Free Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita Page B

any chemical residue that might have been transferred from a leather mask. But there was nothing definite in the autopsy notes, and a blindfold theory could and would be offered to Vanessa Bouton as another proof of Detective Means’ enthusiasm.
    Aside from the wood fibers, the only other physical evidence found on the victims were the long, irregular strips of leather that’d earned Thong his name. They were not made from cowhide; the strips had originally been part of a deer. (This fact, along with a number of others, like the stab wounds and the removal of the eyebrows and eyelids, had been withheld from the public.) The deerskin strips must’ve seemed like a great lead to the original investigators, but the fact is that approximately six million hunters kill approximately one million deer in New York and surrounding states each November during the short hunting season. Most of these hunters have the heads mounted and the hides tanned in order to display their stupid macho prowess for their equally stupid macho friends.
    As I said, I hunted all through my childhood, but for me hunting was never a way of proving my virility. It was not an aphrodisiac. Mom had a way of spending every penny that came into the house. She liked going to greaser bars (that’s where the “uncles” came from), but she’d buy gallons of cheap wine if times were tough. The state, perhaps in recognition of my childish vulnerability, included food stamps in Mom’s welfare package. Food stamps Mom sold at a fifty percent discount to a local grocer named Pierre DeGaul. The point, of course, is that I hunted in order to eat. I never equated dropping the sights of a 30-30 onto a grazing deer’s shoulder with personal bravery.
    Still, there was nothing in the FBI’s profile to indicate the killer ever hunted anything but humans. The profile imagined Thong to be a fussily dressed executive type. It was hard to picture him crawling through a muddy forest. Or bloody to the elbows, skinning and gutting the still-hot carcass of a freshly killed deer. One more item to call to Vanessa Bouton’s attention.
    I moved on to the rest of the material Pooch had culled from the files. Theoretically, Pooch had excluded anything connected to the serial killer theory, especially information developed through the hotline or the profile. Included were interviews with friends, coworkers, relatives, etc. Just for the hell of it, I picked up the packet on victim number four and compared it with the packet on victim number one. Number one’s file was at least five times as thick as that of number four. Clearly, once the serial killer theory had been established, standard procedure had gone out the window.
    I removed the files on victims number four and five, laid them out on the empty desk, then took their autopsy reports and put them down next to their respective packages.
    Victim number four was named John Kennedy. Called John-John, though his middle name was Anthony and not Fitzgerald. He’d been twenty-three years old when he’d run into Thong. Twenty-three years old; five-foot-ten; a hundred and forty pounds. No scars, no birthmarks, no tattoos.
    He’d emigrated to New York from the upstate hamlet of Owl Creek six months before his murder and been arrested twice for prostitution, which meant he’d probably gotten into the life shortly after his arrival. Both arrests had been made on Fifty-third Street, better known as “the strip,” an area commonly used by teenage male prostitutes. His last known address was The House of Refuge, one of many nonprofit organizations providing temporary shelter for young runaways. John-John had been taken by Thong in April of last year, April 10 to be exact. His body had been found the next morning in a parking lot on Forty-seventh Street.
    I picked up a crime scene photograph showing the body as it’d been discovered and examined it carefully. John-John Kennedy had been propped up against a wall at the rear of the lot. He