By now, it was late evening.

The body of Jane Doe lay on one of the steel autopsy tables in the basement of the BPD.

The first thing Elizabeth noticed was the sawed-open skullcap.

"We opened the head and removed the brain," Eli Cuevas said, "that's what we always do. Then we cracked the base of the skull open with a chisel to see if there was water in the forehead and sinuses." The bloody chisel and a small hammer were still on the autopsy table. And by him, he meant himself.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "Well?"

"Nothing. If there were water, that would mean she drowned. But she didn't." He pointed to the back of the woman's head, where a huge gash gaped. The bone was shattered, the skin torn. "That means she was already dead when thrown into the water. No wonder, with a hammer blow like that."

Elizabeth looked at the younger man with furrowed brows. "Then the hammer blow caused the death?"

"I assume so." Cuevas paused for a moment. "Will probably have been a carpenter's hammer, with one of those claws on the other end." He looked at the report. "Here --" he turned and looked at the org table, "... Is her stomach." He pulled apart the stomach cut open along the long side. "If she had drowned, we would have a three-layered content. Solid on the bottom, liquid and foam on top."

"And we don't have that either?"

"No. Just some leftovers that look Asian. Chinese or Vietnamese. Rice and stuff like that was the last thing she ate.

Elizabeth didn't know where to look. It was all gruesome and disgusting. But she had to get a look at the body. That was why she was here.

The body had been cut open from chin to pubic bone, and the innards lay on a separate table at the feet of the corpse. There was still something obscene about the way the floater lay there. Elizabeth thought again about the arrangement of the scene at the lake and that there was undoubtedly more to the perpetrator than a mere intent to kill. She had had cases before where the perpetrators took sadistic pleasure in showing their victims in sexually degrading poses even after death. Some perpetrators stayed with the corpse and masturbated over the cadaver. They had caught one because his semen traces stuck to the body, and investigators could trace the DNA.

"The body wasn't lying on its back by accident," Cuevas continued. "The perpetrator had superficially cut the skin on her back and shoved a thirty-pound weight plate under the skin to weigh the body down. Then he had sewn everything back up makeshift."

Elizabeth looked at him with wide eyes. "That kind of thing is no accident. He wanted the body to be found lying on her back. Lying on her back with her legs spread."

Katherine cleared her throat. "Like a voluptuous woman who, even as a floater, still awaits her next suitor," she added.

Elizabeth was becoming increasingly aware that all of this was ceremonial. And the cross around her neck had added yet another new aspect. And no one voiced the fear, but they all harbored it: it didn't have to stop at one murder. This could be a serial killer.

Elizabeth watched Cuevas, who looked intently inside the decomposed body. Jane, too, leaned forward slightly.

Elizabeth furrowed her brows a little. "Fatal was the blow to the head?"

Cuevas nodded slowly. "As far as we can tell here, yes. The top of the skull is fractured, and according to what's left of the brain," he pointed with his chin to a nondescript grayish-brownish slush in a kidney dish, "we can assume an intracranial hemorrhage. He crushed the skull with a sledgehammer. That's what the CT scans show." The reconstruction was visible on the computer monitor. They had run the body through CT earlier.

"He wrapped the giblets around her neck post-mortem. So, strictly speaking, strangled her with her intestines," Katherine mused. "It could be symbolically a gesture of hanging. And along with the cross, it makes death a kind of redemption. Or an absolution."

Jane's eyebrows drew together, and she looked at the psychiatrist for a long time. "And that means?"

Katherine took a deep breath and licked her lips. "In medieval theology, hanging, one of the most prominent forms of strangulation, was always the sign of greed and intemperance," she said. "Pier della Vigna also hangs in Dante's Divine Comedy. And Judas, the betrayer of Christ, had also hanged himself from a tree. And when Dante and Virgil go to the hell city of Dis in the Divine Comedy, they pass through a forest of suicides beforehand. These suicides have turned into trees. And are hanging from the trees. So hang themselves."

Elizabeth looked at the body. "Kind of like this."

Katherine looked at her exhausted sister. "And," she continued. "He weighed the body down extra, making it float on its back. That's the difference between modus operandi and signature."

Elizabeth frowned thoughtfully. "The modus operandi is the method of murder --"

"Exactly. He beat the woman to death with a sledgehammer. Maybe out of anger or effect. We don't know."

