Hidden Salem (BishopSpecial Crimes Unit #19) - Kay Hooper Page 0,2

enhanced sense of smell told her the hunter had, and she tried not to think about that, tried, now, to shut down the spider sense.

Not that she could. Once triggered, it was a wayward thing with a mind of its own, the team members who used it had decided. Unlike the truly psychic senses, which could usually be cut off by erecting a shield, the spider senses were just . . . there. Once turned on, they were impossible to turn off. They were just raw nerves exposed to the air, gradually ebbing over minutes. Or hours.

Grimly, Geneva breathed through her mouth, trying to ignore the thick feeling of scent even there, and stood right where she was, studying the scene carefully.

A dump site. Not a murder scene; for all the blood and viscera, and there was a lot of both, the ground around the . . . remains . . . wasn’t soaked, and that told her this victim had been killed somewhere else.

The worst of the butchery had been done afterward, and here, long after his heart had stopped pumping blood.

Victim. Male; he was naked, and nothing had been done to mutilate his genitals. She noted that dispassionately, just as she mentally checked the box beside NOT SEXUALLY MOTIVATED.

Young but no child; from what she could see of bony shoulders and upper chest, her guess would be in his twenties. After that . . . all she could do was note details. Arms and legs had been slashed repeatedly, some shallow cuts and some showing white bone. His chest and midsection had been opened, the breastbone and ribs broken outward, and with great force. That could be done by an expert with the right tools, she knew, but this . . . this didn’t look like anything she’d seen, not in textbooks, not at the body farm, and not at any crime scene or dump site she’d witnessed until now.

Almost as if he’d swallowed some kind of explosive device, though she saw no signs of other damage such a device would cause. Just those outward-bent, splintered ribs and breastbone.

Virtually all of his organs appeared undamaged yet had been cut free of the body and now lay alongside it in a way that looked to her eye more hurried than carefully staged.

And his head . . . his skull . . . looked as if it had somehow . . . burst open under the same extreme force that had broken the breastbone and ribs outward. Shards and fragments of bone from the skull were also angled outward, some bent, some broken, white in the morning sunlight with only a patch or two of scalp still clinging to bone.

His brain was gone.

Just gone.

It was difficult to remain dispassionate at that, but she mentally checked another box in her head: SOMETHING I’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE; NO IDEA WHAT CAUSED IT.

Geneva forced herself to look carefully, still not moving closer, and saw no sign of that organ anywhere.

There were several boulders not much larger than basketballs around the body that looked as if they had been rolled from somewhere else and placed there, a few clearly pried loose from dark earth still clinging to them. Placed carefully, she thought, to surround the body. That much was staged. A hasty effort to make this look like something occult or satanic? And on bared areas of gray granite, probably in the victim’s blood, were signs and symbols. Like an ancient language. Or the scribbling of a toddler.

Geneva didn’t recognize a single one of them as having any kind of meaning, occult or otherwise. And though she might not be the SCU’s expert on the occult, she was more than familiar with the basics, as all primary agents were.

The clock in her head was ticking away the minutes she likely had before the militia arrived. And it was ticking fast. She grabbed at the camera, grateful for it now, and began skillfully photographing the scene.

She was no crime scene tech, but like all of Bishop’s people, she had spent some time working with the best specialized teams at Quantico in order to learn the skills she might need in the field. And that