Chapter 12: The Hungarian Recruits
The locker room smelled of jasmine and old metal. Three days had passed since the Black Sea flight and the smell had not faded, a stubborn sweetness hanging under the vents like the place itself refused to forget who had stood in front of the mirror last.
Skyler stood in front of that mirror now, alone, adjusting a single strand of hair. Her uniform was Miranda's cut, navy and severe, tailored at the waist. She had taken the blazer from the dead woman's locker and had the shoulders let out by a tailor in the city who asked no questions. The gold wings on her lapel were Miranda's too. She had polished them clean.
Her phone buzzed on the bench behind her. Two texts, both from the same number, sent an hour apart.
The first: We need to talk to you before we go.
The second: Please.
Skyler checked the time. Boarding was in forty minutes. She had already filed the amended crew roster with Volkov's office, already rewritten the flight log for the client's request, already moved Miranda's name into a closed file marked medical leave, pending. That part had taken a single email and a signature she had practiced for an evening until the loops matched. Nobody had questioned it. Nobody ever questioned anything when the money kept moving.
She had also cataloged the new pair last night, at the hangar, under the bright lamp Miranda used to use. She had done it alone, with the digital camera on the tripod, and she had said the same things Miranda would have said. Chin up. Spread wider. Look at the lens like it's the client. The girls had obeyed her the way she used to obey.
The door opened.
Zsofia came in first, tall and slow, the way models walk when nobody is paying them. She was twenty-three and she knew exactly what her body was worth, which made the slight tremor in her hands more interesting.
She was five foot nine in bare feet. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown, cut blunt at the jaw, glossy enough to catch the exit sign and hold it. It fell across one eye and she pushed it back with two fingers, a nervous tic she had not managed to kill. Her face was all planes and edges. Sharp cheekbones, a thin straight nose, a mouth that looked carved rather than grown, the upper lip a shade fuller than the lower. Blue-grey eyes under brows she drew in darker every morning.
Her body was the body of a dancer who had stopped dancing but kept the discipline. Lean through the shoulders, narrow through the waist, all long muscle and small, high breasts that sat without a bra under her thin cashmere sweater. The sweater was oatmeal, soft, a little too large, its neckline slipping off one shoulder to show the strap of nothing underneath. She wore it with low-slung jeans worn white at the knees and a delicate gold chain at her throat with a tiny star pendant. No ring. The nails were short and clean.
The mole was the detail Skyler had noticed first, the night before, tucked low on Zsofia's left hip just above the bone. It had shown when the girl had lain on the bed in the studio, and Skyler had zoomed in on it without thinking, because it was the kind of small imperfection that made a man believe he was seeing something private.
Boglarka came in behind her and closed the door with her back, both hands behind her, as if she wanted to hold it shut. She was twenty-four and shorter, five foot six, and she carried her body differently, all of it forward, chest and hips leading her into a room before the rest of her arrived.
Her hair was honey-blonde, dyed, long, and it curled at the ends the way it had been curled in a salon that morning. Green eyes, wide and wet before she had even said a word. Her lips were full and soft and there was a small dark beauty mark just above the left corner of her mouth, a mark she had once told Skyler she had considered having removed and now never would. Her face was rounder than Zsofia's, softer, with a dimple that appeared when she smiled and which she was not smiling with now.
She wore a black silk slip dress that moved like water over every part of her, ending high on the thigh, and over it an oversized black leather jacket that swallowed her shoulders. Under the silk there was nothing at all, and the fabric showed the weight of her breasts and the shape of her nipples if she moved too fast. High heels, straps thin as wire, a silver ankle chain. On her right wrist a thin leather band with a tiny charm, a horse, which she never took off.
Her body was the other kind of beautiful. Full breasts, heavy and low and soft, a waist that curved in hard and then out again into hips that made men turn their heads in the street without knowing why. Her thighs touched all the way down. She had a softness to her belly that she hated and that clients paid extra for, the kind of softness that made a man want to put his hands on it and press.
Skyler watched them in the mirror for a moment before she turned around. She had learned to do that from Viktor. Let them see the back of you first. Let them wait. She remembered testing them both during their portfolio shoot, her fingers exploring their wet pussies as the camera clicked, making Zsofia eat her out while Boglarka moaned against her clit, their bodies slick with sweat and desire.
