many; with Cody Wilkins, it's few; and with Foreman, it's somewhere in between."

Maggie took a deep breath and rubbed her stomach. "Please ask me something easier, Liz. He probably had a rough childhood, never got to climb in a tree house with the big boys, and didn't get to watch TV at night."

Elizabeth looked somberly at her wife, but Maggie held the gaze without flinching.

Katherine overheard everything said. "A scar," she said slowly, "is a sign of strength after confronting evil. It's supposed to show that you've taken an obstacle, that you've overcome something. Even if something remains from the confrontation."

Elizabeth heard what her sister said, blinked, and looked at her, puzzled. Unconsciously, she put a hand on the leg that had been shot so many years ago, when she was a child, the night Maura had tangled with Dionysius in her childhood home, had been shot before her mother had run off into the night without looking back and was untraceable for weeks, even presumed dead until Jane had tracked her down in the mountains, brought her home, back to the family, to her girls. The first scar that life had inflicted on her then, on which many others had followed. Physically as well as psychologically.

Maggie hadn't missed that her wife had once again drifted off into the past in thought and cleared her throat, causing Elizabeth to blink several times and return to the present. "Well, Al Zaid didn't take that obstacle very well, though." Again, she tapped an image with the metal rod, the same metal rod she often tapped on the bodies in the autopsy room when explaining something.

Katherine still looked at her sister and frowned deeply. "Zorro, the novel and movie character, carves a Z into his opponents as a sign of submission. Could this be something similar? And could this arrow-like rune have a specific meaning in certain circles?"

"You mean circles where carvings and scars like this are used?" asked Maggie without looking at her sister-in-law. "Where that kind of thing is trendy?"

Katherine breathed in heavily. "For example."

Maggie pressed her lips together. "Let me think. Remember we had that dead guy here once with the brandings? In connection with the autopsy, I had talked to some piercer and brander from downtown at the time."

Elizabeth seemed to return to the here and now and shook her head briefly before slowly saying, "Piercer and Brander."

Maggie nodded slowly, giving her wife time to follow again. "Yeah," she said, frowning. "Some guy who does piercings and tattoos and branding and all that. The one who told me then that third-degree burns must be created for burned-in scars."

"The body is the translation of the soul into the visible," Katherine mused, looking at her sister. "Did this brander also deal with cuts?"

Maggie pulled the corners of her mouth down. "With all kinds of things. Cuts, etchings, piercings, tattoos. He gave me his card back then, and he thought it was fascinating here in the autopsy. Finally, I explained a few things to him. If we ever need anything, he said, we should contact him. Come on; I'll look for the business card."

In her office, Maggie rifled through his drawers.

Elizabeth let her eyes wander, as if in a trance, over the shelves and file cabinets full of bones and skulls. Many were from World War I and World War II, with bullet holes in their skulls. Maggie had always been interested in forensic anthropology, as she once told Elizabeth on one of their first dates.

Maggie stretched her back and sighed with relief. "Finally, here it is." She handed the business card to Elizabeth with a frown. "Alex Romeo called Sphinx. And that's where he works. Downtown."

Elizabeth stared at the business card for a moment. "Snake Mountain, and that's the name of his store?"

Maggie pulled the corners of her mouth down and slumped in her desk chair. "If that's what it says, Liz."

The detective and the psychiatrist looked at each other. "Maybe this Draftsman belongs to some milieu where such cuts are considered trendy," Katherine said hesitantly. "It's worth a try. Best we go there right away."

Elizabeth nodded and started moving with her sister. "I agree." She made a face and stopped at her wife's doorstep. "Oh, by the way. Mom moved up the family dinner to tonight," she said as Maggie slumped into her longed desidered desk chair.

Maggie looked at the detective and groaned loudly, almost painfully. Not because she disliked Maura and Jane but rather because she was hoping for a relaxing evening where she could put her feet up on the coffee table and watch some cozy television.

Elizabeth smiled apologetically and said before disappearing. "I love you, Mags."

Maggie sighed loudly, rubbed her protruding belly, and said with a smile, "I love you too, Elizabeth, you damn fool."