Free Petrified by Graham Masterton

shave.
    â€˜I’ve managed to ID them,’ said Dan, as Jenna came click-clacking across the lobby. He flipped open his notebook and said, ‘They were two friends from different apartments who used to go up on the roof to smoke, because their wives wouldn’t let them do it indoors. Chet Huntley, thirty-nine, and William Barrow, fifty-two. Huntley was an insurance assessor and Barrow was an electrical contractor. As far as I can tell they had nothing in common except that they both enjoyed a cigar and they both supported the Phillies.’
    â€˜Are the witnesses still here?’ asked Jenna. ‘This time I need to talk to them.’
    â€˜One of them lives in twenty-one-oh-nine. She’s the one who saw the bird-thing the clearest.’
    â€˜The one who thought it looked like Don Rickles?’
    â€˜That’s right. Her name’s Mary Lugano. The other two live in nineteen-twelve and seventeen-twenty-three respectively. Christine Takenaka and Kenneth Keiller.’
    â€˜Which of them found the bodies?’
    â€˜Mary Lugano and Kenneth Keiller and another resident from twenty-oh-six.’
    â€˜They’re OK? They’re not in shock or anything?’
    â€˜Lucky for them they didn’t really see too much. It was pretty dark, up on the roof, and all they could make out was one of the vic’s heads, and a leg, and the floor all covered with blood. They came straight back down and called nine-one-one.’
    â€˜OK,’ said Jenna. ‘Let’s take a look.’
    They went up in the elevator to the twenty-second floor. At the back of the elevator car there was a brown-mottled mirror, and Jenna thought what a mess her hair was, and how tired she looked. These days she found herself wondering more and more frequently why she had chosen to join the police department. Even after all these years, her job frequently gave her horrific nightmares. It had broken up her relationship with Ellie’s father Jim, and with several of her closest friends, and she always looked as if she had been dragged backward through a briar patch.
    If she quit, though, she knew that she would miss it from the very first day. It was a curse, but it was a calling. It was like being a doctor, or a nun. She had told Sister Mary Emmanuelle that she couldn’t understand how she could spend her entire life in prayer, but in reality she did understand, only too well. Just like Sister Mary Emmanuelle, she had no choice.
    When they reached the twenty-second floor they stepped out of the elevator, crossed the corridor to the stairwell, and climbed up the last flight of stairs. Outside, the roof was brightly lit with portable halogen lamps, and cameras were flashing like summer lightning. Ed Freiburg and two other forensic investigators were waddling around in their noisy blue Tyvek suits, taking photographs and measuring the blood spatter and collecting samples of tissue and skin. Off to the left, two police officers were leaning on the low railing that surrounded the roof, talking to one of the medical examiners and deliberately keeping their backs to the horrors behind them.
    The lights of the city twinkled all around them, and a soft damp breeze was blowing. Jenna stepped forward two or three paces, but no further, because of the dark shiny blood that was splashed across the concrete, as if somebody had thrown it from a bucket.
    Dan had been right. The two victims had been torn to pieces, but much more explosively than Jenna could have imagined. They reminded her of a young woman who had been hit two years ago by an Acela express locomotive out at Norwood, and whose head had been found seventy-five feet further up the track than her feet, with every other part of her body littered in between. Both Chet Huntley and William Barrow had been ripped apart in a similar way, which indicated that they had been struck by something traveling at an extremely high velocity, and of considerable mass. And at a