"You wanted to talk," she said.
Zsofia spoke first. She always did. "We heard about the flight. The one to Bucharest."
"Craiova," Skyler said. "The client is going to Craiova."
Boglarka flinched at the name and looked at the floor.
Zsofia swallowed and stepped forward, hands clasped in front of her, thumbs working against each other. "Skyler. Please. We know who he is. We've heard the stories from the other girls. He broke Petra's wrist on the last trip. He put Anais in the hospital. She still hasn't come back to work."
"That's a rumor," Skyler said.
"It isn't."
"Then it's an old one, and Petra is a difficult girl."
"She wasn't difficult," Boglarka said, quiet, from the door. Her voice was lower than you expected from that face, a little rasped, Hungarian-accented and warm. "She screamed the whole flight back. We heard her through the wall of the crew bunk."
Skyler picked her phone off the bench and slid it into her skirt pocket. She did not look at either of them while she did it. The trick, she had learned, was to give them nothing to grip. Miranda had done the opposite. Miranda had shouted, and threatened, and grabbed, and then Miranda had been put in a trash compartment in the rear galley and the company had emailed her family about a medical leave.
"You signed contracts," Skyler said. "Both of you. Twenty-four months. Advance paid. Housing paid. Training paid. Visa, travel, wardrobe, dental." She looked up. "Do you want me to read the clause out loud, or do you know it?"
Zsofia's jaw tightened. The tremor in her hands was worse now, and she pressed her palms flat against her own thighs to stop it, which only made the whole line of her arms look rigid and strange.
"We're not saying we won't work," she said. "We're saying not him. Not this one. Put us on anything else. Any client. Any route. We'll do double shifts, we'll do the Tokyo run, we'll do the charter with the two brothers from Dubai, you know what they wanted last time and we'll do it, we'll do all of it, just not him."
"That's not how it works."
"It could be how it works. You're the one who decides now."
Skyler let that sit. It was true. That was the part she had not fully gotten used to yet, though she was getting used to it fast. Three days ago she had been a girl who poured champagne with shaking hands while a call-girl was passed around a sofa. Now she was the one who decided who flew and who stayed on the ground, and who got the envelope and who got the room in the back of the hangar with the broken heater.
Boglarka pushed off the door and walked toward her, and the heels clicked on the concrete, and the silk moved over her breasts in a way that made the whole room feel warmer. She stopped close, closer than was professional, and put one hand on Skyler's forearm. Her fingers were cold. There was a faint smell of vanilla and cigarettes coming off her, and under it the cheap green-tea perfume she always wore to save money on the good stuff.
"Skyler," she said. Her eyes were wet and she was not trying to hide it. "You were one of us two weeks ago. I sat next to you at the Christmas dinner. You told me about your mother in Iowa. You told me you were scared."
"I was scared," Skyler said.
"So help us. You know what he does."
"I know what he pays."
Zsofia made a small sound, something between a laugh and a sob. "Is that all?"
Skyler looked at her. She remembered standing in a corridor with Marcus's hand on the back of her head while Miranda filmed. She remembered the number under the video climbing while she sat in her own shower with the water cold, watching herself from a thousand miles away. She remembered lying awake and hearing the numbers click over in her head like a meter running. She remembered Viktor's voice on the dead woman's behalf. To the trash.
She pulled her arm gently out from under Boglarka's fingers and walked to the mirror. She fixed the strand of hair again, though it did not need fixing, and she watched both of them in the glass. Zsofia with her hands flat on her thighs, jaw clenched. Boglarka standing with her hands loose now, defeated, the silk dress catching the cold green light and glowing all the way down her body.
The catalog had both of them photographed last night. Skyler had looked at the files before she came in. Boglarka's pictures had gotten eleven pre-requests from clients in the first four hours, more than Zsofia's, more than Skyler's own had in her first week. Her profile had a note beside it in Miranda's old shorthand: full, sub, no marks visible, good for repeat. Zsofia's said: dancer, long legs, distance, does not like the mouth. Somebody had added a small asterisk, and the asterisk meant the girl was a liar about what she did not like.
"You're not excused," Skyler said.
Silence for a beat.
