Free No Mercy by John Gilstrap Page A

corpse even more difficult.
    It wasn't clear from the photographs whether they had been taken before or after the corpse was moved from where it was found. Two crushed Budweiser cans were clearly visible, plus a sprinkling of broken glass, the shape and the colors of the shards suggesting yet more retired beer containers. Beneath the body, bottles and cans and twisted tufts of grass grew like leafy cancers from a flat gray bed of gravel. It was one hell of a way to treat a human being.
    Deputy Semen's description of the corpse didn't touch the reality of what the photographs showed. It was true enough that the hands had been removed, but so had the elbows and a good portion of the upper arms. Dried blood in wild spray patterns decorated the naked chest, which showed the lack of muscle tone that was typical of forty-something desk dwellers. The head was likewise missing, severed by a hacking cut just below the jawline. If Jonathan's estimates were correct, the larynx had been left behind. Stephenson Hughes had been transformed into a slab of pale flesh that gleamed like a beached fish.
    "Jesus, Digger, do you have to put those on my computer? I feel like I need to wash it now."
    "They tortured him, too," Jonathan said.
    Venice reapproached the screen cautiously, as if afraid that the power of the images might hurt her. "How do you know?"
    He pointed with a crooked forefinger--testament to the limitations of field-splinting broken bones in the middle of a Latin American firefight. "Look at all the blood spray here around the amputations," he explainedwsed through the rest of the photos. Each of the five displayed a different angle on the horror, and with each click of the mouse, the grisliness of it grew.
    As Venice acclimated to the gore, she leaned in closer to the screen. "What's that?" she asked, pointing.
    Jonathan had been wondering the same thing. A patch of flesh, roughly the shape of a triangle and the size of a hand, had been excised from the victim's chest above the left nipple. The wound was an ugly purple thing with none of the telltale signs that it had been inflicted during life. In fact, had the wound been viewed out of context, it might have looked like an example of modern art--the kind that Jonathan never understood, but seemed to be all the rage among the MOMA set. Swarming flies capped it all off with a disturbingly surreal quality.
    "Are we looking at a serial killer?" Venice asked. "A collector?"
    "Don't think so. This looks like the work of a professional to me. Collectors take body parts as trophies. Professionals take them to prevent identification."
    Venice didn't press for more details, probably because she didn't want to know the source of Digger's knowledge.
    He continued, "I think that missing skin used to be a tattoo. The killer didn't want the tat pointing the way to the corpse's identity."
    "Did Stephenson Hughes have a tattoo?"
    Jonathan shook his head. "I don't know. Apparently." Looking at these photographs, at the brutal violence that they represented, he couldn't help but think of the unspeakable agony that Ellen must have suffered as these animals came at her and bludgeoned her for information that she never knew. He heard her screams in his head.
    He said, "Rattle Boxers' cage and bring him back to work. We've got stuff to do."

Chapter Sixteen
    Of the four civil aviation companies at the Indianapolis Airport that rented helicopters, it turned out that all four had choppers out during the critical period from April 19 to 21. Of those four, three sported a lateral wheelbase in the range of seven feet, the nominal separation between the tire prints in the grass, and the fourth was a Bell Jet Ranger that didn't have tires at all, but rather took off and landed on skids.
    After seven hours of drive time and investigation, Gail Bonneville's case hadn't progressed at all. The number of suppositions and intuitive guesses were compounding, and without something definitive, some bit of hard