Free Brass in Pocket by Jeff Mariotte

marks. The attacker would have had to strike hard and deep to leave these marks in the bones—strikes that, to her, indicated explosive fury.
    Fury directed toward innocent animals.
    Riley had grown up knowing that people’s mental states came in every condition—calm, disturbed, disoriented, brimming with contentment or quivering with confusion or roiling with rage. Her parents dealt with it by studying the workings of the mind and trying to help people achieve some sort of balance.
    Riley’s response to this knowledge had been different. People had to want help to seek out psychiatric care—or they had to be forced into it by the courts. In the latter case, it was often too late to do much to help their victims. That became Riley’s goal: helping them—even belatedly—by working to identify and apprehend the perpetrators before whatever disconnected wires they had in their brains caused them to injure or kill again, and by giving voice to the dead by interpreting the clues left by the circumstances of their deaths.
    People were never responsible for their own murders, in her mind. But they could bear some of the blame, on occasion, through bad choices they made, the sorts of people they chose to be around, the acts they committed that might drive others to that final, extreme action. Animals, though, rarely made such poor choices, and when they were antagonistic toward people, it was never malicious. They were slaughtered for food and hunted for sport. However she felt about those two activities, this pit was evidence of something else—pure cruelty toward creatures who had done nothing to deserve it and who, in most cases, could not fight back.
    While she photographed cut bones and bullet holes, Greg was busily collecting specimens of animal hair, soil samples, and tiny bits of vegetation found inside the pit. One never knew where the smallest clue might lead, so they took specimens of everything.
    â€œRiley?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œCome here for a second.”
    Riley carefully set down the bullet-scarred skull she was about to take a picture of and made her way around the pit. Greg had gone back to the sheep, and he was holding its head up, shining his light at the animal’s throat. “Something just occurred to me,” he said. “Look at these wounds.”
    She had already looked once. Which, really, was more than enough. “Is there something new?”
    â€œLook closely. Around the edges.”
    She forced herself to move in for a more careful examination. You couldn’t be squeamish in this business, but she had to fight back a wave of revulsion. “Okay.” She thought she saw what he was talking about—he had tipped her off by saying
wounds
, plural, instead of
wound
. “There are smaller, more shallow cuts around the periphery of the big cut.”
    â€œThey show hesitation,” Greg pointed out. “As if the cutter was taking practice cuts before making the final, more confident slice. Building up his courage, maybe.”
    â€œBut he had already killed all these other animals.”
    â€œNothing this big, though. It’s still a step up, from a dog or cat to an animal this size. I’m betting we’ll find that the smallest animals came first, and the larger ones are more recent.”
    â€œA size progression,” Riley said.
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œYou’re thinking something, Greg. I can see it in your eyes.”
    â€œI’m thinking that these are
all
just practice. The progression worries me.”
    She had to ask, even though she was afraid she knew the answer. She had been starting to think the same thing. “Worries you because… ?”
    â€œBecause people who do this sort of thing often don’t stop with animals.”
    â€œThey move on to people,” she said.
    â€œThat’s right. Whoever did this is seriously disturbed. I’m afraid we might be looking at the