"You owe eleven thousand euros each on the advance," she said. "Plus the housing. Plus the dentistry. If you walk off the roster, the company calls the note, and the company has lawyers here and in Budapest, and the company has friends." She turned around. "You can go home tonight and be free and be sued, or you can get on the plane and be paid, like you agreed, like I agreed, like every girl here agreed. Those are the two doors. That's all that's behind them."
Zsofia's eyes filled. She did not cry. She just stood there and let the tears sit in them, and the exit sign made them shine, and she looked exactly like the picture from last night, the one with her on all fours, arching, looking over her own shoulder at the camera with that same wet glare.
"Skyler," she said, very quietly. "Please."
Skyler picked up the garment bag from the bench. It was heavy. Inside were two fresh uniforms, pressed, wrapped in plastic, with the girls' names on the tags in Miranda's handwriting. She had found them already made in the wardrobe two days ago. Miranda had ordered them before she died. That was the part Skyler kept turning over, in the quiet moments. Miranda had known exactly what was coming and had made sure the uniforms were ready.
She held the bag out.
"You'll want to change," she said. "The client's driver gets here in thirty-five minutes. He doesn't like to wait, and he doesn't like girls in street clothes."
Boglarka took the bag. Her hands were shaking too now. She held it against her chest like a shield or a baby, and the plastic crackled against the leather jacket.
"What do we call him?" she asked. "The client."
"Sir," Skyler said. "You call him sir, and you don't ask his name, and you don't eat in front of him, and you don't speak unless he speaks to you. There's food in the forward galley. Eat before." She paused. "And whatever he tells you to do, you do it before he finishes saying it. He hates hesitation more than anything else. More than crying. He can forgive crying."
Zsofia's mouth opened like she was going to ask how Skyler knew that. She closed it again.
The door to the hangar clanged somewhere beyond the wall. A voice, one of the ground crew, calling out a tail number.
Skyler straightened the wings on her lapel and walked past the two of them to the door. She stopped with her hand on the handle and looked back. Both girls stood in the middle of the room, under the green glow, half in shadow, holding the bag between them.
"You're both beautiful," Skyler said, and it was true, and she meant it the way a farmer means it about good stock. "That's your whole advantage. That's all you have to trade, and it's worth more than you think, and it stops being worth anything sooner than you'll believe. So use it now. Tonight. Every night this month. That's the only advice I have."
She opened the door.
The hangar light flooded in, white and flat, and briefly both girls looked like something out of the catalog, painted and posed and waiting for a client's thumbs to scroll past.
On the tarmac the jet waited under a grey sky. The driver's black car was already at the foot of the stairs, engine idling, a man in a suit holding the rear door open.
Skyler took out her phone as she walked. She opened the camera roll and pulled up the files from last night's shoot, and looked at Zsofia's mole one more time, and Boglarka's mouth, and she typed two notes into the client brief with her thumb. Then she put the phone away and went to meet the car.
She met the car and let the man in the suit take her garment bag.
Behind her, up the metal stairs, Zsofia climbed first. The uniform pulled tight over her ass on every step and Skyler watched it go, filing the shape the way she filed tail numbers. Boglarka followed with one hand on the rail and didn't look back.
Neither of them did.
Skyler climbed the stairs behind the driver and stood in the doorway of the cabin while the two fresh uniforms went soft and human in the leather seats. Zsofia faced the window. Boglarka kept her hands folded in her lap like a girl in church. The client wasn't on board yet. He boarded nine minutes later with three men and no luggage, and he did not look at the girls when he walked past them either. Skyler closed the door and stepped back onto the stairs and the ground crew pulled them away.
The jet rolled out past the hangar. Skyler watched the tail number until it was a grey smudge and then a grey nothing. Then she walked back inside to the changing room, where the jasmine still hung in the vents, and she sat down on the bench in the silence and looked at her own reflection for a while without any particular expression on her face.
The weeks after that went by the way weeks go by when the money is good and the work is routine.
