Jonathan Maberry - Dead of Night

Dez guessed that Olga was probably fifty. Russian. At least five foot nine, easily two hundred pounds. Arms like a shot-putter, tree-trunk legs, bowling-ball breasts. Not pretty by any standard, with thick lips and a bulbous nose.

What had been done to her was unspeakable. There was no point in checking for a pulse. There wasn’t enough left of her throat to bother. The skin below her jaw was a ragged ruin. Strips of flesh hung from her cheeks, her arms, the tops of her breasts. There were pieces of shapeless meat on the floor and stuck to her drab uniform.

Dez slid her flashlight into its belt holster, bent, and peered at the wounds. They were strange. Not one clean cut. No puckered bullet holes. No gouges like you’d see from a claw hammer. The skin looked shredded.

Dez heard a faint gagging sound and half turned to JT.

“If you’re going to hurl, do it outside.”

He looked gray but shook his head.

“Take a breath, Hoss,” Dez advised, and he did. Slow and ragged.

“God,” he gasped and mopped sweat off his face with his sleeve. “I’ve seen every kind of traffic accident. I’ve seen decapitations and … all that. But, Christ, Dez, I think those are bites .”

“I know,” said Dez softly. “Doc, too?”

JT nodded. “The door was ajar … You think a bear got in here?”

She studied his face for a moment. “C’mon, JT … this wasn’t any fucking bear. There’d be slash marks with a bear.”

“Coyote?” He sounded more hopeful than speculative.

Over the last decade several packs of coyotes had repopulated rural Pennsylvania. They were vicious, violent creatures, and they’d taken a serious toll on the house pet population. However, attacks on humans were extremely rare, and their bites looked like dog bites. Dez leaned as close as possible without stepping into the pool of blood.

“No,” she said as she straightened. “Wasn’t a bear, a coyote, or a fucking Bigfoot, and you know it.”

JT was panting like a runner. “Dez … you don’t think these are human bites, do you?”

It was clear to both of them — to anyone who’d ever seen the blunt bite signature of human teeth — what kind of bites these were. Dez kept a poker face. “Forensics will take castings,” she said.

Dez stepped back and walked into the other room to take a look at Doc Hartnup. He lay in a rag-doll twist on the bloody tile floor. JT drifted up behind her.

It hurt Dez’s heart to see him like that. Doc was one of the good guys.

“JT, look at this,” she said, pointing to the bulge in the left rear hip of Hartnup’s trousers. “Looks like his wallet’s still there.”

“Car keys are on a peg by the door,” JT said. “Perp left in his own car.”

“He was barefoot when he went outside. If those are the perp’s footprints.” Dez shook her head. “We need forensics and detectives on this. This isn’t falling together for me. There’s a lot of valuable stuff in here, and there’s a flat-screen and Blu-ray in the office. Why not take them?”

“Maybe he didn’t have time. We might have spooked him and he went out into the Grove.”

Dez nodded. That was an ugly possibility. The Grove connected to the state forest half a mile from there.

“Tell you what, Hoss,” she said, “It’s going to be a circus here soon. We have to start a log on this and I don’t want to screw anything up. Go get your camera from the cruiser.”

JT gave a distracted nod but didn’t move.

Dez straightened and snapped her fingers under JT’s face, startling him.

“Yo! You in there? If you need to bug out, then bug out. Go sit in the car, whatever; but don’t lose your shit in here.”

JT gave her a five-count stare.

“You cool?” Dez asked, her tone quiet but not soft, her blue eyes hard as metal.

He drew in a long breath through his nostrils and gave a curt nod. “Yeah. I’m cool.”

Dez grinned. “Okay — then put on your big girl panties and let’s be cops.”

JT gave a half laugh. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just that—”

“When you get the camera,” Dez interrupted, “bring the shotgun. Just in case Cannibal Lecter comes back. We don’t want to offer him a pork sandwich.”

That squeezed a fraction of smile from JT’s pinched features. He headed outside. Dez fished in a pocket for gum and popped two pieces of Eclipse from the aluminum blister pack and crunched them thoughtfully between her teeth.

Poor JT , she thought as she stood in the doorway, watching him for a few seconds. Under every other circumstance he was nominally in charge, and Dez knew it. They both knew it. He was better at most aspects of the job. They were both good with it. He’d been on the job longer, too; but her five years in the military made all the difference in how they were reacting to the horror of this moment. While JT was rolling along the back roads of Stebbins County, Dez had been playing hide-and-seek with the Taliban in the Afghan hills. She was never Special Forces, but she humped her share of battle rattle over miles of desert, working everything from Haji patrol to scouting IEDs to dodging red-on-red fire, working in the first wave of American women to go into battle side by side with the men. She’d seen every kind of carnage and mayhem modern weapons could create and carrion animals could make worse. Had it been any other guy but JT losing his shit on the job, Dez would have torn him a new one. JT was like family; different rules applied.

Her thoughts drifted from JT to the crime scene. This was big and it could easily get out of hand. If the perpetrator had gone into the Grove, then that would mean putting together a massive manhunt. Beyond the lawn and the Grove, the state forest was an easy place to get lost and stay lost; not to mention the tens of thousands of square acres of farmland in Stebbins County. Hundreds of farm roads, fire access roads, country lanes, trails crosses and game trails to follow. If the killer was even half smart, it would take a hundred men with dogs and helicopters to run him to ground; and even then it might take days to do it. Days they might not have if the coming storm was as bad as they were saying on the news.

She turned away and looked down at the corpse.

Doc Hartnup … Damn.

Dez had known plenty of soldiers who had been killed in battle or by things like land mines and suicide vests; but she had never known anyone who had been murdered. She was surprised that it felt so much worse.

“This is fucked up,” she told the dead man. JT returned a moment later with the camera. He also carried a Mossberg shotgun, which Dez would die rather than use because the weapon was loaded with beanbag rounds. She thought they were sissy rounds and once remarked that it was the lethal-force equivalent of giving the perp a blow job. JT knew different — the beanbag round would put anyone from a badass biker to a spaced-out meth head on his ass — but that wasn’t enough for Dez.

Dez took the digital Nikon. “I’ll document the scene,” she said. “Why don’t you walk the perimeter? Figure out where the perp went so we can get some boots on the ground in pursuit. I’d like to bag this dickhead before shift ends so I can spend all night beating the living shit out of him in the holding cell. Sound good?”

He laughed, and it was clear he wasn’t sure if she was joking.

“And, JT,” she added, “keep your eyes open. This asshole might be outside. He just killed two people … Don’t get into a debate with him.” She punctuated her remark with a sharp nod toward the weapon he held. JT jacked a round into the shotgun and went outside without a word.

Dez went into the adjoining office, stepping gingerly over the bloody footprints, and stood on a clean section of carpet, aiming the camera toward the doorway. She took shots that established a clear trail from the prep room into this one. Then she bent over and took close-ups of the bare footprints. She took incremental overlapping pics so that they could be lined up later to show an unbroken progression from one killing room to the other.