“But cannibals don’t attack people face to face like that,” I said. If he wanted to play serial-killer trivia I could give him a run for his money. “Human cannibal attacks are premeditated and careful, like Jeffrey Dahmer or Armin Meiwes. They carve up the body almost like a—dammit.” Trujillo was right. As soon as I started talking about the classic cases, I realized what Trujillo already had: that this one didn’t fit the pattern. “Most cannibals carve up the body like a butcher,” I said. “They incapacitate the victim, take it home, store the parts.… This guy didn’t do any of that.”
“Even without knowing the details of the initial attack,” said Trujillo, “the body makes what happened after that fairly obvious. Our killer fed on the victim soon, perhaps immediately, ripping out bites like a feral predator. He took time to remove some of the clothes, but that appears to be the only humanlike behavior; the rest is very animalistic. When he was full, or at least sated, he hid the body in a Dumpster—he didn’t save it for later and he didn’t even carve off a piece. All the wounds are caused by teeth, and if they weren’t human teeth, this would have virtually no hallmarks of a human attack.”
“What about the face?” asked Ostler. “You started this whole topic by mentioning the face.”
“Because that’s the part that doesn’t fit,” I said. Now that I saw what Trujillo was talking about, I could tell exactly what he was thinking. “The nature of this attack suggests—though again, we don’t know for sure—that it was a face-to-face assault, possibly with bare hands. Serial killers who treat dead bodies this wildly tend to attack living ones with the same attitude. But this one didn’t.” I turned back to the corpse, picking up the right hand and searching it for marks. “Not only would an attack like that damage the face, it would leave some clear defensive wounds from when the victim fought back: scrapes or cuts on the knuckles, ripped nails, that kind of thing. I don’t see any of those, either. Did the forensic examiner mention anything like that?”
“No,” said Diana. “We assumed it was a more careful attack, so the lack didn’t stand out.”
“This is why we have a criminal psychologist on the team,” said Ostler. She looked at Trujillo. “So this attack was abnormal, that much seems obvious. What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” said Trujillo. “I’m still getting used to the idea that the killers we’re chasing are supernatural, and that changes literally everything. There might be a deeper psychological reason for an attack like this, or it might just be that the Withered who did it eats human flesh, and got hungry.”
I’d been so enthralled by the body that I’d missed the significance of it—all the little clues that I should have seen and didn’t, and it embarrassed me that Trujillo had seen them so easily. I’d felt even worse when Ostler asked Trujillo for advice, and hearing him admit that he was out of his depth gave me a small, almost petulant thrill. Now it was my turn.
“The first thing we know is that this is probably one of the new guys who showed up at the mortuary last night,” I said.
“Really?” asked Nathan. “You got a good look at their teeth, did you?”
“If it had happened in town before, the police examiner wouldn’t have been confused by it,” I said. “Plus, the killer hid the body in a place no local would have bothered with.”
“It was a Dumpster behind a trashy motel,” said Diana. “That’s such a common place to hide a body it’s practically a cliché.”
“Most trashy-motel Dumpsters are,” I said, “but not this one. I assume the body was found by a homeless guy?”
“It was,” said Ostler. “How did you know?”
“Because I’ve seen the Riverwalk Motel before, when we visited the homeless shelter looking for one of Cody French’s victims. The motel and the shelter are barely three blocks apart. That Dumpster probably gets picked through all the time, and a local killer as experienced as a Withered—who has to kill regularly just to survive—would know that. He would have a system in place to hide his victims, and he wouldn’t change that system out of the blue to hide a body in such a risky place.”
“The change might not be out of the blue,” said Trujillo. “An attack this violent could represent an escalation, or a reaction to something that angered him. We did just kill two Withered; they may have been his friends, and the loss pushed him over an edge.”
“But that’s why the face is important,” I said. “That’s why this body doesn’t make sense: because it doesn’t look premeditated, but it is. There’s no damage to the face or head, there’s no defensive wounds; this was not a feral assault in an alley somewhere.” I relished talking about this with people who understood me, who didn’t think I was freak. I looked at Diana. “You read the report: did the forensic guy find the wound that killed him?”
Diana scoffed. “Any of those wounds could have killed him.”