The autopsy had been finished for fifteen minutes. It was not yet clear who the woman was. Maggie sat with Elizabeth and Katherine in her office across the hall, the autopsy report in her hands.

"You asked for a crucifix," Maggie said, looking at her wife.

Elizabeth took a deep breath and frowned a little. "Was there one?"

Maggie nodded and held up a small paper bag.

"Where?"

"The perpetrator inserted it into the woman's vagina. We discovered it first on the CT scan."

"Crucifix in the vagina," Elizabeth murmured softly. "There is indeed some religious element to this whole case. And we can't get the connection. Or are we missing something?"

Katherine raised her eyebrows briefly. "It's not unusual. Many serial killers have religious delusions. Think of Albert Fish. He saw himself as a messiah. They all want to unite the holy with the dirty. Here we have the crucifix and the vagina. Or take the Green River Killer. He may have cried over his Bible reading, but he still killed forty-nine women. Officially."

Maggie looked closely at her sister-in-law, unsure she even wanted to know the answer to her question. "And unofficially?"

"At least seventy-one," the psychiatrist replied without hesitation.

Maggie shook her head slowly. Even she, a born cynic, could say nothing to such a number. "I'm not a case analyst," she continued, "but we have another piece of evidence that it was the same killer. In the last victim," she looked at her wife and Katherine, "he cut out the woman's ovaries."

"And here?"

"Right here, the uterus with fetus and ovaries," the ME said tonelessly.

Elizabeth noticed Maggie gritting her teeth in strain. "Excuse me?"

Maggie took a deep breath, frowning. "She was pregnant, I guess. Quite early still. Between seven and ten weeks. We can't be more specific than that." Maggie's voice strained cool as if to keep the experience at a distance.

She was pregnant, Elizabeth repeated in her mind. Maybe eight weeks. Almost like her wife. Nor had she and Maggie told anyone. Just the girls, Katherine and Nick. Because something kept coming up. Terrible, horrible things. This woman had been pregnant, too. Until that man killed her. And what had he done with the child?

"What does the embryo look like?" the detective asked.

Maggie pressed her lips together, shaking her head. "Can't tell."

"Can't you --?

"It's gone, Liz," the redhead said firmly, seeming as if she wanted to get up from her chair but decided against it. "He cut it out of the woman's stomach. The uterus is gone, too. He opened the abdominal cavity and sewed it back up pretty makeshift."

Elizabeth looked at the stitching shown in the picture. It looked like someone had sewn two curtains together with thick thread. Quickly and loveless. "And we know she was pregnant because --?" Something in the detective resisted accepting that the killer had taken the woman's child in such a brute manner. Even though the woman was already dead. And the child, too. He had wanted to separate mother and child. At any price.

Maggie leaned back in her chair. "Because we found a piece of placenta in the abdominal cavity. Apparently, he opened the uterus in the body and took out the embryo and the placenta. He probably removed the uterus and the ovaries after that. Only an experienced surgeon can remove an embryo that way. And I don't think our killer is one. She pursed her lips. "So he performed a rather bumbling C-section. We had the HCG level determined at the lab. The value is of limited value post-mortem, but it does suggest eighth to tenth week."

Katherine cleared her throat to defuse the situation a bit. "Then it's clear. The roses. Mary. That's the innocence. The whore, that's the temptation. The sin. He kills the young girls so they won't be tempted in the first place. Not sin in the first place. And the whore who has a child --"

"That can't happen in his canon of values," Elizabeth noted.

"Canons of values are good," Katherine said with a furrowed brow. "But that's just the way it is. Regardless of whether he is religious now or not, the child of a prostitute, the murderer thinks, can only become a creature of sin. That is why he removes the ovaries from the one prostitute. So that she will never have a child --"

"Post mortem," Maggie said. "He removed the ovaries from the first prostitute post-mortem. By then, she can only have children in the spirit realm anyway. Or not right now."

Katherine took a sip of her coffee. "As I always say, you can't ask for logic with these people. It's about a symbolic act. By removing the ovaries, he's symbolically preventing the prostitute from reproducing per se."

"And by cutting out the embryo even more so?" asked Elizabeth with furrowed brows.

Katherine nodded slowly and set the coffee cup down on Maggie's desk. "That's right. This is the second escalation he's trying to branch out with his hobby room autopsy. I could even imagine the killer being startled when he saw the woman was carrying a child."

"She was pregnant between eight and ten weeks?" asked Elizabeth again. "That's as close as you can get?"

Maggie pressed her lips together and shook her head. "No. I'm afraid we can't be more specific than that."

Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. "Do we know who the woman is yet? We're already talking about a prostitute, of course. Have your people found out anything yet?"

"Yes," Maggie said. "There were identification documents in another container. According to the picture, it's the victim. She glanced around her office. "I guess the perp was careless there."

"Or disappointed that it was over, after the euphoria and rush of the kill," Katherine indicated.

The redhead shrugged. "Or so. We've got the woman's address, and we're going to run a DNA match."

"So, is she actually a prostitute again?" asked Elizabeth, wide-eyed.

Maggie shrugged again. "Don't know yet. Wouldn't be surprised, though."

Prostitutes were a high-risk group. That they would be caught as victims was always only too likely when it came to rape, extortion, robbery, drug trafficking, kidnapping, or even human trafficking. Still, the frequency in recent days was significantly more than what could be statistically explained as usual, even in Boston.

"That leaves the necklace," Elizabeth said.

Maggie didn't seem entirely with them. "The necklace?"

"Yes, the necklace the victim wore around her neck. Jacqueline had Lisa's necklace. I wouldn't be surprised --"

"... if that necklace came from Christi Parrish! Exactly!" Katherine rose, and Elizabeth stood up as well.

