Jack frowned, moving slowly as he examined the body. One of the hands was missing. When he pointed it out, Cordwell shook his head; they hadn’t found it. The leg from which the John Doe was strung up was virtually untouched. Jack imagined a man would know that it would have to be kept intact to support the weight of the body, but how the animal or animals managed to avoid it, Jack could only guess. Likely, it was simply too high for them to reach. The other leg was mangled, but not nearly as badly as the head, arms, and torso. Those wounds alternated between slashes Jack figured for a knife and more of those ragged tears, right down to the bone in a lot of places. Jack shook his head at the brutality of it and moved around to the back of the body.
Then he saw the brand. In the entire space between the shoulder blades, ugly, angry pink swells of skin formed a large kind of symbol Jack didn’t recognize, featuring asymmetric swirls crossed with an irregular lattice of lines. It looked deliberate; in fact, it surprised Jack that the design was as clearly and intricately formed as it was.
“Hey, Brennan, you get a picture of this?”
“The burn marks? Yeah. Creepy shit. Occult?”
“Maybe. Looks pretty new.”
“You know,” Brenner said with a careful, measured tone, “if this is some kinda devil-worshiping thing, they’ll probably want to bring Ryan in on this.”
Jack frowned, glancing at the younger man. “Don’t think we’ll need Ryan, necessarily.”
Brenner shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe the brand doesn’t mean anything at all, other than deluded satanist fantasies of some nut job thinking he’s some grand high wizard or something. But you know, if it’s not—“
Jack turned the full attention of his gaze on Brenner and the rest of the sentence dropped off.
It wasn’t that Jack didn’t like Ryan; they’d worked very closely a few years back busting a child sex ring that had strong connections to a radical Golden Dawn sect working out of Newport. She’d also been called in to work with him on collaring a big-name drug dealer in Boston whose specialty product, in addition to persuasive pulpit revelations delivered in an abandoned Russian Orthodox church, was a powder rumored to make devoted users both see and attempt to kill demons. Occult practices, ancient grimoires, devil worship, blood sacrifices, and rites to archaic gods and monsters—that was Ryan’s thing, her specialty. She’d worked all over the country as a private consultant to law enforcement evaluating occult involvement and assessing risk, and was known to be efficient and discreet. She also was apparently able, through resourcefulness or mystery connections, to skirt a lot of red tape and paperwork regarding freedom of religious pursuit that usually hung up other investigations. Jack thought she was brilliant, aloof, and intense, but the kind of woman one was dismayed to be inexorably drawn to.
Ryan was good at what she did, although to say she was popular with the people she worked for or with might be pushing it. How she’d come into her line of work or developed a reputation for being one of the country’s leading experts in it was something she guarded closely. Jack suspected it contributed to what made her eyes dark and her smile fleeting, and any true attempt at getting close to her impossible. Her experiences formed the ghosts of truly haunted expressions beneath those she offered the world. And Jack thought she was a bottle of vodka and a .38 away from blowing all that she’d seen and learned about the fringes of the world out the back of her head.
Cordwell clapped him on the shoulder, jarring him from his thoughts. “I’ll have a prelim report for you in a day or two. Stay warm.”
Jack nodded as the men moved away, ducking under the police tape. He saw Cordwell motion to one of the technicians, say something, and then gesture in his direction. Jack assumed the tech had been told the body was ready for transport.
He stood a few moments, his eyes drawing over the details of the body, the contorted features of the face, the wounds already starting to take on that freezer-burn-like quality to match that smell that, when the wind shifted, found its way inside his nose on the back of the cold, dry air. He made his way over to the small blue tent top that had been set up over a folding table, designated as the detectives’ safe area. He figured Detective Reece Teagan would already be there, getting a jump start on examining the items Cordwell said had been found in the dirt.
And so he was—Teagan’s scuffed sneakers were propped up on the corner of the evidence table as he leaned back in a metal folding chair. He was squinting intently at the contents of a plastic evidence bag with a red label, an unlit Camel cigarette hanging out of his mouth. With his free hand, he absently ran his fingers through his hair, a quirky little habit that sent it up into dirty-blond spikes. When he noticed Jack’s approach, he nodded a hello, which sent those spikes drifting back, more or less into place. Jack noticed for the first time that some of those spikes had the occasional strand of gray—not nearly as much as Jack had seen mixed in his own black hair the last year or so, but enough to remind him again just how many cases had come and gone for him with Teagan, Morris, Cordwell, and their winters in Colby.
“Jack. You seen these yet? Right feckin’ warped.”
