The Devil's Only Friend (John Cleaver, #4)

“Sexual assault?” asked Trujillo.

“Nothing that simple,” said Ostler, and she grabbed the edge of the sheet. “We think the clothing was removed because it made it easier to do this.” She pulled back the sheet and the others gasped. I leaned forward, fascinated by the carnage. The body was pocked with holes—not stab wounds, but shallow gashes, a couple of inches wide and some of them up to two inches deep. They were mostly bloodless, as was typical for a body already cleaned and examined by a forensics team, so instead of red the wounds were brown and purple. Bruises and rotting meat. They covered the corpse like nightmare polka dots.

I was home.

“What?…” said Nathan, trying and failing to form a cogent question.

I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and prodded the nearest wound, feeling the ragged edge of skin around its rim. I’d grown up in a mortuary, spying on my parents as a child, watching them work on corpses through the crack in the door, and as I’d grown older they’d started giving me little jobs to do: bring me a drink; hand me that cleanser; hold this just for a second. By the time I was a teenager I was working full time as an apprentice embalmer, and there were few things I loved more in the entire world. Now that Marci was dead, maybe there was nothing.

“What could have done this?” asked Trujillo, apparently more inured to the sight of death than Nathan was.

“Teeth,” said Diana. She’d been with Ostler all morning and had apparently already been briefed. I ran my finger gently along a pair of sharp ridges jutting up from the muscle tissue, imagining a row of teeth making just such a mark. It made sense, and I nodded while Diana continued. “It took the local forensics guy a while to figure it out,because the bite marks are obvious but the bite shapes are all wrong. They get dog and coyote attacks in this area every now and then, but those leave a longer wound because that’s how a canine muzzle is shaped.” She made a puppet-like motion with her hand, chomping at the air. “These bites are wider and shallower.”

“A bear?” asked Nathan.

“Human,” I said. “Look at this pattern of tracks.” I pointed to the ridges I’d been studying and bared my teeth, clacking them together to demonstrate. I pointed at each ridge in the flesh. “There’s the incisors—a bigger one, then a smaller one—and then a deeper track on the side for the canine. Those are exactly the tracks a human mouth would make biting through the meat.”

“It’s disturbing that you know that,” said Nathan.

I shrugged. “One of many reasons I’m a vegetarian.”

Ostler looked at me. “Have you encountered anything like this before?”

“Forman left bite marks in some of his torture victims,” I said, shaking my head, “but they barely broke the skin. Whoever did this was after the meat.” I probed one of the deeper wounds on the body, a large chunk missing from the outer thigh. The attacker had taken several bites from the area, digging in and ripping off flesh until the bone itself was exposed. The surrounding muscle hung into the wound in ragged, ropy strands.

As violent as the attack had been, I felt a kind of stately reverence for the body. The cannibal had attacked, the victim had fought back, flesh had ripped away in a bloody spray, but that was all done now, and we were looking at a pale, bloodless effigy. It was like a marble statue, carved in commemoration of an ancient battle. I raised a clean finger and smoothed its hair, doing my part to honor the dead.

“Why wasn’t his face damaged?” asked Trujillo.

I frowned, and looked at the body’s face. It was completely free of the wounds that covered the rest of it; in fact the whole head seemed practically untouched. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?

“There’s not a lot of meat on a face,” said Nathan.

“You’ve never eaten sheep in Afghanistan,” said Diana.

“Meaty or not,” said Trujillo, “the face is a prime target for a cannibalistic assault. Lunge at a person and what does your own face contact first? People reflect each other; our arms grab theirs, our face meets theirs.”