Hunting Death

Chapter 19

Damien sat in the waiting room outside the coroner's office reading over the reports of the responding officers and looking at the pictures the crime scene techs provided him with. Although tired as hell, he didn't want to leave until he'd gotten a preliminary report.

Poor Kieri.

And in a more trivial way, he guessed, poor him. The guys were never going to let him live it down for puking at the scene like some rookie, but he'd been unable to help himself. The scent alone would have turned damn near anyone's stomach, but the gruesomeness of it all, he'd been a detective for over a decade now, and in all that time, he'd never seen a murder this grisly before.

It looked like she'd been mauled by a wild animal.

The door to the coroner's exam room finally opened, saving Damien from having to relive that particular moment, but his relief was short lived when the coroner invited him in to view the body while she gave him her preliminary report.

Kimmy, a short redhead with a stocky build, handed him a face mask and pulled back the sheet, exposing the mutilated corpse of Kieri Krycek. Damien almost gagged, it didn't get any easier to look at it the second time around.

Kimmy pointed one gloved hand at a section of Kieri's thighs, "See here?" she asked, not really looking for an answer. "These are chemical burns, probably hydrofluoric acid, pretty easy to come by. And up here," she continued, indicating a dozen or so marks along the rib cage. "These small lacerations, I'd say whoever did it used a very sharp and probably compact tool."

"Like a scalpel?" Damien dared to ask, already thinking that Keith had done this.

Kimmy shrugged. "Possibly, or a small pocket knife. Either way, this guy knew what he was doing, very precise, with minimal bleeding. Mostly about inflicting pain for him, and probably not his first rodeo."

"Any sexual trauma?"

Kimmy shook her head. "Nope. No signs of rape or sexual trauma at all. You want my opinion? This seemed more about revenge than anything of a sexual nature to me, he probably only took off her clothes to cover his tracks. Less evidence to find that way, I honestly don't expect to find anything that will help you catch your guy, aside from that burnt flesh and gutted deer smell, she reeks of bleach."

"Great." He grumbled, more to himself than anything. "Cause of death?"

"Exsanguination, the cuts, and burns appear to be pre-mortem, but whatever he did to her neck, and I'll have to run some more tests," Kimmy paused, glancing back at the gaping hole in her throat. "Because right now it looks like some kind of animal ripped her throat out, she died pretty quickly. I'd put the time of death somewhere around 10:00 pm, plenty of time to dump the body and get away before your guys found her. I'll have a more thorough report written up for you in a couple of days after I do an autopsy."

Damien looked at the body reluctantly one more time, he would never be able to get that image out of his head.

Kieri's body had been mutilated, while she'd been alive through it all, afterward someone had literally torn out her throat, her trachea severed in two, her head nearly decapitated, and then the bastard shoved her in the back seat of her car, rolling her up into the fetal position and abandoning her on the side of the road like a piece of garbage.

It angered him something fierce. Kieri was an innocent. She hadn't done a damn thing to deserve this kind of treatment. Not a damn thing.

With a heavy heart and a sour stomach, Damien found his way back to his office. He wanted to write up his report and take his ass to bed. But he realized it would have been a fruitless effort, sleep would've eluded him even if he'd been shot with a tranquilizer gun. No, he needed to go over the information he'd gotten from the library, and write up a few theories because that's all he had at this point, and afterward, he might try to get in a few hours of sleep in the on-call room.

He needed to be here though, the first forty-eight hours were the most crucial in any murder investigation, after that, the likelihood of making an arrest became significantly reduced. Besides, he also needed to check in with the guys down at the crime lab to find out what, if anything they got out of her car, and he was still waiting for the luds to come back on her cell phone. He wanted to know who she'd talked to that day.

His IT guys were also trying to work on that voicemail again, figure out if they could enhance it any more in hopes of possibly pulling the voice of whoever she'd been talking to right before her message cut off.

Snagging a cup of day-old coffee, and loading it up with cream and sugar to cut through the bitterness, Damien plopped into his chair, noticing a sticky note stuck to a folder that sat on all the clutter he'd been going through earlier.

'This came in for you,' it read.

Damien opened the folder, he found a fax sheet on top from the Salem County Sheriff's office. He hadn't been expecting it until tomorrow and began to think he might catch a break yet, if only it had come before Kieri lost her life.

What surprised him most though, was the face that stared back at him on the copy of the license for Keith Welker, circa 1982, the year Keith Welker essentially disappeared. He would have been thirty-five years old at the time and damned if he didn't look identical to the current Keith Walker.

But that was impossible... Right?