Detectives Montgomery and Volario stared down at the smoldering skeleton the firefighters had dragged out of the inferno and tossed on the sidewalk. There was little flesh left on the carbonized bones and half of what remained had been charred to a cinder.
They were both grimacing as the smell of burnt hair and barbecued meat roared in their nostrils.
‘Do you think this was a homicide?’ One of the firemen who’d recovered the body from the ashes was leaning over Montgomery’s shoulder, peering down at the sizzling corpse. He didn’t look so good. Shock had leeched all the color from his face and his pupils were wide as bullet holes. Montgomery was afraid the man would vomit all over him. He wouldn’t have blamed him. The smell alone was stomach-churning. The detective moved over just in case.
‘I’m pretty sure the fire didn’t do this,’ Detective Montgomery said, turning to his partner and pointing down at one of the corpse’s legs, which seemed to have survived the fire relatively intact except for the absence of meat on the thigh where something had cut away at it. There were long scrapes on the femur where someone had obviously shaved the meat off of it with a sharp blade.
‘Are those teeth marks?’ the wide-eyed young fireman asked. There were circular bruises on the calf, with indentations that had broken through the skin where something appeared to have bitten down hard. It looked like a human bite mark.
‘Yeah. It kinda looks like it, doesn’t it? I think this one was dead long before the fire started.’
The young fireman began to weave back and forth, like he was going to faint. With his curly red hair, explosion of blotchy freckles, and dimpled cheeks, he looked more like a choirboy than a fireman. His innocence added a surreal quality to the horror they were slowly piecing together.
‘It almost smells sweet, doesn’t it? Like barbecued pork,’ Montgomery said.
Then the fireman did turn and drop to his knees, regurgitating.
‘It looks like quite a bit of it is missing. There’s hardly any meat on it at all.’ Even with much of the flesh burnt away it was obvious that something else had been at work on the body. Its chest cavity appeared to have been broken open and gutted. All of the internal organs were missing and all the flesh had been cut away from the chest and pelvis, making it impossible to identify the sex of the body without an autopsy. Volario held a handkerchief over his nose in a vain attempt to stifle the stench of both the burnt corpse and the young fireman’s vomit.
Two more firemen came out of the still smoldering building, carrying a half-melted, misshapen, white box: a small apartment-sized refrigerator.
‘Uh … detectives? I think you should see this,’ one said.
They opened the little refrigerator; it was stuffed with meat that had cooked inside it during the blaze. It took a second for Montgomery to notice what it was that had the two firemen so spooked. Then he saw it.
‘It looks like we’ve found the rest of the corpse,’ Volario said as he peered inside. Montgomery just stared without saying a word.
‘Who-who would do this? I mean … why would someone, why would anyone do something like this?’ The fireman looked to be in his midforties, though he obviously spent a lot of time in the gym and could have passed for a much younger man if not for the worry lines in his face. He’d probably seen a lot out here during his many years with the SFFD, maybe even as many bodies as the detectives had, but this was completely beyond his experience. He looked from one detective to the other, waiting for them to offer some explanation. They stared back at him, equally perplexed.
Inside the little refrigerator was a liver and kidney, part of what appeared to be a loop of intestines, thick pieces of meat that could have come from the victim’s back and thighs … and half of a human face that had been neatly cut away and removed in one piece.
