“So she wasn’t strangled.”

“Right.” Gently, he sets his hand beneath her chin and shifts her head to the left. Her lips part, and I notice two of her front teeth are broken to the gum line. He turns her head to the right and the wound on her throat gapes like a bloody mouth.

“Throat was cut,” the doc says.

“Any idea what kind of weapon made the wound?”

“Something sharp. With no serration. No obvious sign of tearing. Not a slash or it would be longer and more shallow on the edges. Hard to tell in this light.” Gently, he rolls her body to one side.

My eyes skim the corpse. Her left shoulder is covered with bright red abrasions or possibly burns. More of the same appear on her left buttock. Both knees are abraded as well as the tops of her feet. The skin at both ankles is the color of ripe eggplant. The flesh isn’t laid open like her wrists, but her feet had definitely been bound.

My heart drops into my stomach when I notice more blood on her abdomen, just above her navel. Obscured within the dark smear is something I’ve seen before. Something I’ve imagined a thousand times in my nightmares. “What about that?”

“Good God.” The doctor’s voice quivers. “It looks like something carved into her flesh.”

“Hard to make out what it is.” But in that instant I’m certain we both know. Neither of us wants to say it aloud.

The doc leans closer, so that his face is less than a foot from the wound. “Looks like two X’s and three I’s.”

“Or the Roman numeral twenty-three,” I finish.

He looks at me and in his eyes I see the same horror and disbelief I feel clenching my chest. “It’s been sixteen years since I’ve seen anything like it,” he whispers.

Staring at the bloody carving on this young woman’s body, I’m filled with a revulsion so deep I shiver.

After a moment, Doc Coblentz leans back on his heels. Shaking his head, he motions toward the marks on her buttocks, the broken fingernails and teeth. “Someone put her through a lot.”

Outrage and a fear I don’t want to acknowledge sweep through me. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

My heart pounds as he shines the pen light onto her pubis. I see blood on the insides of her thighs and shudder inwardly.

“Looks like it.” He shakes his head. “I’ll know more once I get her to the morgue. Hopefully the son of a bitch left us a DNA sample.”

The fist twisting my gut warns me it isn’t going to be that easy.

Looking down at the body, I wonder what kind of monster could do this to a young woman with so much life ahead. I wonder how many lives will be destroyed by her death. The coffee has gone bitter on my tongue. I’m no longer cold. I’m deeply offended and angered by the brutality of what I see. Worse, I’m afraid.