Paul didn’t walk Rider on a leash. The big dope never strayed too far from Paul’s side when they walked down the narrow strip of asphalt that was Ten Devil’s Hop Road. Paul had lived in Charon all his life, and he couldn’t figure out how in the hell some of the roads in the county got their names. It was like one of the founders had gotten drunk off mead or moonshine or both and just picked names out of a goddamn hat.
He stepped down off the porch with Rider by his side. The sun was only a suggestion behind the heavy gray, almost blue clouds in the east. The wind pawed at his hoodie, seeking an opening as they started down the road. Paul could hear a few birds and another dog barking in the distance, but that was about it. At this time of morning there were no cars on the road and no neighbors in their yards. Ten Devil’s Hop belonged to him and Rider alone.
They made their way down the road on the wide shoulder that separated the gravel-covered shoulder of the road from the ditch bank. Rider stayed on Paul’s right for most of their walk. Every once in a while he got in the road, but Ten Devil’s Hop was nearly a straight line from Route 143 till it joined Chapel Neck Road. A few locals would use it as a cut-through if they were trying to get around a tractor or a truckful of hay bales during the fall, but that rarely happened this time of day.
When they came upon the service road for one of the county’s four cell towers, Rider took off down that road. Paul saw a fat gray squirrel running for its life as Rider bore down on it. Paul didn’t worry about Rider running off. The big goof would chase a squirrel or a rabbit without any real intention of catching it. All Paul had to do was stop and stand in one place while Rider found his way back.
While he waited for Rider to run down that squirrel (who probably had five escape routes memorized), Paul checked his phone. He scrolled over a few social media apps, checked on the score from the Wizards game the night before and was pleasantly surprised to see they had won. That mean Todd Robbins owed him fifty bucks. After a few minutes he saw Rider come bounding toward him.
“Rider, boy, what’s wrong with you? Oh my God, are you bleeding?” Paul said. He was shocked to hear himself yelling. He ran to Rider and dropped to one knee. There was blood on his muzzle and in the fur on his face. Blood so bright red it looked fake. Like Rider had gotten into a can of barn paint. Paul threaded his fingers through Rider’s fur, searching frantically for a wound.
“Boy, what did you get into? Thank goodness, you’re not cut. You find a dead deer or something?” Paul said. He got up and went to the ditch bank. He wiped his hands on the grass with a promise to himself to soak them in a heavy bleach-and-water solution when they got back to the house.
Rider bounded back into the woods. He stopped and barked at Paul. Then he continued through the brush and undergrowth.
Later, Paul would tell his friends down at the Watering Hole that he had followed the goddamn dog because he didn’t want it to get lost so he wouldn’t have to hear Holly’s mouth. But that was a lie. He’d followed Rider because he didn’t want him rooting around some rotten deer carcass and getting an infection. Either from some parasite on the deer or whatever kind of bacteria was on its corpse. So, cussing under his breath, he worked his way through the undergrowth and the brush and the wild blackberry thorns. He followed Rider’s barking until he came to a narrow culvert. He hopped over it and pushed his way through some vines he prayed weren’t poison ivy until he found himself in a clutch of pine trees.
Rider was standing there barking, his ears drawn back and his tail wagging furiously.
Paul had been working the day Oscar Tillman got caught in the industrial threader. A forty-foot-long Lovecraftian nightmare of a machine that sewed the hem of the American flags with laser-like precision. Unfortunately, when Oscar had tried to work on the machine without locking it out properly, he felt that precision up close and personal. By the time they’d shut off the threader, Oscar’s body resembled a piece of cured meat that had been cut into sections and wrapped in waxed cotton in a deli.
Nightmares had plagued Paul for months after seeing Oscar Tillman rendered like a slaughtered lamb.
He thought what Rider had found would give him nightmares for the rest of his life.
* * *
Titus studied the dead man.
The body was suspended by the wrists between two pine trees that had grown up less than four feet apart. Yellow nylon rope, the kind you could pick up at Sadler’s Hardware or any big-box retailer anywhere in America, was wrapped around the wrists and the forearms and wrapped around a couple of low branches on each tree.
The body had no face.
The skin had been peeled away like the rind of an exotic fruit. What was left behind was a terrible contortion that seemed to be half a scream, half a laugh. Lidless eyes stared out at nothing, like a blind man staring into the sun. It was a cool day in mid-October, so there were no flies buzzing around the corpse, but other insects had found the remains. A few ants trundled across the mouth and over the tongue. Fat black beetles crawled over the body’s naked chest. A smooth gash ran across the body’s throat and opened it like a secondary mouth.
A crown of blackberry thorns encircled the head like a wreath. Titus could see what he had at first taken to be the cleaned and scoured skin of some large animal, maybe a deer, attached to the victim’s arms was actually the victim’s lungs. The killer had sliced the man’s back open and then pulled the lungs through the slits.
Titus knew this was a form of torture allegedly used by Vikings and other wild tribes from the Scandinavian northlands, but the way the arms were positioned, the crown of thorns, Titus thought this was less like a bloody eagle and more like a bloody angel. If the symbolism wasn’t obvious enough, someone had carved URIEL in the victim’s chest, right above a death’s-head tattoo over a Dixie flag background over the victim’s heart. The force of the arterial spray had launched blood away from the body, leaving residual streaks that ran over the wound in the chest and the tattoo.
Blood had pooled in front of the victim’s feet like a puddle of syrup, appearing almost black on the ground covering the pine needles and other detritus.
“It’s like a monster got hold of him,” Carla whispered.
“No, it was just a man. Monsters don’t care about all this pageantry,” Titus said. Trey was taking photos before they cut him down. Titus had temporarily pulled him off the shooting investigation. He was the best photographer in the department and Titus wanted everything here documented to within an inch of its life.
“That’s Cole Marshall,” Davy said.
“How can you tell? I mean, without a face and all?” Steve asked.
“We used to play rec league basketball. Time to time we’d play shirts versus skins. I’ve seen that tattoo going up for a layup more than once,” Davy said. He said the words in a near-monotone.
“Jesus Christ in a juniper tree,” Titus said under his breath. He knew he had recognized that voice. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
He’d just recognized it too late. Far too late.
“You got it, Trey?”
“Yeah, we good.”
“Dr. Leonard, we good?” Titus asked.
The diminutive physician lit up a Pall Mall, took a deep drag, and exhaled. “Yeah, he’s definitely dead,” Dr. Leonard said.
“Cut him down,” Titus said.
Steve and Douglas cut the ropes and laid the body down inside a heavy-duty black body bag provided by Blackmon’s Funeral Home. The big, light-skinned brother nodded at the body.
“I’m assuming he needs to go to Richmond. That don’t look like natural causes,” he said.
Titus looked at him for a hard ten seconds.
“I guess that’s a yes,” he said, and zipped up the bag. Davy and Steve helped him lift the bag onto a stretcher. The attendant, who said his name was Nathan but you could call him Nate, pushed the stretcher through the undergrowth to his van.
“If that was Cole Marshall, he has to run two-forty, two-fifty. How strong would one man have to be to cut his throat, slit his back, then string him up between these two trees?” Titus said to Trey.
“Strong enough I wouldn’t want to fight him one-on-one,” Trey said.
“Maybe it was two people? One holds him while the other cuts his throat?” Carla said.
Titus stared down at the ground. At the broken twigs and branches and brown pine needles that littered the floor of the forest.