The detective pointed to a picture. "Let's borrow this one." With that, she took the image from the necklace.

"Goodbye's a pleasure!" shouted Maggie after them.

"Do you mean us or the picture?" asked Elizabeth with a grin over her shoulder.

"The picture, of course!" the redhead replied, and the detective chuckled for the first time of the day.

Maggie rolled her eyes, smiling, though.

xxx

Elizabeth steered the unmarked car and looked strained at the road. She turned her head briefly to her sister. "So, you think it's just one killer?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "I think so. I had thought at first it was two killers, one of them killing girls and the other prostitutes. But it's different."

"What's different, Kate?"

"It's just one killing young girls and prostitutes. That's good news: One killer makes less work than two. The bad news is, it's a serial killer."

"One he punishes by death, the other he protects by it?" asked Elizabeth with furrowed brows.

Katherine took a deep breath and nodded. "That's exactly right. The young girls he wants to protect through death. Those who are dead will no longer be tempted. The older prostitutes, however, he wants to punish by death so they can't continue to live viciously." She looked through the windshield for a while without fixing any particular point. "Some he protects through death. That seems to be his goal. Somewhat, the two combine in the final sacrifice."

Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together. "In what way?"

"He separates the innocent child from the guilty mother. It's like he's trying to protect the child from the mother."

The detective snorted. "You call that protecting?"

Katherine made a face. "Why don't you stop taking it so personally and thinking like you would when analyzing it? Think like the killer. The psychopath. If he goes to this trouble, it means something. Some he punishes with death, others he protects by it."

"Maybe, but still a strange kind of protection. And what's the point of the crucifix?"

"It's a kind of absolution."

"A what?" Elizabeth really thought she hadn't heard right. "The crucifix in the vagina as an absolution?"

"Well, we said it earlier: it connects the holy with the dirty. The crucifix with the vagina. The cross is holy for him. The vagina is dirty for him."

"But then that's all the more sacrilege," Elizabeth replied with furrowed brows. "Then he's defiling the crucifix, after all. Or he's making fun of both. About the woman and the cross."

Katherine wiggled her head. "Also possible. The association of sacred objects with sexual organs is not new. Even in Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, some crucifixes and hosts are always being introduced somewhere. That's clearly sacrilege."

"So?"

"And in the movie The Exorcist, we see the possessed Regan repeatedly jamming a crucifix into her vagina while shouting Fuck me."

"Fuck me? Surely that's not absolution she's doing?"

"No, that is exactly the mockery of the sacred, as we also find in Maquis de Sade. But it may be that the killer had something else in mind. The fear of the prostitute and of the dirty. Namely, exactly what the film is also about an exorcism." Katherine looked at her sister. "The exorcism of evil. He wants to remove the innocent child from the guilty mother. And then purify the vicious place of the woman. The crucifix has a similar effect to holy water in that case."

Elizabeth stared into the dark gray autumn sky for a while. "An exorcism ... Can we catch him more easily with this knowledge?"

Katherine took a deep breath and frowned deeply. "I'm afraid no."

xxx

Judith Parrish had served tea and cookies. She couldn't speak for almost a minute when she saw the picture.

"That's Christi's necklace," she kept stammering. "The necklace of my Christi. My little, dear Christi. How can it be that you have a picture of it --"

Elizabeth didn't know what to do. It was one of those situations where anything she said could be wrong.

Telling Judith Parrish where they got the picture was wrong. To keep quiet about it was wrong. Lying about it was wrong. To say nothing was wrong. It wasn't good that way. And it wasn't good the other way. It always needed to be corrected.

"My daughter," Judith Parrish sobbed. "How can this be? What happened to her? Tell me! Tell me!"

Elizabeth could tell her nothing. Nor could she tell her that Christi Parrish was dead. That she had lost her feet. They had taken the picture with the necklace by the body of a prostitute in a dumpster at the airport. All this she would have to tell her, but she couldn't. But she would have to. Because every relative, especially the mother, deserved to know if her child was still alive. Uncertainty was the most significant punishment. Certainty, even if it was the certainty of death, was almost always better than the uncertainty between life and death. Only then could man begin to mourn. And mourning was the first step toward coping. Even if it would never lead to forgetting. Time heals all wounds, they said. But in such cases, that was wrong. And in most other cases, too.

After all, Elizabeth had told the mother.

Judith Parrish had just wept silently to herself. People reacted so differently. Some cried. Some remained quite motionless and composed. And tore their whole apartment apart when the detectives were gone.

Some also attacked the detectives directly and then had to be sedated. Some even had to be hospitalized. But Judith Parrish had cried.

At some point, she had stopped and escorted Elizabeth outside. But perhaps she had continued to cry after that. Elizabeth hoped that Judith Parrish would eventually be able to conquer her grief. Maybe BPD's mental health counseling would help her, too. Perhaps it wouldn't.

At some point, she and Katherine were back in the car.

A call had come in.

With two messages.

The body of the prostitute in the dumpster had been finally identified. Her name was Vanessa Donnelly. At the same time, the airport's surveillance camera had captured an obscure image. A man dressed in black dragged a huge bag upstairs to the dumpster. The face had been unrecognizable. At least one could halfway recognize the car. An Audi 80, with the license plate pasted over. A black Audi. Black like the tape the driver had taped over the license plate. Black like the driver's soul.

An Audi 80, the detective thought. How many of those were there in Boston? She had driven one once. A typical killer vehicle, it was not. It was more like the VW bus that serial killers in particular preferred, as she had once heard at a lecture in Quantico.