She learned the office side of it fast. The pilots' rotation, the fuel margins, the customs waivers, the standing orders at the hangars in Nice and Dubai and Teterboro. She learned which clients paid upfront and which needed chasing, and which of them were allowed to leave marks on a girl and which were not, and which of them had signed the addendum about the cabin door. She kept the catalog current. She booked the shoots, hired the photographer when the old one got expensive, and did the files herself when the old one quit. She approved wardrobe. She took two new girls in September and one in October, and she evaluated each of them the way she had been evaluated, on a bed under a lamp, with a camera on a tripod and a voice telling them to spread wider.
She flew now and then, when a client asked for her by name from the old files. She took the envelopes. She came home, showered, posted what needed posting. The subscriber count behind the mirror had gone past six figures. She had a manager for it in Los Angeles, a woman she had never met, who sent her a wire on the first of every month and a list of requests that Skyler mostly ignored.
She did not hear about the girls.
Not a call. Not a message. Not a casualty report, not a claim, not a lawyer's letter about a missed shift. Their names dropped off the roster the way names do, and the roster filled back up, and the Craiova run went into the flight log as completed with a clean signature in the compliance column that she had, by then, stopped having to practice.
She thought about them less as the weeks went on. That was the honest accounting. Maybe twice in November, both times late, both times when she couldn't sleep. Then hardly at all.
The email came on the ninth of December at twenty past four in the morning.
The address was a string of numbers at a Bulgarian domain she didn't recognize, no name in the sender field, no subject line. There were three attachments in a stack, labeled in Cyrillic with a numeral after each one. Skyler sat up in the dark of her apartment with the phone propped on her knee and read them the way she read everything now, without any expression at all.
The first was a translation of a regional newspaper article. Somebody had typed it out in a laborious, uneven English, mistakes kept in, and there was a scan of the printed page laid under the text at the bottom.
BODIES OF TWO FOREIGN WOMEN FOUND NEAR DANUBE BRIDGE, FOREIGNERS, POLICE SAY NO SUSPECTS
By the staff of the newspaper, Ruse edition, 4 December
Two bodies of young women were discovered by a fisherman early Monday on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube, approximately seven kilometers east of the bridge, the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Interior said in a statement. The bodies were found in a shallow gravel depression among the willows, partially covered with plastic sheeting and branches, and were in an advanced state of decomposition, according to the statement.
According to the police, the deceased are likely foreign nationals. No identification documents were found on the bodies or near the scene. The women are described as being of European appearance, aged between twenty and twenty-five years. Both were unclothed. The statement says that the condition of the bodies does not permit a visual identification.
Sources close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the scene in terms which this newspaper will not print in full. One source said that both women had been severely beaten before death and that the injuries were, in the source's words, "of a kind that suggests a long period rather than a moment." A second source confirmed that the two women had been sexually assaulted, and said that at least one of the assaults took place in the hours immediately before death. Forensic experts have not yet completed their work, the prosecution said.
The regional prosecutor's office confirmed that a preliminary investigation has been opened under Article 116 of the Penal Code, aggravated murder, and that Interpol has been notified through the national bureau in Sofia. The prosecution declined to answer questions about possible suspects. A spokesman said only that there is no evidence at present to connect the deaths to any person known to the police.
Residents of the village nearest the site told this newspaper that vehicles had been heard on the levee road in the nights before the discovery, that they had heard nothing further, and that such traffic is common on that road and they had not thought anything of it.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced. Anyone with information is asked to contact the regional directorate.
Skyler read it twice. The fisherman, the willows, the plastic. She looked at the scan under the text and found the date and the masthead and went no further with it. Her thumb hovered over the second attachment and she poured a glass of water first and drank half of it.
The second document was the forensic report. It ran eleven pages. The translation had a stiff, institutional flatness to it, the kind of English a service produces when it runs everything through a legal glossary, and the flatness made the content worse, not better. She read it standing up.
REGIONAL FORENSIC MEDICAL SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY
PROTOCOL OF MEDICOLEGAL EXAMINATION
CASE 4412-BG/2023, SECOND BODY, FEMALE, ESTIMATED AGE 23-25
EXAMINING PHYSICIAN: signed, stamp affixed
DATE OF EXAMINATION: 3 December
External examination. The body is that of a female of medium build, length 173 centimeters, weight approximately 58 kilograms. Decomposition is moderate and uniform. The face is not identifiable due to postmortem trauma and decomposition. The hair is dark brown, dyed at the roots, cut to jaw length.
