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“It just so happens I’m between jobs at the moment,” I said, taking the gloves.
Our hands met briefly and I jerked, but I felt the heat of his touch all the way to my toes. I pushed the feeling away and busied myself with putting on the gloves so I wouldn’t have to look at him and see that he hadn’t felt it the same as I had.
“Show me the body,” he said, putting on his own gloves and turning on the flashlight. “Walk me through it.”
I discarded my long coat and tossed it back in the Suburban, forcing myself to deal with the cold. I couldn’t afford to ruin a perfectly good coat with blood and other unmentionable things that no dry cleaner would ever be able to get out. My finances were in dire straits at the moment, and a new coat wasn’t on the list of necessities.
“I’d pulled over to the side of the road just there,” I said, pointing to the skid marks my tires had made when I’d slammed on the brakes after my brief panic attack. Jack didn’t say anything, but I noticed the corners of his mouth tighten as he looked at the evidence of my loss of control.
“I didn’t see the body until I pulled back out onto the road and my headlights glanced off him. Scared the hell out of me,” I admitted. “Playgrounds are creepy at night.”
“I’ve always thought so,” he agreed. “Worse than a graveyard.”
We walked up to the tree where the victim was chained, and I felt my strength slowly seep back into my bones. My thoughts were sharper now and the cold had been forgotten. Only the victim existed for me now.
“I don’t recognize him right off,” Jack said, positioning the flashlight on the ground so it acted as a spotlight.
“Me either, but I’m not sure his own mother would recognize him at this point.”
A couple of squad cars pulled in behind us, and the deputies were quiet as they got their equipment out of the car. Jack had managed to amass a competent police force over the few years he’d been sheriff, drawing in men who’d served in larger cities and who had specialized in different areas. I recognized Marcus Colburn immediately. The same man who’d tried to kill me had murdered Colburn’s pregnant lover. I was actually surprised to see he’d stuck around, especially since his lover had still been married to one of Bloody Mary’s council members during their affair. The situation had been messy at best.
I was willing to bet Jack had gone to bat for him. Colburn had worked as a cop in Bloody Mary for ten years, but before that he’d worked violent crimes in Arlington, so his experience was invaluable to a small force like ours. He helped train the younger cops when something like this came up. Jack nodded to his detectives and we took a couple of steps back so they could start documenting and securing the scene.
“Let’s get spotlights set up,” Jack called out. “It’s too dark for Doctor Graves to examine the body. I want everything, no matter how inconsequential, tagged and documented.”
A smattering of yessirs filled the air, and everyone got to work. Lights flashed from the cameras, but I hardly noticed as I tried to take in everything I could with a quick visual examination.
“He’s been tortured,” I said, thinking aloud to myself. “All his fingers are broken. Toes too. Not just broken, but crushed to pulp, as if a hammer had been taken to them. I don’t suppose the mob has infiltrated King George County.”
“Not unless you mean the mob that hit the Piggly Wiggly during that snowstorm in January. I had to arrest three women fighting over the last package of toilet paper.”
“The fun never stops,” I said dryly. “I’ll be able to give you more specifics once I get him on the table. It looks like he’s been out here a little while. Or at least dead a while. He’s already out of the stages of rigor, so I’d put death between 30-48 hours ago.”
“I’ll check and see if we’ve had any missing persons reports,” Jack said, using his cell phone to call into the station and make the request to whoever had drawn the short straw to stay behind.
“Someone was supremely pissed at this guy,” I said once he’d hung up. “His kneecaps are shattered. The blood on the lower half of his body makes it too difficult to see his other wounds, but he was definitely alive when they relieved him of his genitalia. There’s too much blood for it to be otherwise.”
“Jesus,” Jack winced. “Would that be the cause of death?”
“Most likely. If they didn’t clamp the arteries and stop the blood loss, he would have gone into shock and eventually bled out. They knew what they were doing with the torture. Nothing was so severe it would have killed him.”
“What about that?” Jack asked, pointing to the black spot just below the hipbone that was crusted with dried blood.
I leaned in closer to get a better look, and I hissed out a breath between my teeth. It didn’t matter. The smell of charred flesh burned the inside of my nose, and I knew I’d be smelling it in my nightmares.
“He was branded,” I said almost to myself, following the unusual pattern with the tip of my gloved finger. I looked up at Jack and saw the anger smoldering behind his dark eyes. “I’ll take an imprint of it once I get back to the lab so we have a better picture, but it looks like someone left us a calling card.”
“That’ll certainly make them easier to find,” he said.
“I need a camera and a recorder,” I said. “I’ll need to collect some samples here because of the shape the body is in. I don’t want to pick up anything extra or leave something important behind.”
Jack walked back to his cruiser and popped the trunk, producing both items.
“Record for me,” I said, snapping a few close-ups of each area of the body. “The victim is male, between the age of twenty-five and forty-five. Brown hair, brown eyes. Small scar on chin not congruent with current wounds. Probably sustained from childhood. He’s a big son of a bitch. Probably your height, Jack. But he’s got a little more weight on him. Ligature marks are visible around ankles and wrist. Slight abrasions around the neck and a few rope fibers. Bones in the hands and feet are crushed. So is the patella and surrounding bones in the knees. Blood loss looks like COD as there are no other mortal wounds that I can see. Unless he had a heart attack from the stress first.”
I took a step back and looked at what was left of what had been a man. There was pity inside of me, but also anger. I knew what real cruelty was, but it never ceased to amaze me that there were those who found joy in inflicting it.
“Jesus, Jack. What are we dealing with here?”
