City of the Lost (Rockton 1)

"Possibly," she says. "There are signs of animal predation."

I look at her and hope my disbelief isn't too obvious. Signs of animal predation? The body is hamburger. Half a hamburger. You don't need a medical degree to know something has eaten Harry Powys.

"So, massive blood loss," I say. "Could be a bullet in the femoral artery, but we don't have the legs to check that. It's not the neck." The head is the one part relatively untouched, except for the eyes, which have been pecked out. "Stabbing?"

"Cutting."

"Cut..." I look toward the missing legs. "You mean he was..."

"Alive, most likely."

"A saw?" I manage to ask.

"Hatchet."

"At the hip?" I say. It's not an easy cut, and I'm struggling to imagine holding a man down for that.

"The upper cut appears to be post-mortem. I'm guessing there was a lower one. Likely the knee."

"I've seen dismembering once. But that was chopping up a corpse for disposal. Why kill him by hacking off his lower legs and then remove the thighs?"

I walk to the tray and take the blunt probe Dalton used. I push aside tattered flesh from the ribs. As I do, I mentally process the condition of the flesh. It isn't tattered. Not the way I'd expect from a beast with teeth and claws. I'm looking for evidence of those teeth and claws on the ribs. Instead, I see knife marks.

Harry Powys hasn't just been murdered. He's been butchered. By humans.

SEVENTEEN

When I tell the others what I think happened, Anders stares at me. Then he looks at Lowry and Dalton. After a moment, Dalton says, "Yeah." Anders looks at the body again. Then he's in the next room, puking in the sink. It only takes a minute, then he's storming back into the autopsy room, wiping his face on his sleeve.

"You knew about this," he says to Dalton.

The sheriff grunts.

"Cannibals?" Anders stalks over and plants himself in front of Dalton. "You've got fucking cannibals in the forest and you didn't see fit to tell me?"

"Did you read the files?"

"What?"

"The files I gave you. The town's background. What we have out there."

"I went through them."

"Flipped through them. Didn't actually read them. Or you'd have known that we've found evidence of cannibalism before. Been a few years and, yeah, it's questionable. But the possibility has always been there, in the files. Not my fault you did a half-assed job reading them."

"Cannibals, Eric? Fucking cannibals, and you can't be bothered--"

"--telling people everything that might be out there? Yeah, I'm just lazy that way."

"I don't mean--"

"Folks don't argue when we insist on escorted hikes and hunts because they know ninety percent of the danger out there. The other ten? That's the fine line between scaring people and shoving them into outright panic." He waves at the corpse. "This would be panic. So it's need-to-know, and if you didn't read the goddamn files, then I guess you don't need to know too badly."

"Um..." I say. "Cannibals? Can we talk about--"

"Read the files." Dalton heads for the door. "Then we'll talk."

"Where the hell are you going?" Anders says.