Lisa Warwick had been a pretty girl in life: dark hair, heart-shaped face, curvy body. The final chapter in her life, however, had not been pretty at all. She had been tortured over who knew how long a period of time. She had been missing as many as ten days. Vince had never known of a serial killer who showed his victims a good time before he killed them. And this one was no exception.

The woman’s torso was a macabre artist’s palette of purple, blue, green, and yellow—severe bruising, particularly to the breasts and lower abdomen. The beating had been inflicted over the course of days according to the variations in color.

Her tormentor had used a fine-bladed knife to inflict deep cutting wounds all over her body, from the soles of her feet to her fingers to her breasts. The first finger of the left hand was missing. Her nipples had been excised.

Her killer had probably kept the parts to help him relive the event. He may have even incorporated them into his daily life somehow. The infamous murderer Ed Gein, “The Butcher of Plainfield,” who had operated in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s, had used the skin of his victims to make lampshades, among other things. Or this killer might have ingested the body parts in a ritual intended to make his victim become a part of himself.

Whatever his intent, the torture appeared to have been very systematic. There were no hesitation marks in the knife wounds, and the cuts seemed deliberately placed, though the pattern suggested nothing in particular.

Crosses cut into victims were always popular among psychotic killers and had the obvious religious connotations. Initials were not uncommon. He had once worked a case in Philadelphia in which a nun had been savagely raped and murdered in the sanctuary of a church, the word “SIN” carved into her forehead with a penknife.

On this victim the lines added up to nothing, but some were vertical and others horizontal, and he had the feeling the pattern meant something to the killer.

The coroner went to raise one of the victim’s eyelids.

“They’re glued shut,” Mendez said. “The mouth too.”

“Looks like more than once on the mouth,” Vince said, stepping in for a closer look. “Look at the lines, the pieces of flesh missing here and here. I’d guess he glued her mouth shut and at some point during the torture she tore her lips open to scream.”

“Jesus,” Mendez muttered under his breath.

Vince produced a collapsible Polaroid camera from his coat pocket under his surgical gown and snapped a couple of pictures of the lips and of the cuts on the body.