Page 28 of Gilded Wicked Mirrors
“Yes.” Quinn’s voice wavered, but she swallowed down her emotion and continued. “There are many possibilities. Maybe we should go down to the docks and ask if anyone saw anything.” Quinn examined the bruises covering thevictim'sbody—nameless victim. You can do this.The bruises seemed to occur both pre-and-postmortem.
“Maybe we should do that when you’re done?” Constance asked.
Giselle glanced at the corpse before placing a hand in front of her mouth and gagging again. “Yeah, that, or we might want to go talk to the leader of the Les Fantômes gang. I could do that now.” Clearly, she wanted an opportunity to leave the morgue. Giselle’s father used to run the gang, so she probably knew who to talk to and how to get answers. But then again, she only lived there for the first ten years of her life before her mother forced her to leave and learn how to be a lady.
“No one should go anywhere in this investigation alone. It’s not safe,” Jevon said cautiously. Calm, practical, and observant. Three traits Quinn adored.
“I agree,” Quinn said.
“Doing things alone is how people end up dead in this city,” Constance said. “What do you think the time of death was?”
Quinn glanced down at the body. It was in a state of full rigor mortis, which took roughly fifteen hours. The state of themaggots found on the body also suggested around fifteen to eighteen hours of decompensation. “I’d say approximately between two and three am.” It was not as precise as she would like, but it’d be more accurate after examining the stomach and intestine contents.
Which meant she needed to open the corpse.
Quinn pinched her eyes shut. Fuck, this hurt, and she was struggling so much to compartmentalize. So utterly unlike herself.Get yourself together. You need to do this for her. Do it for Jane.
Yes. I can do that.
With a scalpel, Quinn made the preliminary incision—the Y-shaped cut that ran from the shoulders to the sternum. For a female, the incision was a bit different. Instead of a straight Y, Quinn cut under and around the breasts and up to the shoulder joint.
Blood should’ve flowed from the incision and drained off the exam table, but the corpse had a complete absence of postmortem lividity and drainage. No blood left to remove. Quinn hypothesized that blood loss was the cause of death. The two slices across the victim’s throat were given postmortem, but the puncture holes in the jugular occurred while the victim was alive.
The holes were five millimeters wide, and Quinn was unsure what object caused them. If she had to guess—which she frowned on doing, accuracy was currency in science—they belonged to either a letter opener or a set of pointed teeth. The implications of the latter were terrifying.
Fangs could mean the wound was inflicted by long-extinct vampires.
Was it possible?
They were the most powerful creatures in the world at one point. What if they hadn’t vanished seven hundred years ago? What if one survived?
Survived to create more.
Survived to feed on and murder people.
Gooseflesh crawled down her arms. It was a horrifying thought.
Cracking her neck and rolling her shoulders, she tried to release the tension in her back before focusing on her task. But it was so fucking hard. Made even harder by the fact that her eyes suddenly learned how to produce tears, which she was forced to hold back, and the entire process of doing so stung and was utter agony.
Focus.
Quinn pinched her lips together and cracked open the ribcage, and gagging sounds were heard from over Quinn’s shoulder. Jevon and Giselle.
With her arms wrist-deep in the chest cavity, Quinn’s sliced at connective tissue. She needed to remove the organs to examine them. With her scalpel, she sliced along the spinal cord, the bladder, and then the rectum. This separated the remaining organs so that she could take them out all at once before placing them on a table.
Without having a diener—assistant—Quinn needed to close the corpse herself quickly. The stitches were rushed and far less precise than she would’ve wanted, but she didn’t have the time—a fact that scratched at the back of her perfectionistic brain.
“Do you know how many ways a vampire can kill a person?” Giselle asked, her nose still deep in her book.
“Why are you so random?” Constance let out a belabored sigh and picked at her nails.
Giselle shrugged, not looking up from her book. “Just so we are clear, I am still heartbroken, and I have no idea what to do, so I am trying to deal with my grief through facts. So please indulge me.”
“You’re so weird,” Constance said.
“And clearly, you’re heartless.”
Quinn cleared her throat, trying to break up an argument that was about to start. “There are hundreds of ways tokill a human. So I would gather it is a couple more than that,” Quinn said as she examined the stomach.
