Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(39)

He read through them. “Blood alcohol levels normal? In every case? I missed that.” Ethan looked at her. “Okay, so none of them were drinking. They said they were high.”

“But on what?” Dana asked. “There’s just this.” She pointed to a comment, then read it aloud. “‘Evidence of synthetic compound simulating effects of standard 5-HT2A receptor agonists.’” She shook her head. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” said Ethan. “Maybe we can figure out a way to ask Two-Suit.”

She agreed and began to close the big folder but stopped, took a breath, and then went back and pulled Maisie’s autopsy photo out again and studied it. Maisie had been badly mangled and the wounds were horrific, but Dana forced herself to look closely at them. Clipped to the last photo was a photocopy of a page that had been used to take notes. It had an outline of a generic human female body, with arms out to the sides. There were dozens of X’s marked on it and a list of corresponding injuries, all in medical shorthand that Dana could not interpret. Remarks like subdural hematoma and comminuted fractures of the occipital bone are observed, and the mucosa of the epiglottis, glottis, piriform sinuses, trachea, and major bronchi are anatomic. Picking through that to make sense of it would require a medical dictionary, and despite all the books on the shelves, there wasn’t one to be found.

But then something struck Dana, and she stopped and looked more closely at the diagram, then shuffled through and pulled out the autopsy photos.

“Do you have a magnifying glass?” she asked quickly.

“Sure, why?”

“I want to check something.”

Ethan got up and fetched a big magnifier from the desk, and she took it and used it to look at each separate wound. The damage was so extensive that it was difficult to find what she was looking for, but it was there.

It was all there.

The damage to Maisie’s wrists, the punctures in the tops of her feet, the smaller cuts along her hairline, and the deeper cut in her side. Dana’s mouth went suddenly dry, and once more it was hard to breathe.

“No…,” she murmured.

“What?” asked Ethan.

“Oh my God,” said Dana. “Quick, get me something to draw on.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Do it,” she snapped.

He hurried over to the desk again and brought back a yellow legal pad and mechanical pencil. Dana took them without a word, tore off a sheet, placed it over the diagram, and traced the same female outline. Then she removed the copied sheet, studied it, and carefully drew only those injuries she had seen in both her dream and waking vision. When she was done, Dana showed it to Ethan.

“Okay,” he said. “So?”

“I think these are the injuries that really killed her,” said Dana, and went over her memories again.

“How do you know that?”

“When I saw Maisie in the locker room, all I could see was what was being done to her.” Dana went over the locker room incident again and then explained about the dark angel in her dream on Sunday night, the night Maisie was murdered.

“Wait, you actually saw this … this … angel … cut and stab her?” said Ethan, appalled. “That’s gross.”

“No, it wasn’t exactly like that. The dream is hazy. In the locker room I saw her with stigmata. Seeing this diagram, I think—no, I’m sure—that Maisie was killed using the wounds of Christ and that the car accident was set up to hide it.”

“Why? By who?”

“How would I know?”

Ethan gave her a guarded look. “Um … do you think an actual angel…?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped, then immediately said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

“No, it’s fine. I just don’t know how to have this conversation.”

Dana snorted. “No kidding.”

He smiled at her. “How are you not losing it after all that?”

“Who says I’m not?”

Ethan chose not to reply to that. Instead he cleared his throat and said, “How sure are you about her wounds? The, um, wounds of Jesus, I mean?”

Dana took her tracing of the body diagram and drew a series of straight lines and right angles as if the victim’s body were in front of a big wooden cross. She scribbled in a thorny crown and drew a crude spear with the blade stabbing deep. Ethan looked appalled, but then he began to nod.

“I read about mass murderers and cults and all that stuff all the time,” Ethan said. “There are a lot of total nut jobs out there who think God is telling them to kill people.”

“I know.” Dana absently touched her crucifix. “I think whoever did this was trying to make a statement.”

“What on earth kind of statement could any of that make?”

Instead of answering, Dana spent the next few minutes tracing the outlines of the other victims and penciling in the location of each wound. For the Asian boy, Jeffrey Watanabe, his car had been so badly torn up that he had actually been decapitated. Jennifer Hoffer had been impaled on the broken steering column of her car. Connie Lucas had been thrown through her car windshield. And there were scores of other injuries, too, which complicated everything. Ethan watched with great interest.