An oversized wolf raced up to us, yipped eagerly, and darted away again. The moon was rising. It was time to go.
Ben bent his forehead to mine. “You know what? That’s so crazy it just might work.”
And then we all howled at the moon, the inconstant moon, together.
Defining Shadows
THE WINDOWLESS OUTBUILDING near the property’s back fence wasn’t big enough to be a garage or even a shed. Painted the same pale green as the house twenty feet away, the mere closet was a place for garden tools and snow shovels, one of a thousand just like it in a neighborhood north of downtown Denver. But among the rakes and pruning shears, this one had a body.
Half a body, rather. Detective Jessi Hardin stood at the open door, regarding the macabre remains. The victim had been cut off at the waist, and the legs were propped up vertically, as if she’d been standing there when she’d been sliced in half and forgotten to fall down. Even stranger, there didn’t seem to be any blood. The gaping wound in the trunk—vertebrae and a few stray organs were visible in a hollow body cavity from which the intestines had been scooped out—seemed almost cauterized, scorched, the edges of the flesh burned and bubbled. The thing stank of rotting meat, and flies buzzed everywhere. She could imagine the swarm that must have poured out when the closet door was first opened. By the tailored trousers and black pumps still in place, Hardin guessed the victim was female. No identification had been found. They were still checking ownership of the house.
“Told you you’ve never seen anything like it,” Detective Patton said. He seemed downright giddy at stumping her.
Well, she had seen something like it, once. A transient had fallen asleep on some train tracks, and the train had come by and cut the poor bastard in half. But he hadn’t been propped up in a closet later. No one had seen anything like this, and that was why Patton had called her. She got the weird ones these days. Frankly, if it meant she wasn’t on call for cases where the body was an infant with a dozen broken bones, with deadbeat parents insisting they never laid a hand on the kid, she was fine with that.
“Those aren’t supported, are they?” she said. “They’re just standing upright.” She took a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her suit jacket and pulled them on. Pressing on the body’s right hip, she gave a little push—the legs swayed, but didn’t fall over.
“That’s creepy,” Patton said, all humor gone. He’d turned a little green.
“We have a time of death?” Hardin said.
“We don’t have shit,” Patton answered. “A patrol officer found the body when a neighbor called in about the smell. It’s probably been here for days.”
A pair of CSI techs were crawling all over the lawn, snapping photos and placing numbered yellow markers where they found evidence around the shed. There weren’t many of the markers, unfortunately. The coroner would be here soon to haul away the body. Maybe the ME would be able to figure out who the victim was and how she’d ended up like this.
“Was there a padlock on the door?” Hardin said. “Did you have to cut it off to get inside?”
“No, it’s kind of weird,” Patton said. “It had already been cut off, we found it right next to the door.” He pointed to one of the evidence markers and the generic padlock lying next to it.
“So someone had to cut off the lock in order to stow the body in here?”
“Looks like it. We’re looking for the bolt-cutters. Not to mention the top half of the body.”
“Any sign of it at all?” Hardin asked.
“None. It’s not in the house. We’ve got people checking dumpsters around the neighborhood.”
Hardin stepped away from the closet, caught her breath, and tried to set the scene for herself. She couldn’t assume right away that the victim had lived in the house. But maybe she had. She was almost certain the murder had happened somewhere else, and the body moved to the utility closet later. The closet didn’t have enough room for someone to cut a body through the middle, did it? The murderer would have needed a saw. Maybe even a sword.
Unless it had been done by magic.
Her rational self shied away from that explanation. It was too easy. She had to remain skeptical or she’d start attributing everything to magic and miss the real evidence. This wasn’t necessarily magical, it was just odd and gruesome. She needed the ME to take a crack at the
body. Once they figured out exactly what had killed the victim—and found the rest of the body—they’d be able to start looking for a murder weapon, a murder location, and a murderer.
The half a body looked slightly ridiculous laid out on a table at the morgue. The legs had been stripped, and a sheet laid over them. But that meant the whole body was under the sheet, leaving only the waist and wound visible. Half the stainless steel table remained empty and gleaming. The whole thing seemed way too clean. The morgue had a chill to it, and Hardin repressed a shiver.
“I don’t know what made the cut,” Alice Dominguez, the ME on the case, said. “Even with the burning and corrosion on the wound, I should find some evidence of slicing, cutting movements, or even metal shards. But there’s nothing. The wound is symmetrical and even. I’d have said it was done by a guillotine, but there aren’t any metal traces. Maybe it was a laser?” She shrugged, to signal that she was reaching.
“A laser—would that have cauterized the wound like that?” Hardin said.
“Maybe. Except that it wasn’t cauterized. Those aren’t heat burns.”
Now Hardin was really confused. “This isn’t helping me at all.” “Sorry. It gets worse. You want to sit down?”
“No. What is it?”
“It looks like acid burns,” Dominguez said. “But the analysis says salt. Plain old table salt.”