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CHAPTER 1

Present Day

Monday – November 8 3:40 PM

Jackson Middle School took up a sizable chunk of real estate on the northeast corner of Tillotson Avenue at 26th Street, and at 3:00 PM the back lot was buzzing with a hundred kids burning off the pent up energy six hours stuck in the classroom had engendered.

Nicole Davis burst through the back exit and ran for the athletic field where she knew Josh would be waiting with the Frisbee. She hi-fived the Hinkle twins — perched upside-down on the jungle-gym — intentionally ignoring the eighth-grade cheerleaders practicing their lame routines. Silly Barbie-dolls, she thought, with that peculiar, tomboy sense of superiority. She pushed through a gaggle of hoopers on the basket ball court, snagged the ball from Eddy Speers and sunk a perfect layup before darting off to meet Josh.

Nicole was in a dead heat when Josh tossed the Frisbee. His first snap flew over her head. She jumped for it, but the orange disc bounced off her mitten, just short of purchase.

"What's with the jacked-up high fly, McCoy? I'm not six feet tall. At least not this year."

The Frisbee landed in a small mound of leaves under the frog-on-a-toad-stool — one of a dozen such denizens in the concrete menagerie occupying the playground.

"Check this out," she shouted, running hard and fast toward the frog.

Her plan was to kick the pile of leaves to smithereens and send the Frisbee back in the air without laying a finger on it, proving to any onlookers that Nicole Davis was a force to be reckoned with — the exact opposite of those silly pom-pom-twinkettes in their stupid little cheerleading outfits.

From Josh's point of view, Nicole was the personification of Wiley the coyote tackling a haystack, oblivious to the fact that Roadrunner's anvil was cleverly hidden beneath. She landed flat on her ass in a fugue of embarrassed confusion.

Josh shouted, "and Manning fumbles on the second-yard line!"

"I've got your fumble, McCoy," she shouted back. " Your turn to go fish."

With a practiced flick of her wrist, she shot the Frisbee hard, fast and low, a perfect arc, just over his head.

When Josh took off for it, Nicole retraced her steps to the toadstool, wondering what the hell had knocked her so unwittingly off balance.

At first, Nicole thought she was looking at a soccer ball, old and deflated now, weathered by exposure to weeks of sun and wind. Just a raggedy old grey thing, rotting under the pile of leaves. Boys are so immature, she thought. Why can't they just put things back where they belong? She made a mental note to mention that fact to the coach, when it occurred to her that an empty rubber ball couldn't have stubbed her up so badly. What was so heavy under there?

She moved in closer. That's when the mucous-filled eye winked at her, its iris peeking from under a pasty, white film. That eye had been blue once. Maybe. She was paralyzed under its fixed, accusing stare, as if the thing were scolding her for some thoughtless transgression. Disturbing his rest, perhaps?

Where the other eye should have been, only a dark hole presented itself, filled with a wet, pussy gel — a sticky ooze that leaked from the corners like pregnant tears, only, not tears. More like gooey, resinous, bug-guts.

Definitely not a soccer ball ...

Josh was unable to wrap his mind around that scream — a high-pitched squeal so freakish, so piercing, it felt like needles stabbing his eardrums. He'd never heard her make a sound like that. He and Nicole had shared every Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th and Halloween film ever produced, and he was intimately familiar with the range of her vocal cords. But this was different.

He tried to move but his legs were like fence posts anchored in concrete. The pee in his boxers only confirmed the fact that he did not want to know what had made her scream like that.

Other kids had abandoned their games and began circling Nicole. The gaggle grew into a crowd, the commotion louder, as parents settled back into parking spaces and got out of their cars. Now and then, a new scream ripped through the air. One of the Hinkle twins added projectile vomit to the mix, his double now on his knees, barfing in empathy as identical twins often do.

The boys shooting hoops had fled the basketball court, protectively wrangling the cheerleaders as they approached the source of all the hubbub. By the time Josh's legs allowed him to move, the schoolyard was asea in a wave of blue and red strobe-light and police uniforms.

6:12 PM

Disturbed individual was not the phrase Detective Susan Harwood had jotted into her case book, even though the medical examiner had mouthed those two words more than once during his initial assessment of the corpse.

Sick-fucking-puppy was her term. Eyeing the bits and pieces of what had once been a living human being, Susan tried to imagine who in this town — this quaint little throwback to a more innocent and hospitable place in time — was capable of such a brutal and sadistic act. Not one individual on the city's current roster of thugs, goons and misfits came even close. The psychotic rage of the monster who'd perpetrated this madness was beyond her scope.

By the time Susan had arrived, two EMS units, the county medical examiner, three crime scene techs (Muncie is not a big city) and her Lieutenant were deep into analysis. She lived five minutes from the playground by car, but the shift in mindset had been radical. How do you switch off a Colts football game and wrap your head around this lunacy in five lousy minutes? Tonight was supposed to be the christening of her brand new, 3-d, 60-inch flat screen, and sharing the game with her best friend Brian. The twelve-pack of Saint Pauli Girl beckoned as she approached the crime scene.