"And the signature?"

"That's the method of dressing. To kill her, he didn't have to tie her entrails around the woman's neck post-mortem. He didn't have to decorate her with her sexy lingerie and glue high heels to her feet. He did that because it had meaning to him. Whatever it is. So does the cross underneath."

Jane scratched her chin. "If she didn't wear it before," she countered.

Katherine nodded slowly. "Yes. But we don't know that. If he put it there, it has meaning."

"Just as it has meaning for the killer of Lisa to send the nose to the father?"

"The same. Because even the amputation of the feet or nose, in this case, it was both times post-mortem, is not causative of death." Jane looked at Cuevas forcefully. "It would help some if we knew who this woman was and what she did for a living as soon as possible."

Cuevas looked at the chief almost punitively. "Dental status we're querying now," he growled.

Katherine cleared her throat. "Can we find out about the rose?"

Cuevas looked closely at the psychiatrist and shrugged. "We can examine it, too. Maybe we'll find some foreign DNA. Which I don't think we will. The body's been in the water too long for us to have any luck there. The rose did it to you, didn't it?"

"Well, it's more than a coincidence that we find one here, too. And then also in the vagina. She didn't have any identification documents with her?"

Cuevas shook his head.

"A whore --," Nick muttered. "Last time we had a case, a john beat a whore to death because she stole his money while he was showering after the act. The money was untraceable. In the end, it came out that she put it in her vagina."

Cuevas raised his eyebrows. "Hear, hear. Did she do that with credit cards, too?"

Elizabeth rolled her eyes for the umpteenth time that evening. Evidently, Maggie's inappropriate jokes appealed to her significantly more than Cuevas'.

Even Jane slumped her shoulders. "Please, gentlemen. A little more seriousness." She looked closely at Katherine. "So, what do you think? Is it Jack the Ripper 2.0?"

Katherine ran her fingers thoughtfully along her lower lip. "If it's a prostitute, the case is indeed reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. And if it's a new Ripper and he's following the template, he lives somewhere in the area from where the body was last found. Such killers kill in their region. Jack the Ripper did that, too. He was out and about in Whitechapel. At that time, there were one thousand two hundred prostitutes and more than sixty brothels. An ideal hunting ground for such killers."

Jane looked at her daughter questioningly. "Did the Ripper disembowel them, too?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "Yes. And the ovaries were removed. The symbol of fertility and female anatomy. It's like he was trying to stop prostitutes from reproducing."

"Isn't it possible that the perpetrator dumped the body somewhere?" asked Elizabeth. "And that she just happened to be driven to that dock?"

Katherine thought and made a strained face. "Also possible. But the body's legs were tied down, after all. It doesn't fit, Liz."

Cuevas nodded in agreement. "That's true. But it's also possible she washed up there. And someone didn't tie her down until later."

Katherine made another face. "But who finds a body there and ties it up? And then in such a pose? Certainly not a Sunday walker just out walking his dog." She disguised her voice: " The weather is so nice, what will I do? Oh yes, tying up floaters. Got nothing better to do."

Elizabeth grunted softly and dropped her chin to her chest, lips pressed together to keep from grinning widely.

Jane nodded in agreement. "Exactly. It can't be. Well, what can be, we don't know either." She puffed. "It's too many could's, possibly and maybe for me in this case. And too few so it is."

"That's what cases are like," Elizabeth replied, turning to her sister. "The only connection to Lisa would be the rose, right?"

Katherine twitched her brows. "Yes, from that, it could be two perpetrators. One kills young girls, the other prostitutes. Or the murder of the woman or prostitute, whatever she was, is also a one-time murder and not indicative of a series?"

Jane folded her arms in front of her chest, "And the junkie?"

Elizabeth slumped her shoulders. "Good point. Does he work for both, then, or just one? Just the one who kills the girls, though, right?"

Katherine shrugged. "Probably yes. However, we need to find out who's working for whom. One junkie for one killer, several junkies for one? Or even several for several?"

"I could ask at the unemployment office," Cuevas growled. Elizabeth wasn't listening at all. Cuevas continued to examine the inside of the body. Then he glanced at Katherine. "Didn't you say that Jack the Ripper removed the ovaries of many of his victims?"

Katherine nodded slowly.

Cuevas looked again at the body cavity and then at each in turn. "Looks like," he said slowly, "the killer did the same thing here."