Читать книгу Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game - J. Kerley A. - Страница 36

Tanner’s body went straight to the state morgue in Frankfort. Cherry arranged to have the body put atop the post-mortem list, going from transport to autopsy. We ate a light breakfast to give the transport a head start, then drove the ninety minutes to Frankfort, the state capital. McCoy returned to the scene to see if he could make any further reconstructions using his woodsman’s knowledge.

“It’s unreal,” Cherry said as we zoomed down the ramp from I-64 to Frankfort, “the perp carried Tanner’s body almost a half-mile. He went down steps, up and down the trail, pulled it to the top of the arch. Oh yeah, he was also carrying a big coil of rope. You know the kind of strength that would take?”

I shook my head in disbelief. I was fit and relatively strong and would have crapped out halfway down the trail. If it was one person, he was built like Mike Tyson in his prime.

The attending pathologist was a man named Vernon Krogan, late fifties, close-cropped gray hair, wide blue eyes incapable of surprise. I knew Doc Krogan, his species anyway, closing in on retirement after a lifetime disassembling bodies, many of them victims of hideous and violent crimes. He’d performed the autopsy as if tearing down a carburetor, not interested in philosophical aspects of the device – carburetors have neither philosophy nor theology – but only in such things as carbon accumulation and surface pitting.

The autopsy complete, the body was covered by a drape. Cherry and I stood to the side of the table as Krogan pulled off his mask. The room smelled of death and disinfectant and I’d smell it for days. I used to think the smell was on my clothes, my skin, but realized it had gotten trapped in my head.

“The corpse had been slit open,” Krogan said, removing his mask. “I’d figure a gutting knife, like hunters use on deer. Hang them upside down, slit the belly, let the innards fall out.”

Cherry grimaced. “Tanner’s guts were gone?”

“A crude job, intestines slashed out, cut top and bottom. A lung had been left behind. But mostly everything got yanked out.”

Cherry was having trouble grasping the news. “Tanner was emptied out and sewed back up?” she said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

Krogan pulled off his paper lab gown and jammed it into a receptacle. “Sewed is an imprecise term. Someone punched holes in the opened flaps of flesh, lashed the pieces closed with black boot laces.”

“Why sew him back up?” Cherry asked.

“To keep the stuffing from falling out, of course.”

“Stuffing?” Cherry said.

Krogan paused. “Oh … No one told you? Several of my colleagues came back to take a look.”

“Told us what? Look at what?”

“The emptied abdominal area was packed with a brown substance before being stitched closed.”

“What kind of substance?”

Krogan snapped off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle. “We’re doing tests, but everything points to horse manure.”

“Tanner was packed with horseshit?” Cherry said, eyes wide.

Krogan regarded Cherry with a look combining curiosity and amusement.

“So far you’ve sent us a man with a soldering iron in his lower bowel, a drowned woman dressed like a hooker, a man crushed by a snack van, and a corpse packed with horsepoop. What do you have going on over there in Woslee County, Detective Cherry? Sure seems like a corker.”