Teagan had grown up in Westport and Inistioge in Ireland before going to Oxford and then working as a detective sergeant, and although he’d been almost ten years in the States, his brogue was still strong. It seemed a continuing source of amusement to him that American women swooned and giggled when he spoke to them, calling them “love.” His accent and accompanying rakish grin never ceased to earn him confidences, phone numbers, and, when need be, forgiveness from the “birds” he occasionally dated. That he was a pretty good-looking guy beneath the facial scruff, with a lean, strong build to boot, didn’t hurt his cause, either.
“How’s that?” Jack pulled up a folding chair next to him and leaned in toward the evidence table. Nodding at Teagan’s light jacket, he said, “Aren’t you cold?”
“Fresh air, mate. Take a look at this stuff.” Teagan gestured at the evidence bags. Jack examined the contents of the first few, taking note of some change (thirty-four cents), a key ring with car keys (although the Toyota they belonged to was conspicuously absent), and a receipt for chips and coffee from the nearby convenience store.
“Not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing here. Looks like the stuff on the floor of my car.”
“Not those,” Teagan said. “These.” He slid a few bags over to Jack. The first bag contained what looked to Jack like a chunk of splintered wood about six inches long and three inches wide. He held it up by the bag and turned it over, then saw what Teagan meant. The back side of the wood was flat and smooth, and into it was burned or carved a series of runic marks that formed neat lines across the whole surface. Jack looked at Teagan questioningly, and the other man shrugged.
“Cordwell says this one’s a tooth.” He handed Jack another bag with a slightly curved bit of ivory substance about five or six inches long. One end held the remains of a rough kind of root while the other tapered to a very sharp point.
“What the hell has teeth like this around here? Is he serious?”
“Damned if I know,” Teagan said. He slid another bag toward Jack. “And there’s this card, here.”
It was the size of a business card, although it was entirely black and there was no writing on it on either side. Jack studied the matte finish on both sides for signs of fingerprints but couldn’t even find a smudge.
“Calling card, maybe? Business card?” Jack asked.
“No idea. Though, whoever it belongs to might want to be rethinking their business plan.”
Jack handed it back. “Maybe they can get something off it. Or off that piece of wood there. Cordwell seems pretty sure this was some kind of orchestrated animal attack.”
There was a pause. “Cordwell’s saying they might call Kathy in on this,” Teagan said, his gaze fixed on the piece of wood.
“Yeah, Brennan said the same thing to me,” Jack
replied. “For her sake, I hope all this black-magic bullshit is coincidental. Last I heard, she could use a break from it.”
“Her input couldn’t hurt,” Teagan said thoughtfully, handling the bag with the wood sliver. “Even if she only identifies this . . . language, or whatever it is.”
“You know superficial involvement, at least in cases, isn’t how she operates.”
Teagan reined in a small smile. “Yeah, I know.”
Jack prided himself in thinking he understood the thoughts, feelings, and motivations below the surface—the ones others wore in their eyes and their smiles and nowhere else. He was fairly certain Teagan was in love with Kathy. The way he looked at her, the softness that crept into his voice when he said her name—it wasn’t an investigative stretch to see his longing for her, however smooth and subtle he thought he was. Kathy, though, likely had no clue. In spite of their individual eccentricities, or maybe because of them, Teagan and Kathy were probably soul mates, but knowing her as Jack did, he was pretty sure she never allowed herself to entertain the thought. And Teagan . . . he approached his job with the relentless instinct and perseverance of someone resigned to giving up anything like a normal life. To Teagan, there were dead folks and the folks who killed them, the psychology behind how and why, and not much else.
“Well, I’m off. Could eat the ass of a low-flyin’ duck,” Teagan said suddenly. “We on this thing together, yeah?”
“Yeah, looks like,” Jack said, leaning an elbow on the table. “You, me, and Morris. Tomorrow, nine a.m. My office.”
Teagan nodded and jogged off to his car. Jack watched him go, then turned his attention back to the chunk of wood in the bag. He took a deep breath, frigid in his nose and throat, and let it out in little white puffs. It was time, he knew, to start the job.
Savage Woods
Bram Stoker award-nominated author Mary SanGiovanni returns with a terrifying tale of madness, murder, and mind-shattering evil . . .
Nilhollow—six-hundred-plus acres of haunted woods in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens—is the stuff of urban legend. Amid tales of tree spirits and all-powerful forest gods are frightening accounts of hikers who went insane right before taking their own lives. It is here that Julia Russo flees when her violent ex-boyfriend runs her off the road . . . here that she vanishes without a trace.
State Trooper Peter Grainger has witnessed unspeakable things that have broken other men.
But he has to find Julia and can’t turn back now. Every step takes him closer to an ugliness that won’t be appeased—a centuries-old, devouring hatred rising up to eviscerate humankind. Waiting, feeding, surviving. It’s unstoppable. And its time has come.
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