The following injuries were identified on the external surface. The posterior surface of the torso carries a series of approximately forty distinct contusions in a regular linear pattern on the upper back and the backs of both thighs, consistent in spacing with a single flexible rod of between thirty and forty centimeters, applied repeatedly and with force. Several of these are confluent. The pattern indicates that the injuries were inflicted while the subject was alive or immediately perimortem; extravasated blood is present in the subcutaneous tissue of the majority.
Both shoulders show oval contusions consistent with forceful grasping. The right acromioclavicular joint is dislocated. The right humerus shows a closed oblique fracture at the mid-shaft. Both wrists show circumferential abrasions with a herringbone pattern consistent with a braided or toothed ligature applied under tension and removed after death. The skin of the left wrist is abraded through the dermis over a distance of nine centimeters.
The nails of both hands are intact. Fragments of skin and of foreign textile were recovered from beneath the nails of the right hand and preserved for laboratory examination.
Examination of the ano-genital region. The vulva and the perineal tissue show extensive antemortem laceration. There is a full-thickness tear of the posterior fourchette extending 2.5 centimeters into the perineal body. Additional longitudinal lacerations are present in the vaginal wall, three in number, the longest nine centimeters, extending into the right vaginal fornix. There is no evidence of pre-existing infection or disease. The hymen presents an old, healed rupture. There is fresh hemorrhage into the surrounding tissue, indicating that these injuries were inflicted while the heart was still beating.
The anus is dilated and patulous. There is a deep fissure at the posterior midline and a partial tear of the external anal sphincter. Hemorrhage into the sphincter and the surrounding tissue indicates that this injury was also antemortem. Swabs were taken from the vagina, the cervix, the anus, and the rectum. The laboratory report is pending; preliminary microscopy confirms the presence in the rectal swabs of spermatozoa in a quantity consistent with multiple donors. Seminal fluid was additionally recovered from the skin of the abdomen and the lower back.
Neck. The hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage are both fractured. There is petechial hemorrhage in the conjunctivae and the soft tissue of the neck, and the pattern of the injury to the soft tissue is consistent with sustained manual compression by a hand or hands of considerable size. Death is attributed to asphyxia by manual strangulation, with a duration of compression sufficient to be survivable for at least forty seconds to one minute before loss of consciousness. The blows to the head recorded below are secondary and postmortem in part.
Head. There is a depressed fracture of the right parietal bone measuring approximately four by six centimeters, with comminuted fragmentation at the center. Hemorrhage at the fracture margin is minimal, and the examining physician is of the opinion that the majority of this trauma was inflicted after the death of the subject, though a minority of the hemorrhage suggests that the very first impact may have been delivered with the heart still active.
Summary. The subject, a female of approximately twenty-four years, died of asphyxia due to manual strangulation. Prior to death she sustained multiple blunt and patterned blunt injuries consistent with beating, was restrained at both wrists, and was subjected to repeated and violent vaginal and anal penetration, with multiple donors of seminal material present. Postmortem injuries to the head indicate that the body was struck after death. Estimated interval between death and discovery is between four and seven days. Cause of death: manual strangulation. Manner of death: homicide.
The document did not end there. It ran on, the way institutional documents do, into a second heading with a different case number and the same date.
REGIONAL FORENSIC MEDICAL SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY
PROTOCOL OF MEDICOLEGAL EXAMINATION
CASE 4412-BG/2023-A, FIRST BODY, FEMALE, ESTIMATED AGE 20-23
EXAMINING PHYSICIAN: signed, stamp affixed
DATE OF EXAMINATION: 3 December
External examination. The body is that of a female of slender build, length 175 centimeters, estimated weight 55 kilograms. Decomposition is advanced over the exposed surfaces of the face, the neck and both hands, and moderate over the trunk and limbs. The hair is long, dark brown, wet with silt and matted with dried blood at the crown and the left temple. The musculature of the thighs, the buttocks and the abdominal wall is well developed and symmetrical, of a type consistent with sustained athletic training. A pigmented nevus, 4 millimeters in diameter, is situated on the left cheek approximately 2 centimeters lateral to the ala of the nose. There are no tattoos. There is a single healed surgical scar, 3 centimeters, in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen.
