“Help us catch the man who did this,” said Diana. “Please.”
“I was…” He clutched his head, turning to the wall and crouching down into a fetal position. If it had been anyone else, someone would have run to him by now with a blanket or a comforting arm, but the Withered suffered alone. “I was on my way to go shopping and I got a flat tire. Somebody stopped to help. I remember … a sharp pain, in the back of my neck.”
“A bite?” asked Ostler.
“No.” Elijah shook his head, as if trying to shake the thoughts right out of it. He put his hand on his shoulder. “It was like a stab, barely more than a pinprick. It’s the last thing I remember.”
“A needle,” said Potash. “He injected her with something.”
“The back of the neck doesn’t show any signs of damage,” said Hess, rolling the body on its side and peering closely with a light. “Some blood, but it’s all from other areas.”
“Not the neck,” I said. “He said neck, but look where he’s holding himself: on the shoulder.”
Hess looked up; Elijah was clutching the spot where his neck met his back, just over the right shoulder behind the collarbone. Hess looked back at the corpse. “That part isn’t even here anymore.”
“He ate the wound,” said Diana. “That’s why we couldn’t find any cause of death on the other bodies—The Hunter ate the evidence.”
“Something will show up in the toxicology report,” said Ostler. “Ms. Hess, I want your report immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hess signaled to a member of her forensic team, and they wheeled the body into the exam room.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would he hide the method of death?”
“Because he doesn’t want us to know,” said Potash.
“Yes,” I said, “obviously. But why not? Start asking the right questions.”
“Somebody find my son!” yelled Elijah.
“Get him back into interrogation,” said Ostler, gesturing brusquely to a nearby cop. “Find out where Mercer’s car broke down and get someone on the scene ASAP.”
“And check to see if her car was tampered with,” I called after them as they left the room. Diana looked at me quizzically. “Maybe The Hunter sabotaged it,” I said. “He’s not the kind to leave things to chance.”
“Get Dr. Trujillo on the phone,” Ostler snapped to another officer. “He’ll need to update his psych profile with this new information.”
“This destroys the profile,” I said. “Nothing we thought we knew about The Hunter makes any sense anymore.”
“He’s meticulous,” said Ostler. “He’s precise. That all still holds. Trujillo’s profile even theorized he was a doctor or a scientist, and this injection story corroborates that.”
“The only thing we have to change is the method,” said Nathan. “We thought it was mind control, now we know it’s not; that’s only one detail—”
“That’s everything,” I said again. “We thought we were looking for a Withered who stunned people and ate them. Standard predator behavior, regardless of the method itself. Now we’re looking for a Withered who’s actively deceiving us about his own nature. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he’s trying to spook us,” said Nathan. “A needle in the back isn’t nearly as frightening as a mind-controlling monster, so he’s making himself look more frightening. Everything about his letters was intimidation—this is just one more piece.”
“Only if he could predict that we’d guess that he could mind control people,” I said. “There’s no way he could control any of that; it’s too many leaps of logic.”
“Unknowns are always more frightening than knowns,” said Potash. “The specifics don’t matter.”
“What did he do that he didn’t have to do?” I asked, thinking out loud. “He ate the needle marks because he…” I was grasping at straws. “He was ashamed of them because a Withered shouldn’t need to sedate people. Or he hated them because he felt guilty for what he did, so he wanted them destroyed.”
“The man who wrote those letters doesn’t feel guilty about anything,” said Ostler.
“I know,” I said, “I’m just trying to think.”
“Maybe the injection isn’t a drug at all,” said Nathan. “Maybe it was butter and herbs, like you’d inject in meat before you cook it.”
“That wouldn’t knock her out,” said Diana.
“If that were the case we’d see more signs of food preparation,” I said. “A guy this meticulous should be carving off slices and pairing them with wine. If he were doing anything to add flavor, we’d see evidence of it somewhere. Ketchup stains at a minimum. Instead he’s just … taking bites.” I frowned. “Almost at random.”
“Maybe the injection is the whole point,” said Nathan. “Maybe he’s proud of it, like it’s a sign of his own power, so he started to fetishize it, and eating kind of grew out of that.”