It’s a mannequin, I thought. It had to be a mannequin. It couldn’t be Dr. Anders. But I knew it was. Yellow nylon ropes bound her to the chair, and her top-heavy upper torso sagged, sending her head forward to hide her face. Stringy hair caked with black hung to further hide her expression, and I thanked God for that. Her legs were missing below both knees, the stumps sticking out like a small child’s feet at the end of a chair. The ends were raw and ugly, swollen with decay. Her arms were gone at the elbows. Old black blood covered her clothes in a fantastic rivulet pattern so thick the original color couldn’t be guessed.

My eyes flicked to Gwen, shocked at her blasé expression. “Don’t touch anything. I’m not done yet, okay?” she muttered as she went back to her photographing. “God bless it. Can’t I have even five minutes before everyone comes traipsing in here?”

“Sorry,” I breathed, surprised I could still talk. Dr. Anders’s slumped body was covered in blood, but there was surprisingly little of it under the chair. I felt light-headed, but I couldn’t look away. Her lower cavity had been opened at her belly button, a perfectly round patch of skin the size of my fist propped open with a silver knife to show a careful dissection of her insides. There were suspicious gaps, and the incision was entirely bloodless, as if washed—or licked—clean. Where the flesh wasn’t covered in blood, it was white, like wax. My gaze went to the pristine walls and floors. The body didn’t match. It had been mutilated elsewhere and moved.

“This one is a real sicko,” Gwen said, camera chattering away. “Look at the window.”

She pointed with her chin, and I turned. It looked like a little cityscape was arranged on the wide shadowed sill. Squatty buildings were set out in straight lines in no apparent order of size. Small lumps of gray putty held them upright like glue. They were arranged around a thick class ring, placed like a monument among the city’s streets. I looked closer, horror tightening my gut. I spun to the limbless corpse and back again.

“Yup,” Gwen was saying as she clicked away. “He put them there on display. The larger parts he tossed into the closet.”

My gaze shot to the tiny closet, then back to the shady windowsill. They weren’t buildings, they were fingers and toes. He had cut her fingers off knuckle by knuckle, arranging them like Tinkertoys. The putty was bits of her insides, the viscera keeping it all together.

I felt hot, then cold. My stomach went light and I thought I might pass out. I held my breath as I realized I was hyper-ventilating. I was willing to bet she’d been alive during it.