That was the mole. Skyler read the sentence twice. Four millimeters, left cheek, two centimeters from the nose. She had cropped that mole out of two of the photographs and had left it in on purpose in a third, because a client had asked for it by name in a message at two in the morning, and she remembered typing the reply herself from Miranda's account.
She kept reading. She did not sit down.
Head and neck. There are multiple incised wounds of the face, four in number, all of them postmortem. There is a 12 centimeter incision running from the left temple across the cheek to the angle of the mandible. There is a second incision of similar length crossing it at a right angle. Both ears have been separated from the skull at the level of the cartilaginous attachment and neither has been recovered at the scene. The nose is partially transected at the root. The margins of all these wounds are pale and dry and show no hemorrhage whatsoever, and the examining physician is of the opinion that the face was cut after the death of the subject and, from the absence of any vital reaction, at a substantial interval after it, when the blood had already settled and the tissues had begun to lose their elasticity.
The scalp bears a contused laceration of 5 centimeters in the left parietal region. Hemorrhage into the surrounding soft tissue is present and abundant. Beneath it, after reflection of the scalp, there is a linear fracture of the left parietal bone running anteriorly toward the coronal suture. The hemorrhage at the fracture margin is established and extends into the epidural space. This injury was inflicted during life.
Both hands show injuries. The third and fourth metacarpals of the right hand are fractured at the neck, with hemorrhage into the surrounding tissue consistent with the subject having struck a hard surface or an assailant with a closed fist. The nail of the right index finger is avulsed and the nail bed is torn, and the nail itself was recovered from the gravel beneath the body. Three of the nails of the left hand are broken at the free edge. Fragments of skin and of a dark woven textile were recovered from beneath the nails of both hands, in a quantity greater than in the case of the second body, and have been preserved for laboratory examination.
Neck. The strap muscles of the neck are intact. The hyoid bone and the laryngeal cartilages are intact. There is no petechial hemorrhage in the conjunctivae. The trachea and the bronchi contain a moderate quantity of blood, both liquid and clotted, extending into the secondary bronchi of both lungs. This blood shows no evidence of having been aspirated with air during life.
Trunk and abdomen. The body lies with the anterior abdominal wall opened by a continuous incision which begins at the pubic symphysis and extends superiorly to a point 4 centimeters inferior to the xiphoid process. The incision is irregular and was made in more than one pass, and the margins of the first pass are clean while the margins of the second are jagged and show the marks of a sawing motion. Reflection of the abdominal wall is incomplete on the right side, where the tissue has been torn rather than cut.
The peritoneal cavity is open and the greater omentum has been divided and drawn upward over the left costal margin. The loops of the small intestine have been withdrawn from the cavity and are draped over the left thigh, extending from the suprapubic region to the mid-thigh, where the tissue is bound to the skin by dried blood. The small intestine has been divided transversely in two places. The stomach and the colon have been displaced but remain within the cavity. The peritoneal surfaces show no hemorrhage and no inflammatory reaction.
The following organs are absent from the body and were not recovered at the scene: the uterus, both ovaries, both fallopian tubes, and the left kidney. The right kidney is present and intact. The liver shows a sharpened defect along the inferior margin of the right lobe measuring approximately 6 by 3 centimeters, with clean margins and no hemorrhage. The spleen is intact. The aorta and the inferior vena cava are intact above the level of the renal vessels.
The margins of the abdominal incision show no vital reaction along any part of their length. There is no hemorrhage into the subcutaneous tissue, into the rectus sheath or into the peritoneum. The evisceration was therefore carried out after the death of the subject. The examining physician notes, in addition, that the disposition of the bowel and the degree to which the dried blood has bound the tissue to the thigh indicate that a period of some hours elapsed between the opening of the cavity and the placement of the body in its final position.
Ano-genital examination. The external genitalia show extensive injury. There is a full-thickness laceration of the posterior fourchette extending 3 centimeters into the perineal body. There are two longitudinal lacerations of the vaginal wall, of 7 and 11 centimeters, the longer of which extends through the right vaginal fornix. Both show hemorrhage into the surrounding tissue and were inflicted during life. There is a deep fissure of the anal margin at the posterior midline and a complete tear of the external anal sphincter, with hemorrhage into the sphincter and the perirectal tissues, also antemortem. The anal canal is dilated to a diameter of approximately 5 centimeters and does not close.
