Pulling out the obituary section, I headed for the first house on the list. Before I got there, my cell phone buzzed. I nearly let it go to voice mail, figuring the caller was Cal or, worse, Ian. But I was too responsible to ignore what could be an emergency, so I glanced at the display, then I jerked my car to the side of the road, nearly dropping the phone under my seat in my haste to answer.
“Doc?”
“Freaking caller ID,” he muttered. “I hate progress.”
“Tell me you’ve made some.”
“Have you ever known me to dawdle? I’ve performed autopsies on two of the bodies still at the funeral home. No hearts.”
I’d suspected as much, but now what?
“Don’t you want to know what killed them?” Doc asked.
“Not the lack of a vital organ?”
“No.”
Which led me to believe that my initial diagnosis was correct: The victims weren’t people, but creatures we hadn’t identified yet, and there was someone in town who knew not only how to recognize them, but also how to kill them.
“Okay,” I asked when Doc didn’t elaborate, “how did they die?”
“From the exact cause you’d expect in the particular circumstance of each victim.”
“Which makes no sense.”
“And human beings without hearts do?”
“I’m not so sure they were human.”
“I didn’t find any indication of that,” he took a deep breath, then let it out, “except for the pesky tin-man syndrome.”
“I don’t understand how this wasn’t discovered before now.”
“In the case of these victims, I’m not surprised.”
“Why not? I’d think that a dead...” I paused, not wanting to use the word “person” but being unable to think of a better one, since we had no idea what they were. I gave up and moved on. “They come into the funeral home with a gaping hole in their chest cavity and no one notices?”
“The chests were unmarred, so the lack of a heart would only be found during an autopsy, and there wouldn’t be an autopsy ordered in any of these cases. Nothing suspicious.”
“What about during the embalming process?”
“None of them were embalmed.”
“But isn’t that required?”
“Embalming’s only used to preserve the body for the funeral. If there’s a quick, planned, small ceremony, no ceremony, or a cremation without a viewing, no embalming.”
Since I’d already had a variation of this conversation with Grant, I remained silent.
If the dead were some kind of supernatural creature, then how could they be dying from a human ailment?
Maybe they hadn’t been, but the “hunter” was able to kill them so it looked as if they were, or perhaps infect them, somehow, some way, so that they died in a manner that wouldn’t begin a rash of autopsies. Which was pretty far-fetched, but I wouldn’t put it past the Jäger-Suchers.
Except Elise insisted none of them were here. I wasn’t sure I believed her; however, plenty of people in the world had seen strange things and might have decided to kill them. Neither me, Mal, Claire, nor Doc was a J-S agent, but we all kept silver weapons close at hand.
“None of the deceased showed any signs of waking up and walking around?” I asked.
“Not when I was through with them.”