Wildeve dug her nails into her palms. Tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her lip. She had arrived too late to hear the tearing sound of steel cutters through bone. For that, she would always be grateful.

Experience had taught her that the organs were taken from the body in three distinct blocks. The incision at the base of the throat confirmed the windpipe and tongue had already been removed, Hudson and her technician working from inside the chest to preserve the face for the relatives’ sake. They were currently cutting free the liver, stomach and pancreas.

Wildeve swallowed twice, trying to ignore the lightness in her head. She wanted to shake Hudson, to implore her to reveal the secrets of this murder, but the pathologist rarely conversed while she was working, preferring to confer her attention on the dead. Often, she left this kind of preparation to her assistant, but it seemed she had come in early to work this case.

As a detective and a wife, Wildeve appreciated the gesture.

Next to the body was a deep plastic container container with two handles, the kind her mother had filled with leaves and garden waste. It was lined with a black bin bag. Wildeve glimpsed the sheen of bodily parts. The first block of organs—heart, lungs, throat, tongue and aorta—were already inside, awaiting evaluation.

When Hudson had removed the kidneys, bowels and bladder, and all that was left was a raw cavity, the mortuary technician dipped a ladle into the abdomen and decanted the excess blood into the shallow trench that edged the dissection table. It made a wet sound as it trickled into the sump.

The pathologist, who had a reputation for showing less emotion than the bodies in her morgue, finally broke open the silence.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?”

Wildeve found she could not speak at all, but Hudson read the answer in her eyes.

“All righty, then. Let’s crack on for now.”

At the bench, the technician weighed the organs, and Hudson began to work through each block in turn. She used a scalpel to check for fluid in the lungs, assessed the size of the heart and looked for vessels blocked by fatty deposits. She lingered here, a frown on her face.

Her voice was low and even as she recorded her findings into a small voice recorder.

“One atherosclerotic lesion in the thoracic aorta. Signs of pulmonary edema, possible cause of cardiac failure.”

Wildeve registered the words, but she could not seem to retain them. All she could think about was how it must feel to be a killer, a thief of life, and the sheer waste of it all.

If grief created wide empty spaces, was committing murder a way of filling those gaps?

Hudson murmured into the machine, deleting all emotion and replacing it with the language of science. The minutes ticked on. Wildeve was conscious of Sheridan’s eyes upon her. The soft, sucking sounds of the mortuary technician at work. The detective had been too distracted to wear plastic shoe covers, and when she looked down, she noticed the pale suede of her desert boots had a tidemark of bodily fluids.