Furies
Page 38
McCarty knelt down beside the body. The stench was nauseating. He shone the flashlight on the exposed part of the face. The decayed flesh appeared to be covered with tiny bite marks. Laupacsis narrowed his eyes. “What is that?”
“Animal depredation probably.”
“Think it’s a murder?”
McCarty shrugged. There were maybe eight to ten homicides a year in the entire region; most of them domestics, a couple of drug-related murders over the years, but murder victims rarely turned up in the forest in Chalk Valley. McCarty stood up and stretched. The Coroner’s Investigators would have to do their work before the detectives could examine the remains. He looked at the boy, whose face had turned a pale shade of green beneath the streaks of dried mud.
“Why don’t we have somebody take you home.” The boy gratefully agreed and the patrolman escorted him back up the path.
Not even a buzz of traffic could be heard from here; they could have been in a primeval forest a thousand years ago and it would have felt no different. McCarty noticed the small pathways that led from this clearing and disappeared under the bushes, so low you’d have to crawl under them on your hands and knees. The little predators were watching their every move, their bright eyes gleaming from the darkness of the forest. They weren’t used to visitors.
“Okay, get a few other guys down here and set up the perimeter,” McCarty told Laupacsis. “Give me five hundred paces out and around, all directions. No one has access but the investigation team. We’ll grid search it in the morning.”
The coroner’s investigation team arrived a few minutes later. McCarty knew the CI well, Sally Donovan, a straight forward, fortyish woman whom he respected. The CI team quickly set up a bank of floodlights around the area. The silence suddenly exploded all around them with the loud chugging sound of a diesel generator churning to life. In a few seconds, the clearing was filled with artificial daylight. The body, hidden so long in the shadows of the deep forest, now lay brutally exposed, luminescent in a bath of stark white light. Donovan removed the crime scene tape that had been put in place by the first patrol officers and had a technician pound a three foot long metal stake into the ground near the victim’s head. She followed that with three smaller wooden stakes, one near each side of the body and one at the feet, then tied lengths of yellow tape to the stakes, forming a perfect square around the body. The metal stake would serve as their point of reference for all evidence they discovered around the site, like the centre point of a compass.
Other policemen officers had arrived and were busy combing the area with flashlights. Black jokes flew like charms in the falling night. Donovan took photographs of the body in situ from several different angles. McCarty pointed out specific areas of interest for her as she took closer shots of sections of the body before she knelt down, pulled on latex gloves and started to carefully sweep layers of leaves and detritus off the body. The body was shirtless, wore jeans but no shoes or socks. McCarty had the CI techies place the leaves into clear garbage bags so they could be sifted through later at the lab for evidence.
“From the size and shape of the body, and from the clumps of long hair, I’m assuming the victim was a female,” Donovan said. “The state of decay makes it difficult to confirm until the autopsy.”
“What’s that around her neck?” Laupacsis asked. The body had what looked like a dirty rag wrapped around her neck. Donovan raised her eyebrows and shook her head. She and one of her tech’s laid out a body bag on the ground and carefully rolled the body over into it. Clusters of insects scurried from the sudden wash of white light, pale maggots squirmed helplessly while flat, gleaming checker beetles scrambled for cover. Patches of flesh had decayed or been predated from the victim’s face, leaving the bare skull only, stripped of its fragile humanity. The bone over the right orbital crest had been crushed, a spider web fracture the size of a silver dollar. The cheekbone was also fractured. The blows that could have caused such damage could have been death blows, delivered savagely, mercilessly.
Donovan took photos of the rag tied around the victim’s neck. A short, broken-off stick was twisted up in it. “Ligature,” she said of the rag. Shit, McCarty thought, his stomach lurching. It was easily the most brutal body find he’d ever come across. The coroner’s team worked methodically under the floodlights, occasionally swatting at the bloodthirsty flies that buzzed around their heads, but otherwise oblivious as they worked. The human tragedy of what lay before them had been put aside, compartmentalized. Now, they had a job to do.
Donovan reached into the body’s jeans pocket with her gloved hands and dropped the contents into a plastic baggie. A few dollars, some coins, some dirt which she also bagged, hoping it could provide a clue as to where the girl had come from. No ID was found, unfortunately. “Okay, I’m finished,” she said. “Are we good to go?”
“Yeah, we’re good,” McCarty said. The two detectives escorted Donovan and her techs as they carried the body up the hill towards their van. The uniforms had cleared the pathway of branches, making their journey up a little easier than it had been coming down. A crowd had formed up top along the highway to see what was happening in this normally quiet little patch of nowhere in the night. “Have one of the uniforms stand guard down here for the night,” McCarty told Cuthbert.
The other detective nodded. Laupacsis lingered back with Cuthbert and Morris and chatted as McCarty walked towards his cruiser. The air smelled crisp with ozone. Raindrops spattered on the windshield as McCarty got into the car. A downpour would start soon. A woman strangled, he thought, her shattered body left to rot in this dark, lonely forest. Christ. I hope we catch this guy fast. He fished his silver flask out from under his seat, looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and took a long drink.
Please follow the link below
to purchase the full version of
CHALK VALLEY.
http://www.amazon.com/Chalk-Valley-ebook/dp/B008LDYW2K
About the Author
D.L.Johnstone lives in the Toronto area with his wife, four kids and a half-dog/half-sasquatch named Charlie. He is also the author of the contemporary thriller CHALK VALLEY.
FURIES is his second novel.
If you’d like to contact him, please drop him an email at: dljohnstonewriter@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @DLJohnstone1. He comments on thrillers, “indie” publishing and other miscellany at his blog: www.dljohnstone.com.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the following individuals. Books may have a single author listed in the byline but they are rarely a solitary effort:
-My Mom, Bette, my first reader ever!
-My Dad, Lorne, and my brother, Tom – it never gets easier
-My meticulous and generous proof editor, Karen Gold
-My A-Team: Linda Boulanger, Jeroen ten Berge and Ryan Mason, for helping me pull together an amazing package. Where would this book be without first-class formatting, a fantastic cover and an outstanding map I wished I’d had when I started writing this book
-My beta readers: Laura Johnstone, Lisa Arbuckle, Martin Cho, J.P. Gagnon, Glenn Miller, Donna Spafford and Uri Gorodzinsky
-Helen Heller – this journey took a bit longer than I’d intended
-Robert (Sensei) Bidinotto, Theresa Ragan, D.B.Henson and Drew Kaufman, four tremendous authors who took the time to encourage and support a fellow traveller
- My four amazing kids – Emma Lee, Aaron, Liam and Megan, who inspire me everyday more than they will ever know
-And especially Cathy, who, after all these years, still manages to put up with me
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