|
The body was undefined and mutilated, with portions of white weathered bone protruding from leathery skin. It was apparent that the body had been laying in the brown weed patch for some period of time, heaps of refuse and rusty automobile coaches surrounded the small bit of hallowed earth as if refusing to invade the inner sanctum of it sacredness. The eyes, and a large amount of the mouth had been eaten away by crows or another species of bird which feeds on rotting flesh, the damage surrounding the deep wounds were obvious pecking marks. And It seemed the most tender of morsels, eyes and tongue, were the first to be eaten, the soft watery flesh had become some ominous black birds glutinous nirvana in retrospect. But the odd thing about this heinous operand was that the body had been posed naked and upside down, crucified on a cross made of rusty steel pipe, corps and steel all lashed together with baling wire of some sort. McLesh stepped back slowly as a uniformed officer nearby made an attempt to speak, but only a faint guttural sound came from his lips. McLesh thought of his last interrogation with Desmond Necotera and the darkness moved in and started to surround him, he felt his stomach beginning to turn, but fought the nausea back……..Call it a hunch, but he knew deep down inside that either Necotera had some hand in this or others in that odd apartment building at 666 West End Avenue. But he cleared his mind of the thought as the coroner spoke to him from behind, "this looks like an odd one John." He moved past the detective and began to examine the corpse. "We'll need to pack this one up and take it downtown, let me know when you've secured the surrounding area, don't want your flatfoots fucking this one up with their big feet and cigarette butts." The coroner winked at McLesh, they had been friends for a lot of years, and he never missed an opportunity to bring up his often used, or rather misused jokes about McLesh's uniformed officers.
The cold porcelain table held what remained of her beauty…………Seeing without eyes, feeling without heart, speaking without voice. Cranston cut through the weathered skin from the upper chest to the pubic bone, and then proceeded to saw through the sternum. He slowly cranked and spread the rib cage wide……."Hmm, no heart, but the lungs seem to be intact." He stood back one step and scratched his bald head…….Then began to diagram his findings on his clipboard. The intestines, liver and kidneys were all in a state of advanced decomposition, and he dropped them gently on the scales one by one and categorized their entropy. Because the legs were bound tightly with the baling wire, the flesh around the inner thighs and vagina were still remarkably well preserved, possibly because of the nonexistent exposure to the elements. He grabbed the spreaders from the table beside him and gently opened the orifice……His eyes narrowed as he noticed what seemed to be broken pelvic bone near the entrance, he inserted the forceps and began to pull the material from the vagina. His eyes widened in horror as he removed, and then lifted the object up to the light…….It was the skull of a small animal, possibly a cat or another fanged beast he was not familiar with. Cranston carried the skull over to his scales and set it carefully on the tray, "what the hell?" he murmured just as detective McLesh entered the morgue. "What have you found Cranston?" He shouted from across the room, the coroner jumped and then cringed as he relinquished his forceps on the table in front of him with a clink. "You're not going to believe this John." And they both huddled over the scales and looked at the skull, and it sat as a silent reminder, teetering on the edge of their sanity. "Where did you find the animal skull Cranston?" McLesh's dull and monotone voice startled Cranston, and even McLesh felt he sounded more like a distant echo lost in the dark. "In the vaginal canal John………….And she had no heart……..For Christ sake John, she didn't have a fucking heart, there was absolutely no evidence of it ever being surgically removed or even ripped from the chest cavity for that matter!" Cranston's voice began to shake as he stared head long into the empty eye sockets of the beast's skull. McLesh thought to himself……This has been the most bizarre couple of weeks, first with the double homicide…….Gangland motivated but with a twist of the occult, then this little homicide with a naked dame with no heart, crucified and an animal skull shoved up her pussy…………..But he drifted for a moment and the darkness surrounded him once again, tormenting him with its evil……Exposing him to its eternal suffering, scenes flashed before him like a stuttering moving picture, but this one was no where near silent. It evoked the true horror, the screams of the damned. He fought with his emotions as they began to overwhelm him………..He shook his head hoping the thoughts would disappear, but they still lingered within. McLesh had no way of linking these three murders together without solid evidence, and if it meant taking a trip through hell to get it…He was game, and even if it meant his own damnation, his own bloated corpse that they would eventually fish out of the Hudson River. Cranston looked away from the white bone skull and walked back over to the corpse……"Oh…..Almost forgot, look at these scratches on the Jane Doe." He turned the body over on its side to reveal an intricate design laid out from the shoulder blades to the small of the back. "It looks like a pentagram or something…….A real nice carving job, but what in the hell do those symbols mean?"………….. |