It had already dawned. Robert Nixon, the train conductor who had called 911, was the first to greet Nick, Katherine, and Elizabeth. He had a gray beard and blue eyes behind rimless glasses. Behind him stood Nikki, talking with a frown to a stocky man in uniform, who Elizabeth assumed was Sergeant Hays. "Officer O'Laighin," Elizabeth said, gritting her teeth. It had never been easy for her to call Nikki by her late mother's surname. Still, by the time Nikki was thirteen, she had decided it was better to have a surname that wasn't automatically associated with Jane or Elizabeth. Nikki glanced briefly at the Lieutenant and said goodbye to her sergeant with a curt nod. The train was standing on the tracks of a siding. One compartment was particularly brightly lit. Something was threatening about it, even though it was bright. A place where something had happened that wasn't supposed to happen. Katherine took a deep breath and examined the compartment as well. "That's where it is?" Nikki frowned a little and nodded as she joined them. They recognized the symbol smeared on the window from the outside. Elizabeth squinted against the light in the compartment and narrowed her eyes. "Are there any witnesses who heard or saw anything?" Nikki shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "No.""When exactly did the train stop?" "It usually happens right away." Elizabeth looked at her daughter, confused. "What do you mean normally?" What was normal? "According to the conductor, it must have taken thirty minutes for the train to stop. Nobody noticed anything." Nick snorted and shook his head. "Someone is murdered so brutally, and no one notices?"Nikki took a deep breath and looked up at the illuminated compartment. "I think the whole carriage was empty except for the compartment. The window was closed. And here in the wasteland, I'm sure no one heard or saw it from outside. Especially when the train passes quickly. There are a few nebulous statements. We're collecting them right now. But we have another problem besides the lack of witnesses." Katherine looked closely at her niece. "Namely?" The young woman pressed her lips together. "The train had a regular stop outside Boston before it was stopped here. An employee with a snack cart who boarded the train discovered the massacre. He immediately informed Robert Nixon, who immediately called 911. Dispatch ordered Hays and me here, with an ambulance in tow. The paramedics could only take care of the employee with the snack cart. He was pretty shaken up." "I can understand that," Nick replied, looking at Nikki with furrowed brows. He was amazed that she could remain so calm about her first murder, which was beastly. The Lieutenant looked towards the ambulance. "We should talk to this employee, too." Nikki shook her head. "He's not considered fit for questioning yet." Elizabeth took a deep breath. "All right, then. One thing at a time." Nikki looked at the compartment again and gritted her teeth. "In any case. This employee isn't trained to see this sort of thing either.""And the alleged perpetrators --," Katherine began. "... most likely got off at the last stop," Nikki added when the psychiatrist fell silent. Elizabeth furrowed her eyebrows. "So there was more than one perpetrator?" Katherine pulled the corners of her mouth down. "This looks like teamwork." Nick, however, was interested in something else entirely. "They're gone, and no one noticed?" Nikki chewed on her bottom lip and raised her eyebrows a little. "We're not entirely sure yet, but we think that's what happened." He furrowed his brows. "Are there surveillance cameras?" Nikki nodded slowly. "The CCTV footage is already being recovered. My colleagues have already questioned the other passengers." She looked over her shoulder. "Or are still questioning them. But so far, no one's seen anything." Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together as a thought occurred to her. "And you've ... organized it all to be so orderly?" The young woman looked at her mother for a long moment and smiled almost as if she expected to be told off by the Lieutenant. "Hays was a little ... how shall I put it? He was a little troubled when he saw the crime scene. I tried to keep this place from being a mess, Lieutenant." A smile played around Katherine's lips. "Let's look at the compartment then, shall we?" Nikki was still waiting for Elizabeth's lecture and nodded slowly. "Go ahead. One of Mom's --" She paused and cleared her throat. "The ME's office people have already taken the body to the morgue." Elizabeth lowered her brows. "And where's the damn FBI?" The young officer pulled the corners of her mouth down. "There were already a couple of agents here, and they said Marion Bullock was going straight to BPD." Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "So?" "It was like you guys always said it would be when the FBI gets involved. Everything shuts down for now, a huge fuss is made, and then we can return to work in peace." Katherine chuckled before getting into the carriage. The compartment was soaked in blood. The puddles on the floor were already drying up, splashes were all over the walls, and insects, especially flies, were buzzing through the air. The greasy upholstery was full of large brown-red stains, and the curtains were torn from the rails. In some places, the bloody blade had slipped and torn the upholstery open. There were several bloody cuts in the greasy upholstery, making it look as if the seats were also a huge, fat, battered body. Two men from the CSRU were still scanning and measuring the compartment and packing samples of possible skin scales, and DNA traces into small evidence bags, which then disappeared into an evidence case. Flashes from cameras flashed and made colorful shadows dance before Elizabeth's eyes. In the hallway, a forensic technician fiddled with a laptop to analyze the 3-D scan.Elizabeth pushed past the man, growling. The symbol on the window had also been photographed dozens of times. Another forensic scientist was taking fingerprints with a graphite brush and UV light. Katherine gritted her teeth and examined the compartment closely. "Where was the body when it was found?" Nikki pointed to the seat. "She was sitting there on the seat. The legs were spread apart. And the intestines --" She screwed up her face, "... Well, I sent you the pictures." Elizabeth nodded slowly. She looked at the body before her as if it were still sitting there. Who would do such a thing? What kind of madman would do this to a nineteen-year-old young woman? Again, disgust and powerlessness enveloped her like a black, sticky fog. Sometimes, a journalist asked her what murder smelled like. She could hardly describe it, but she knew immediately when she smelled it. It smelled exactly like that here. That smell of death, that sweet, penetrating odor of rotting flesh mixed with the metallic scent of spilled blood and the slaughterhouse-like stench of entrails. There was also the unique smell of fear, despair, and hopelessness, often mixed with the odor of excrement. Katherine looked at the symbol on the window pane and compared it with the pictures she had with her on her iPad."So?" Nikki asked, shifting her weight from one foot to the other again as if she expected her aunt to pull the culprit out of a hat within seconds. Katherine ignored the young woman's impatience. "Most perpetrators choose their victims because of their fears or phobias. They stick needles in women's breasts because their psychotic mother once stuck needles in the penis of the little boy who would later become a serial killer. Why? The boy and everything connected with him was undesirable because the dear mommy would have preferred to have a little girl. And she wanted that because her dear daddy had always touched her so strangely in the bathtub and had forced her to touch him somewhere. Madness is hereditary." Nikki nodded slowly and pursed her lips. "So, was it a man?" Katherine took a deep breath and looked at her niece. "I suppose so. Or several men. This does indeed look more like teamwork." "But all men?" "I would assume so for now." "That's why the vagina thing?" "Maybe that has a meaning, too," Katherine replied. "The vagina is where the baby comes out at birth, but from the looks of it here, the killer turned the whole thing into a bizarre birth of excrement and intestines. Perhaps he also wanted to give her a phallus made of intestines, turning the woman into a man. But why." She turned her gaze back towards the symbol. "Do we have a close-up of the symbol?" Nikki raised her eyebrows and nodded. "Yes." She looked at the CSRU technicians. "And if need be, we can remove the window, right?" Nick almost approvingly pulled the corners of his mouth when he heard his niece's idea. Katherine blinked a few times. "That's not even a bad idea. As gruesome as the whole thing is, the effort, the preparation, and the need not to be disturbed in the process were great. And in a place where you can be disturbed at any time." "Maybe the perpetrators knew they wouldn't be disturbed?" Elizabeth interjected.Nikki looked closely at her mother. "What if they didn't know?"
Katherine looked at the two women. "Then they were very sure of themselves. Or pretty stupid. Or both. Either way, they were dangerous. Or rather, they still are."