Seth leaned over the body, distracted by the colored plastic in the corpse’s ear. A hearing aid? The color was awfully bright… and the shape was wrong. He reached out with the end of his ballpoint pen to carefully move some of the blood-stained hair out of the way. And froze.

His pen matched the color of the plastic in the man’s ear.

“Is that—”

“Yes, I think that was a pen.” Callahan bent beside Seth. “I was looking at that. Looks like he jammed a pen in his ear and then stomped on it to drive it in farther.”

“Holy crap.” Seth was speechless.

His ears suddenly ached.

“Someone was angry,” he muttered.

Callahan raised a brow at him. “No kidding. This killer would be a profiler’s dream. They’d be itching to dissect his brain.”

“It’s so different from the girls,” Seth commented. “That scene was peaceful, almost otherworldly. This is simply brutal. I’d have a hard time believing they were committed by the same person.”

“It might simply be someone with two distinct killing motives. Two different reasons and rationales,” said Callahan. “I’m not disregarding any theories.”

This was a hard, stark scene out of a gore-fest film. The girls in Forest Park belonged in an ethereal fantasy movie, misty and soft.

“This isn’t the result of a botched robbery,” said Callahan grimly. “Lorenzo Cavallo was murdered deliberately and with a lot of anger. Whether or not it’s tied to our girls remains to be seen. But considering he offered insight into the old crime yesterday, I have to consider that someone wasn’t happy that he’d volunteered information.” He pointed at the pen fragments in the old man’s ear. “That’s punishment.”

“Symbolic, maybe?” Lusco mused.

“Probably not,” answered Callahan. “I think it would have been in his mouth if symbolic. As if to shut him up for speaking out. Still, I want that pen when you’re done with it, doctor.”

“Not a problem,” stated Seth. He’d removed odd objects from corpses before. Lightbulbs, kitchen gadgets, and workbench tools. But the crushed pen in the ear was the first of its kind. He stood and heard his right knee pop. As usual. He pulled off his vinyl gloves and set them on the body to keep any evidence with the corpse.

He’d be seeing the man again in a more intimate setting.

Victoria was in her office, typing her notes about the second skeleton, when her email popped up. Noticing it was from Detective Lusco, she immediately opened it and found herself face-to-face with an image of a young woman from another generation. Excitement bubbled inside of her. Did they have a lead on one of the old remains?

She slowly read the email, fighting the urge to rush through it. Italian heritage, age twenty. A brother had reported his sister missing yesterday morning. Why had he waited so long? She continued to read Lusco’s notes. The brother had consented to a DNA comparison. She scrolled back to the photo and stared at the familiar crooked smile.

She smiled and sent a text to Lacey to meet in her office.

Victoria clicked on her file of lab photos from the three women, and scrolled until she found the teeth views. She studied the upper front teeth carefully in each photo, stopped at the teeth photo of the third skull, and enlarged the shot on her screen.

“Hey, whatcha got?” Lacey breezed in through the open door, a light of curiosity in her eyes. She knew Victoria wouldn’t have messaged if she didn’t have something good to see.

Victoria arranged the police photo side by side with the photo Lacey had taken of the teeth yesterday, and pushed back from her screen with a flourish. “What do you think?”

The blonde dentist leaned over, resting her hands on the desk as she studied Victoria’s screen. Victoria waited impatiently and watched Lacey’s eyes flick back and forth between the two photos. Lacey’s smile started on one side of her mouth and spread rapidly to the other. “Oh, nice! Where’d you get this old head shot?”

“Lusco and Callahan had someone bring it in yesterday, wondering if one of the women from the old scene could be his sister. He gave a DNA sample, too.”

“Excellent. Look how the central incisors overlap.” Lacey pulled a dental probe out of her lab coat pocket and held it up to the lovely woman’s photo, eyed the angle, and then moved it to the lab’s image of the teeth. “The angle and amount of overlap are identical. I’ll get a tooth to the lab so they can grind it and extract the DNA for comparison. But I think we’ve got a great start to figuring out if this is his sister.” She grinned at Victoria, who couldn’t help returning the infectious smile. “I’d hoped to identify this skull. When I was charting the teeth, I knew this overlap would be recognizable to the right person. I wish everyone had as easily identifiable teeth in photos.”

Victoria nodded. To her, most people’s teeth always looked about the same. But this woman’s were rather distinctive.

“What’s her name?” Lacey asked.

Victoria felt a small stab of guilt. She’d breezed right over the name, moving on to the photo in the email. She clicked back to Lusco’s letter. “Lucia Cavallo. She was Italian.”

“Pretty.” Lacey tilted her head as she studied the screen.

Victoria looked at Lucia’s eyes, startlingly similar to her own brown, and wondered what had happened in the girl’s life that’d brought her to a group death in the quiet woods. Had she chosen the death? Or had she been murdered?