Swabs were taken from the oral cavity, the vagina, the cervix, the anus and the rectum. The laboratory report is pending. Preliminary microscopy confirms spermatozoa in all five sites, in quantities consistent with multiple donors. It is further noted that the vaginal vault contained a large volume of seminal fluid which, on the basis of its position and of the absence of any vital reaction in the adjacent mucosa, was deposited after the death of the subject. Seminal fluid was additionally recovered from the skin of the breasts, the umbilicus, the thighs and the left axilla. A foreign body was recovered from the vagina and preserved: a fragment of a wooden handle, 14 centimeters in length and 3.5 centimeters in diameter, with splintering at both ends.
A second foreign body, described as a metal rod, 22 centimeters in length, was recovered from the rectum and preserved.
Extremities. Both wrists and both ankles show circumferential abrasions with a cross-hatched pattern consistent with a braided ligature applied under tension. There is hemorrhage into the tissue beneath the abrasions at both wrists. On the left ankle the abrasion extends through the dermis and into the subcutaneous fat. There is a healed scar, 5 centimeters, on the inner surface of the right forearm, and a cigarette burn of approximately 1 centimeter, healed, on the same forearm.
The left groin bears a deep incised wound of 8 centimeters running obliquely from the iliac spine toward the labium majus. The femoral artery is severed at a point 4 centimeters below the inguinal ligament. The margins of the wound are clean and the track is continuous, consistent with a single stroke of a blade of considerable length. Hemorrhage into the surrounding tissue is massive and established. A second, shallower incision crosses the first at its inferior end and shows no hemorrhage.
Distinct patterned injuries. The integument of the back, the buttocks and the posterior surfaces of both thighs carries approximately seventy distinct contusions arranged in parallel linear bands, spaced between 2 and 3 centimeters apart, and consistent with a heavy belt applied with a full arm. A number of the uppermost injuries are confluent and show a darker discoloration at the center, consistent with the buckle. Extravasation is present beneath all of the marked injuries while the subject was alive.
There are fourteen burns of approximately 1 centimeter diameter arranged in an irregular cluster over the right breast and the upper abdomen. Each shows a central vesicle and a surrounding rim of erythema, and each shows hemorrhage into the dermis, and they were inflicted during life. Three additional burns of the same size are present on the medial surface of the left thigh, arranged in a line.
There are four sets of bite marks, two on the left breast and two on the right buttock. Each set consists of two opposing arcs of dental impressions. The impressions are deep, the surrounding tissue is ecchymosed, and the marks were made during life. Dental impressions were taken and are attached to this protocol.
Summary. The subject, a female of approximately twenty-one years, died of hemorrhage from the incised wound of the left groin, which severed the femoral artery. The interval between the infliction of that wound and the cessation of circulation is estimated at between two and five minutes. Prior to death the subject was restrained at the wrists and the ankles, struck repeatedly with a closed fist and with a patterned flexible object, burned with a heated implement in seventeen distinct places, bitten in four places, and subjected to repeated and violent vaginal, anal and oral penetration, with multiple donors. The penetrating injuries to the vulva, the vagina and the anus were all inflicted while the heart was beating and were, by the extent of the hemorrhage, inflicted over a prolonged interval before death rather than at a single time. Following the death of the subject, the body was opened from the pubic symphysis to the upper abdomen and the peritoneal cavity was emptied of the small intestine, the uterus, both adnexa and the left kidney, none of which was recovered at the scene. The face of the deceased was mutilated with a blade. Semen was deposited in the vagina after death. The body was moved to its final position several hours after death, or was kept in some other position and then placed there, on the basis of the pattern of lividity and of postmortem abrasions to the shoulders and the heels. Estimated interval between death and discovery is between four and seven days. Cause of death: exsanguination from an incised wound of the left groin. Manner of death: homicide.
There was a third line beneath the summary, set apart from it, marked as an addendum in a different typeface:
Where the subject was found to have struck her assailant, she did so with a closed hand. She hurt him. The laboratory examination of the material recovered from beneath her nails is expected to produce a profile. It is the opinion of the examining physician that the assailant will carry scratches or abrasions on the face or the neck, or on the forearms, of recent origin.
