town he knew that the hunt had tangled itself into the weirdest set of circumstances he’d ever encountered. The most brutal murders of his career, killers who can take a chestful of bullets and still have the strength and power to lay siege to a hospital and nearly kill three people. Dead civilians, dead policemen. Ferro unwrapped a second stick of gum and chewed it as he stood there, his face giving nothing away, his dark eyes flat and apparently emotionless as he worked the scene in his head. He saw something else that puzzled him. The blood. There were smears and splashes, sprays from opened arteries that painted the corn and the slat fence…but throat wounds like that, even if the hearts of the men had stopped quickly, should have spilled a lake of blood. There wasn’t nearly enough of it. He stepped forward and took a pencil from his pocket, then knelt and probed the ground as close to Cowan’s shoulder as he could reach without risking the integrity of the crime scene. The pencil slipped easily down into the soft earth. Despite the chill, the rain of two nights ago still left the earth very muddy and yielding. He pushed the pencil down three inches and then withdrew it to examine it like a dipstick. There was a little blood and a lot of damp earth. Not enough blood, though, not enough by a long shot. It should have seeped deeper than this. He rose, looking around for other anomalies. That was the smart thing to do—to be a scientist, a criminalist, not a gawking bystander, and he could feel his detachment creeping back by slow degrees. He caught LaMastra’s eye and then jerked a chin toward the blood splashes. “You reading this?”
The younger man had seen Ferro probe the ground with his pencil and understood the implications. “The blood?”
“Uh huh.”
“Maybe the ME will figure it out.” He pointed with his Maglite to a spot in the clearing where bare earth showed through the mess. “You see that?” There were several footprints clearly pressed into the mud. He glanced at the shoes of both dead officers, then grunted. “Gotta be the perp’s.”
“Make sure the lab guys take castings. See how they match up against the ones we got from Ruger and Boyd.” Ferro rose, his knees creaking a little.
“Not going to be Ruger’s,” LaMastra said.
“No,” Ferro agreed.
“So…you make Boyd for this shit?”
Ferro gave a small half-shrug. “Who else? Macchio’s dead. Ruger’s sure as hell dead. Unless there was a fourth man in that car, the only suspect we have left is Boyd.”
“Yeah,” LaMastra said dubiously, “but I don’t like the feel of that, y’know?”
“No kidding, Vince.” With a sour-faced LaMastra in tow, Ferro walked the perimeter of the crime scene, noting everything, working the catalog into his brain, fighting the mixture of revulsion, hatred, and fear that was boiling in his gut. LaMastra tapped him on the shoulder, and jerked his head toward the far side of the clearing, where Chief Gus Bernhardt was standing next to a young man carrying an oversize medical bag. Gus waved him over and the two detectives circled back to them.
“Frank, this is Dr. Bob Colbert from Pinelands College,” Gus said, pointedly looking at Ferro rather than at what was behind him. “Bob teaches anatomy and forensics at the college and fills in for Saul Weinstock on ME work once in a while.” They were all wearing latex gloves, so they just nodded to one another as Gus introduced the detectives.
The doctor looked to be a young forty with black hair and a pronounced Gallic nose. “Saul couldn’t get out here,” he said in a thick northern Minnesota accent. “I’m, uh…kind of sorry I was available.”
“I heard that,” agreed LaMastra. “This is some of the sickest shit I ever saw.”
“I’ll pronounce them so you can get your lab team to work. I can only imagine how badly you want to get whoever did this.”
Ferro met his gaze. “You have no idea, doctor.” He ordered everyone out of the clearing except for the ME. The other cops moved back reluctantly, their faces white with shock and grim with frustrated anger. Chief Bernhardt turned a face to Ferro that was gray and sweaty. He tried to say something but it stuck in his throat. There were tears brimming in his eyes and he looked ten years old. Ferro just nodded to him and left him alone for the moment.
Ferro drifted along behind the ME, making the young doctor nervous by peering over his shoulder as he examined the wounds, palpated the flesh on the throats of each victim, and took temperature readings. As the doctor worked Ferro continued to read the scene himself, not liking what he was seeing for a hundred different reasons. “Well?” Ferro asked after the ME had finished his cursory examination.
“Well, I guess I have to officially say that they’re dead. They are. Boy are they.” The doctor’s face was as sweaty as Bernhardt’s.
“Cause of death?”
The doctor pursed his lips. “I’m going to let Saul Weinstock do the post, but I’ve lived in hunting country my whole life, and I’ve hunted bear in Potter County here in Pennsylvania and in Minnesota, where I grew up.”
Ferro frowned. “What are you saying? That a bear did this?”
“A bear? No, the bite radius doesn’t look big enough, but if I was to make a horseback guess here, Detective, I’d say that yeah,
“You’re calling this an animal attack?”
“Detective, I’m not calling this anything but two dead guys. I mean, two dead officers. What I’m saying is that from a superficial analysis—lacking the specifics of a postmortem—the wounds
Ferro stepped closer and dropped his voice. “Has Dr. Weinstock shared with you the nature of the wounds he identified on the victim found yesterday?”
“Tony Macchio? Yes. Among other things he was bitten.”
“It was Dr. Weinstock’s opinion that the bites were made by human teeth. He lifted impressions. No trace of animal attack, according to him.”
Colbert nodded. “Right, I know, but that’s not what I think we have here, and mind you, it is possible that an animal came upon the bodies after they’d already been killed, but what I see—what I
Ferro looked over at the clear impressions made by a set of shoes other than the pairs worn by the cops— marks that almost certainly had to have been left by the killer—and then looked down at the bodies. He looked around for animal prints and saw nothing. “So what kind of bite do we have here?”
Colbert mopped frigid sweat from his face. “I don’t know. Maybe a dog. It’s big enough for a dog, if we’re talking dog. A German shepherd or something bigger. Nothing smaller, that’s for sure.”
“And you’re sure these wounds aren’t postmortem. I mean…it seems pretty clear that there was a third man here, and there’s a good chance it’s one of the fugitives involved in the manhunt. Are you saying that this wasn’t a murder but that these two armed officers were instead attacked by an animal?”
“Detective, I’m not sure of anything. I said that this was a horseback guess—I don’t want you to hold me to it. Whatever left the bite marks could have come along postmortem, sure. The state forest is a stone’s throw away from here, something might have smelled blood and come prowling after your fugitive killed them. Bottom line is I don’t really know.”
Ferro nodded. “Fair enough. One more thing, doctor…what do you make of the amount of blood?”
Colbert looked at him for a moment, then looked around, opened his mouth to say something, then stopped and looked at the scene again. “Hunh,” he said.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Well,” Colbert said, nodding at the bodies as he stripped off his latex gloves, “there is certainly a great deal of visible blood spill and spatter…”
“But?”
“But given the severity of the injuries—to two grown men—the amount of visible blood is less than you would expect.” He cut a look at Ferro. “That’s what you’re referring to, isn’t it?”
Without directly answering, Ferro said, “I would appreciate it if you noted that in your preliminary report.” When the doctor nodded, Ferro added, “Dr. Colbert, I’d prefer you only spoke with Dr. Weinstock about this, and no
