The Wolfen

Becky’s husband Dick was also on the force, a captain in Narcotics, and Wilson wouldn’t mess around with another cop’s wife.

The idea of Wilson messing around with anybody was ridiculous anyway; he had remained a bachelor partly out of choice and partly because few women would tolerate his arrogance and his sloppy indifference to even the most fundamental social graces, like taking the meat out of a hamburger and eating it separately, which was one of his nicer table manners.

“Let’s just go blank on this one, sweetheart,” Wilson rumbled. “We don’t know what the hell happened out there.”

“Cannibalism would indicate—”

“We don’t know. Guys are excited, maybe it was something else. Let’s just find what we find.”

Becky pulled the car in among the official vehicles and snapped her folding umbrella out of her purse. She opened it against the rain and was annoyed to see Wilson go trudging off into the mud, pointedly ignoring his own comfort. “Let the bastard catch pneumonia,” she thought as she huddled forward beneath the umbrella. Wilson was a great one for appearances —he gets to the scene wet, indifferent to his own comfort, concerned only with the problem at hand, while his dainty little partner follows along behind with her umbrella, carefully mincing over the puddles. Ignoring him as best she could, she set off toward the kliegs that now lit the scene of the murders some fifty yards into the area.

As soon as she saw the mess she knew that this was no normal case. Something that made you break out in a sweat even in this weather had happened to these men. She glanced at Wilson, surprised to see that even old super-pro’s eyes were opened wide with surprise. “Jesus,” he said, “I mean… what?”

The Precinct Captain came forward. “We don’t know, sir,” he said to Wilson, acknowledging the other man’s seniority and fame on the force. And he also eyed Becky Neff, well-known enough in her own right as one of the most visible female officers in New York. Her picture had appeared in the Daily News more than once in connection with some of her and Wilson’s more spectacular cases. Wilson shunned the photographers himself—or they shunned him, it was hard to say which. But Becky welcomed them, highly conscious of her role as living and visible proof that female officers could work the front lines as well as their male counterparts.

Taking a deep breath she knelt down beside the corpses while Wilson was still registering his shock. Every fiber of her body wanted to run, to get away from the unspeakable horror before her—but instead she looked closely, peering at the broken, gristle-covered bones and the dark lumps of flesh that seemed almost to glow beneath the lights that had been set up by the Forensics officers.

“Where the hell’s the Medical Examiner?” Wilson said behind her. A voice answered. Wilson did not come any closer; she knew that he wasn’t going to because he couldn’t stomach this sort of thing. Clenching her teeth against her own disgust, she stared at the bodies, noting the most unusual thing about them —the long scrape marks on the exposed bones and the general evidence of gnawing. She stood up and looked around the desolate spot. About a quarter of a mile away the dump could be seen with huge flocks of sea gulls hovering over the mounds of garbage. Even over the hubbub of voices you could hear the gulls screaming. From here to the dump was an ocean of old cars and trucks of every imaginable description, most of them worthless, stripped hulks. A few nearby had white X’s on the windshields or hoods, evidence of the work DiFalco and Houlihan had been doing when the attack occurred.

“They were gnawed by rats,” Becky said in as level a tone as she could manage, “but those larger marks indicate something else—dogs?”

“The wild dogs around here are just scrawny little mutts,” the Precinct Captain said.

“How long were these men missing before you instituted a search, Captain?” Wilson asked.

The Captain glanced sharply at him. Neff was amazed; nobody below the rank of Inspector had the right to ask a captain a question like that, and even then not outside of a Board of Inquiry. It was a question that belonged in a dereliction of duty hearing, not at the scene of a crime.

“We need to know,” Wilson added a little too loudly.

“Then ask the M. E. how long they’ve been dead. We found them two hours ago. Figure the rest out for yourself.” The Captain turned away, and Becky Neff followed his gaze out over the distant Atlantic, where a helicopter could be seen growing rapidly larger. It was a police chopper and it was soon above them, its rotor clattering as it swung around looking for a likely spot to land.

“That’s the Commissioner and the Chief,” Wilson said. “They must have smelled newsmen.” In January a new mayor would take office, and senior city officials were all scrambling to keep their jobs. So these normally anonymous men now jumped at the possibility of getting their faces on the eleven o’clock news. But this time they would be disappointed—because of the unusually hideous nature of the crime, the press was being kept as far away as possible. No pictures allowed until the scene was cleared of the bodies.

At the same time that the Chief of Detectives and the Commissioner were getting out of their helicopter, the Medical Examiner was hurrying across the muddy ground with a newspaper folded up and held over his head against the rain. “It’s Evans himself,” Wilson said. “I haven’t seen that man outdoors in twenty years.”

“I’m glad he’s here.”

Evans was the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, a man renowned for his ingenious feats of forensic detection. He rolled along, shabby, tiny, looking very old behind his thick glasses.

He had worked with Wilson and Neff often and greeted them both with a nod. “What’s your idea?” he said even before examining the bodies. Most policemen he treated politely enough; these two he respected.

“We’re going to have a problem finding the cause of death,” Wilson said, “because of the shape they’re in.”

Evans nodded. “Is Forensics finished with the bodies?” The Forensics team was finished, which meant that the corpses could be touched. Dr. Evans rolled on his black rubber gloves and bent down. So absorbed did he become that he didn’t even acknowledge the approach of the brass.

The group watched Evans as he probed gingerly at the bodies. Later he would do a much more thorough autopsy in his lab, but these first impressions were important and would be his only on-site inspection of the victims.

When he backed away from the bodies, his face was registering confusion. “I don’t understand this at all,” he said slowly. “These men have been killed by… something with claws, teeth. Animals of some kind. But what doesn’t