The phone was still warm in her hand. She set it face down on the mattress and looked at her own reflection in the dark window glass, a ghost of a woman in a rumpled t-shirt. The report was still open behind her, waiting. She didn't close it.
Her hand moved without permission.
She was still sitting on the edge of the bed, her knees together, and her fingers found the hem of the t-shirt and pushed it up over her stomach. No underwear. She had stopped wearing it around the apartment three weeks ago, a habit that had started as convenience and curdled into something else. Something like readiness.
The first touch was tentative. Two fingers dragging through the wetness that had gathered there while she read, because she could not pretend it had not been there the whole time. The second body, the twenty-one-year-old with the mole on her cheek, the one who had scratched her attacker through the dermis, who had fought so hard she had broken her own hand, that girl had made Skyler wet. Reading about her femoral artery being opened, reading about the wooden handle, reading about the metal rod, she had gotten wet, and she had felt it happen, and she had done nothing to stop it.
Now she pushed her fingers lower, spreading herself, and the slick sound of it was loud in the quiet room. Her clit was already swollen, hard under her fingertips, and she hissed through her teeth at the first real pressure.
She leaned back on one elbow and worked herself slowly, her hips beginning to roll in a rhythm she had learned in front of a camera with a dozen men watching. But there was no camera now. No audience. Just her and the dark and the twelve-page document still glowing on the mattress.
She thought about Zsofia. The taller one. The athlete. She had seen Zsofia run the stairs at the hangar in a sports bra, had cataloged the muscle of her thighs and the symmetry of her shoulders. Now she knew what those thighs had looked like, splayed in the gravel. What the straps had done to her ankles. What the femoral artery had done when it was cut.
Her fingers found a faster rhythm, the heel of her palm grinding against her clit as she pushed two fingers inside herself, imagining the stretch of that wooden handle, the inventory of what Zsofia had contained before someone opened her up and emptied the cabinets.
"And she hit him," Skyler whispered to the dark room. Her voice was thin, almost surprised. "She hurt him."
The thought lit her up from the inside. Not the pain. Not the death. The fight. A girl who had been beaten, burned, bitten, entered from every angle, and she had still found the strength to close her hand and swing. Skyler's cunt clenched around her fingers and she moaned, a low sound she barely recognized.
She imagined Viktor watching that girl fight. Imagined him being impressed the way he had been impressed with her, that flat dead-eyed recognition. She imagined being there. Being the one who held Zsofia's wrists while he worked. She imagined the mole. She imagined the sound the skin made when the blade went through it.
She came with a shudder that bent her spine, her hips jerking off the mattress, her fingers buried deep inside herself as the orgasm rolled through her in slow, hot waves. It was not like the others. There was no release in it, no loosening. It was a tightening, a focusing, a bright hard point of knowing who she was.
When she opened her eyes, the room had not changed. The phone had not moved. She pulled her fingers out and looked at them, glistening in the light from the door, and brought them to her mouth without thinking. She tasted herself, and the salt of it was like a confirmation.
She wiped her hand on the sheets and lay back in the dark. The ceiling was bare concrete. The windows had no curtains. She thought about the pale watermark of her own amusement in the face of another woman's body, and she felt no shame at all. She felt only a kind of cold gratitude, the way you feel gratitude for a key that finally fits a lock.
She would go to the hangar in the morning. She would open the catalog and she would look at the new faces with the same eyes she had used to read the report. She would find the hungry ones, the damaged ones, the ones who thought they could fuck their way out of the lives they were born into, and she would float them up the food chain and watch what came back down.
The phone buzzed on the mattress. Skyler picked it up, the screen bright in the dark, and read the thumbnail before she opened it. A message from a number she had added to the catalog only four days earlier.
"Entertainment was memorable. Wire sent. Six figures for the merchandise, two for the extras. And a bonus for you, operative. You sold them beautifully. More please."
She opened the banking app. The balance had already updated. The zeros sat there in neat rows, a column she had learned to read like scripture. The bonus was in a separate line labeled "Consulting fee." She let out a long breath and felt the heat return between her thighs. She typed one word back: "Catalog opens Friday."