Nightbred(15)
“Robbery is checking on it,” Tenderson said. “The killer cleaned out the place. He even emptied the safe in the office.”
“No keys.” Sam stood up and gestured for one of the patrolmen standing watch at the entrance. When he came to her, she bagged the wallet and handed it to him. “Ask dispatch to send a unit to the address on the license. This guy may try to hit the victim’s house, too.”
Sam performed a brief walk-through of the rest of the shop. Coburn’s office had been wrecked, and the floor-to-ceiling vault at the far end stood open. Inside she found empty storage racks and ten large wooden shipping crates filled with straw.
Sam spotted a small, strangely shaped plastic knob on the floor and bent to pick it up. “A trigger guard.” She bagged it before she went to the crates. Becoming Darkyn had turbocharged her senses; her nose was particularly sensitive to smells most humans couldn’t detect. She picked up a few pieces of the straw and sniffed them, instantly detecting very faint odors of oil and burnt gunpowder.
“Detective.” Tenderson appeared outside the vault. “You’d better take another look at the body before we remove it.”
Sam dropped the straw and walked out of the vault. “Did you find something else?”
The ME grimaced. “No, it’s what’s missing.”
Out in the showroom the body of Noel Coburn had been rolled over, displaying the ragged remains of his jacket, which had been pulled away from his back on either side. Raw muscle and bone, scored by deep, jagged grooves, gleamed from neck to waist.
“Holy shit.” Sam walked around the body. “Where’s his skin?”
“It’s not here. About half the muscle is gone, too.” Tenderson came to stand beside her, looking down at the pitiful sight. “It’s almost like the perp ran a lawn mower over him. And it gets worse.”
Sam stared at him. “How?”
“I’ll have to confirm with histamine tests, but from the appearance of these wounds they’re antemortem.” Tenderson stepped back as two of his techs arrived with a gurney for the body. “He was alive when this was done to him, Sam.”
Now Sam spotted the deep scarlet abrasions around the wrists. “Ligature marks. He was restrained for a long time.” As the body was moved, something lodged in the shoulder blade caught her eye. “Hang on a second, guys. Evan, you got some tweezers?”
The ME handed her a pair, and she used them to extract a broken piece of barbed, rusty metal from the victim’s tissue. She stood and held it up, studying it. “Looks like the end of an old hook.” She passed it to Tenderson.
“Too big for fish. Meat hook, maybe.” He bagged it. “I’ll have the lab run it against the database of weapons for comparison, but this”—he gestured at the victim’s mutilated back—“wasn’t done with a hook. He was subjected to prolonged torture by something that ground his back into hamburger.”
“But what?” Sam murmured. “And why?”
* * *
Once Sam left the homicide scene, she drove to headquarters, where she found an enormous bouquet of four dozen roses in a beribboned crystal vase sitting on her desk. At first glance she thought the blooms were black, but on closer inspection she saw they were a deep dark red.
“What’s the occasion, Brown?” Jonah Massey called from his desk. “Anniversary, birthday, or smoking-hot first date?”
“None of the above.” Sam inspected the fragrant blooms for the card but found none. “They probably aren’t even for me.”
“You looking for this?” Massey held up a small envelope decorated around the edges with scrolls of gold. “I thought I’d hang on to it for you. You know, so it wouldn’t get lost.”
Being the only female detective assigned to homicide meant putting up with the usual amount of gender bias and relentless ribbing, and Sam had learned long ago not to make anything an issue unless absolutely necessary.
“So who sent them?”
“No name or sig, just a sweet little message the florist typed in.” Massey grinned and pulled out the card to read it out loud. “‘You make my heart burn.’” He chuckled. “Sounds like the guy needs some antacid.”
Sam tucked a stack of case files under her arm, walked over, and took the card from him. Lucan generally saved his sweet nothings for when he could deliver them in person, but after the minor standoff earlier maybe he’d thought she needed a reminder.
“Nice.” She shoved the card in her jacket. “Thanks for taking care of it. Since you’re so interested in being my personal assistant, you can type these up.” She dropped the files in front of him.