Free Turn to Stone by Brian Freeman Page A

recognized the man in the newspaper photograph that had been waved in his face earlier in the day.
    The man at his feet was Greg Hamlin. The missing realtor that Percy Andrews had been trying to find.
    He’d seen awful crime scenes in his time, enough to be immune to their effects, but this was no ordinary murder. This was a crime of unbelievable savagery, of hatred and madness. Hamlin had died an excruciating death. His body had been desecrated, his skin cut and burned, his bones broken, his incisors pulled, his genitals severed. Based on the blood, most of the torture had been inflicted while the man was alive.
    Stride noted a single messy word that had been carved like a sculptor working in marble into the man’s torso. Carved, like the other wounds, while the man was awake and suffering unthinkable pain. A word thick with red blood. An accusation. A punishment.
    It was a German word he had already seen once before in a Shawano cemetery.
    T EUFEL .

9
    “Two bodies in two days,” Neal Gandy told Stride, chuckling. “Congratulations, that is definitely some kind of record around here.”
    Stride didn’t smile at the joke, because nothing was funny. He felt a heaviness weighing on his chest. In three hours, the revulsion of the crime hadn’t dimmed. No living creature deserved what had been done to Greg Hamlin. The hours the man had spent tied to the bed in Tom Bruin’s camper must have felt like eternal damnation.
    “Anyway, there’s no question about an autopsy,” the coroner went on. “The guy I usually use in Green Bay didn’t want to touch it, so we’ll get a forensic specialist in here from Milwaukee tomorrow. I thought we should leave the body where it is until then, but Weik said we had to get it out of here. Disrespectful to leave it.”
    Stride eyed the police activity across the road, and he was unimpressed. There were too many cops, too many footprints, too much contamination of the scene. He’d seen it before in small towns, where the police rarely dealt with serious crimes but didn’t ask for help. To them, this was the drama of a lifetime, and they didn’t want to pass the glory to anyone else. The result was that the crime either didn’t get solved, or a smart defense attorney was able to get much of the incriminating evidence thrown out.
    “You’re right,” Stride said. “Moving the body was a mistake.”
    Gandy shrugged in resignation, as if to say: Talk to the Sheriff . The two men stood on the asphalt of the highway, which had been closed in both directions. It was nearly dark. “Between you and me, I think Weik figures there’s not going to be a trial on this one. Percy killed Hamlin, then killed himself.”
    “Is that what you think?” Stride asked.
    The young man’s bushy eyebrows arched. “I’m sorry, don’t you? Percy’s suicide smells like a confession. And then there’s the whole Devil thing. The carving on the body. Sounds like he was messed up, you know?”
    Stride knew that Gandy and the Sheriff were probably right. If you believed Mike Black, then Percy put Hamlin’s body in the woods. Stride himself had seen the next step, when Percy placed a gun against his own head. That was what a guilty man did. A man who couldn’t live with what he’d done. The murder case felt open and shut—but it didn’t answer the question of why. Something had led to the bloody intersection of Percy Andrews and Greg Hamlin. Something had triggered the violent rage inside the camper.
    “Why German?” Stride said.
    Gandy looked at him. “Huh?”
    “Why write Teufel in German? Percy wasn’t German, was he?”
    “I don’t think so, but there’s a lot of German influences around here. Kids grew up in Shawano hearing the fairy tale of Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren . Half the old people around the county probably shout curses about Der Teufel when they drop something on their foot.”
    “Except Percy didn’t grow up around here,” Stride pointed out.
    “Well, you