The Taken

“Slight purpling at the wound sites,” he said. “Dead bodies don’t bruise.”

Spere held his palms up to the heavens. “Ah, an answer.”

“That only means he was alive when the note was pinned to him,” said Wingate.

“That’s correct.”

“So this fuck pinned the note to the victim’s hand and then sawed it off?” said Hazel.

“That strikes you as particularly barbaric?” said Spere, wiggling a finger around in his auditory canal.

Wingate was holding the note, in its zip-lock bag, up to the light. “‘Just wanted to give you a hand with your investigation,’” he read.

Spere shook his head. “And he’s funny.”

Hazel had retreated again and was leaning against one of the autopsy tables on the other side of the room. If she had to look at that severed hand again, she really was going to be sick. “This brings things to another level,” she said. “We have to think through our options.”

“What if this person just wants us to watch?” said Wingate. “What if this is a demonstration of some kind?”

“Of what kind?”

“Of power.”

“And for what purpose?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She pushed off the table. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to visit the Record and see what they can tell us about Eldwin. Why is he writing about this stuff? The body in the lake, the fishhook, the note…” She fell silent a moment. “I’ll tell you one thing: he’s not getting any more ink, not until we understand what this is all about. We’ll flush him out: if he wants to keep telling this macabre story, he’s going to have to show his face.”

Wingate was looking right through her. He was lost in his thoughts. After a moment, he approached her and spoke quietly. “What if he can’t?”

“Will we know the difference between can’t and won’t?” Wingate didn’t have a response. “Fingerprint that thing and put it on ice,” Hazel said to Spere. He nodded to her, holding a finger up. His cell had buzzed.

“Just a second.” He held the phone to his chest. “I’ve got Allen Barry on the phone. He’s my imaging guy in Toronto. He wants to know if we can receive a file down here.”

“You mean couriered?” said Deacon.

“No, a singing telegram, Jack. He means over the net.”

“We can go up to my office.”

Spere put the phone to his ear. “I’ll call you back in five.”

Jack Deacon wrapped the hand and put it back on dry ice, in a red cooler like the kind you’d use to store beer for a picnic. It was going to put Hazel off her beer for months.

She realized she’d never been in Jack Deacon’s personal office. She only ever saw him under those harsh blue lights in the basement, surrounded by the stench of preserving fluids and human flesh arrested in its decay by science. He took off his white coat, under which he wore a proper suit, also the first time she’d seen him look like anything other than a nice ghoul with a scalpel. He looked presentable.

“You can put him on speakerphone,” he said to Spere, pulling out his black leather chair so Spere could sit.

Barry’s voice came through the tinny speaker. “Who am I talking to?”

“Me, DC Wingate, DI Micallef, and Dr. Frankenstein.”

“Hi Jack,” said Barry. Deacon waved at the phone. “Okay, so listen. Those little black photos aren’t what you think they are. They are pictures, but not twelve individual pictures, like you thought. They’re one image.”

“One big black image?” said Hazel. “Is that more helpful?”

“I scanned them and got them into Photoshop. Once they were all laid out on one template, I moved them around fitting edges together. There’s enough texture in the images to see where one edge goes against another. Jack, what’s your email there?” Deacon gave it to him. “Okay, I’m sending the first image through.”

They waited, listening to Barry tapping his keyboard in Toronto.

“Don’t expect too much from this one. But you need to see the ‘before’ picture if you know what I mean.” They checked Deacon’s email and there was nothing. “That’s fine, I’ll keep talking. I brightened the image I had and then worked the contrast. Then brightened it again, recontrasted it, and so on; I had to do this four times. There’s information there.”

“And what is it?” asked Wingate.

“Hold on, it’s through,” said Deacon, and he clicked on the tiff file Barry had sent. It loaded: it looked like a picture of an oil spill, shot through with faint lines, like reflections off its surface.

“Okay, I’m sending the reworked image through. It’s not going to look like a real picture, but you have to believe me, this is what was in that black mess.”

They waited as Deacon repeatedly clicked his “receive” button. They could hear Barry breathing over the line.

“You got it?”

“Just tell us what it is, Allen,” said Hazel impatiently. “Naw, you should see it.”

The email arrived. Deacon clicked it open, and over the pitch, swirling black image appeared something like a ghost emerging from dark smoke.

“What is it?” said Spere.

“I think it’s a dead animal of some kind,” said Barry over the speakerphone.

Deacon put on his glasses and leaned forward on the palms of his hands to look closely at the image. It looked like a pile of fur, but there was no face, no limbs. “Is it a pelt?”

“Maybe,” said Barry.

They all studied it. It seemed to have a shape; something about it seemed to infold on itself.

“Hold on,” said Hazel, putting her finger against Deacon’s screen. “Is that the end of a sleeve?”

With her eye, she traced up from the crushed edge of what had appeared to her to be the armhole. She moved her finger up. “This is a hem. Look…”

She waited for the others to see it. “So it is,” said Deacon. “It’s a black sweater.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Spere. “All this trouble for a fucking sweater?”

“Well, glad to be of service,” came Barry’s voice. “Now you folks get to figure out what it means.”

13

Wednesday, May 25

She’d successfully avoided visiting the offices of the Westmuir Record for almost twenty years. The last time she’d been through those doors had been to check the proof of her father’s obituary in person. She hadn’t wanted such a thing faxed, and her mother was so sick with grief she couldn’t do the job herself. Back then, at the end of the eighties, the editor had been an inoffensive old man named Harvey Checker. His Record had been the classic country newspaper, with jam recipes and pictures of kids dressed up in period costumes for the Sunny Days Parade. None of this “real” reporting that Sunderland liked to dream up. When Sunderland had taken over in 1997, he’d changed the paper’s motto from “Eggs, Coffee, and The Record: a Perfect Westmuir Morning” to “On The Record for All of Westmuir.”

The paper was housed in an old tool and die factory at the top of Main Street; it was one of the first businesses you saw after crossing the bridge over the Kilmartin River. Hazel and Wingate went in and asked for