Lieutenant Carter had taped off a twenty foot square surrounding the corpse. The CS techs were absorbed in photography and trace evidence, while the ME recorded preliminary findings. Two of the beat cops — Jimmy Link and Mac Denton — worked crowd control while their colleagues — Steve Croner and Connie Lyman — canvassed for witnesses. The curiosity seekers who couldn't tear their eyes from the grizzly scene pissed her off. The more blood and guts, it seemed, the bigger the crowd.

Susan had witnessed her share of mischief among the animals after nine years on the force, but this was new territory. Murder was rare enough in her little town, usually the result of some stupid domestic squabble gone awry — too much alcohol, dope, or testosterone on the loose — but this Freddy Krieger slice and dice extravaganza had rocked her world.

Her lead CSI Danny Brown said, "some wicked shit, eh Suze?"

He was dislodging a nail that had been punched through a flap of skin peeled from the victim's face. The flesh had been drawn and quartered, then sectioned off in four pieces, each pinned to the ground in separate flaps. The extracted eye had been nailed to one of the flaps, sandwiching that piece of skin between the lawn and the deflated eyeball. Oeuf-en-peau, she'd thought absurdly, hors d'oeuvres for the insane. The other eye stared from its socket, floating in mucous and congealed body fluids.

"Where's the blood?" she asked, stifling the urge to hurl.

"Judging from the lack of it, I'd wager this is only a dump site, but that's Jack's call."

"Is he close to calling it?"

"Couldn't say, but look at this."

A white coverlet had been laid over the corpse. He pulled it down to the dead man's navel. "M.E.'s estimating time of death around twelve hours ago, based on rigor, but without a liver, well, you know the routine."

Susan peered into the hollow cavity. "Jesus ..."

"I know. Our little artist is a real piece of work ..."

"Where's the rest of the body?"

"You tell me. Carter's people are searching the school grounds and park. Deputies are combing adjacent buildings and alleys, but nothing so far. Looks like our whack job wanted us to find this much and kept the rest for himself."

"Lovely," she said. "What did he keep?"

"You name it. No trace of the heart or lungs. Kidneys, spleen, stomach and liver are all missing as well as the upper and lower GI material. All the mesentery.

"Basically, the insides are gone. He kept those.

"And he was thorough, mind you, even extracted the rib cage; leaving only the spinal column. I guess he wanted to maintain the general shape of a man. Then the freak hacks off both arms and legs."

"Any clue as to the whys and wherefores?"

"All I can say is this psycho is no virgin. Notice how clean the incisions, the precise rib cuts, like he was presenting a rack of lamb for a formal dinner party. Or should I say — rack of man?"

Susan rolled her eyes. "Droll, Danny. Very droll."

"You'll have to get specifics from the M.E., but I can tell you we're not dealing with some pissed off boyfriend or husband. I've never seen such focused rage. Such clean, meticulous carving. It gives me the creeps."

Susan saw that the victim's midsection had been cut and peeled in like fashion. A vertical incision ran from the throat all the way down to the pelvis, between which, four equally spaced horizontal incisions had been cut: six exact sections, stripped away and tacked to the ground.

"Ready for the pièce-de-résistance?"

"Christ," she said. "It gets worse?"

"I could just show you the photography later, if you don't want to look. I wouldn't blame you. I mean, it's totally gross. Silence of the Lambs gross if you know what I mean."

She braced herself. "Go ahead. I'll deal with it."

He rolled off the coverlet. She glanced furtively right to left, making sure there were no children or soccer-moms still lingering about. Nightmares were one thing, but this little excerpt from the annals of human depravity could ruin a kid's dreamscape for life.

At which point, the element of surprise came into full play. That which her eyes expected to see, what her brain told her she should be looking at, simply did not exist. Where legs should have been, two cauterized stumps were all that remained. Where the basic anatomy of the male of the species should have revealed simple gonads — and this is the part that finally induced the regurgitation of her stomach contents — there appeared ... a work of art.

An abstract absurdity that reminded Susan of a particularly badly conceived sculpture she'd had the bad luck to observe at the Desrati gallery in Chicago, one of those trendy and absurdly expensive "fine arts" establishments where the line between art and pornography had been the subject of much debate.

No penis. Instead, lying in peaceful repose, palms up and positioned inches below the missing groin, lay a pair of severed hands, one overlapping the other, and crossed diagonally, in some grotesque stance of supplication.

An entreaty? An askance for forgiveness? An offering?

Each digit had been cut off two inches below the nail, so that ten bloody stumps pointed up, awaiting their sticky tickle for whomever dared to take the prize. Indeed, there was an offering. It rested dead center of the upper palm, between life line and heart line. A shiny, black, rectangular object that glinted minute flecks of the surrounding light, approximately two inches long by half an inch wide.

When her gag-reflex abated, Susan sleeve-wiped her lips, said: "Is that what I think it is?"

With a pair of tweezers, Danny carefully plucked the gadget from its grisly corral, mindful not to disturb any finger prints or possible DNA evidence. He dropped it into an evidence bag and held it under the light. "Yup — Kingston Data Traveler."

"Flash drive."

"Two gigs. Says so right on the label."

Her heart skipped a beat as she contemplated possibilities. Had this pervert actually recorded the deed? Produced a little snuff film for the entertainment and edification of the local constabulary? Perhaps a confession, or maybe a verbal account of the insane rationale behind his activities. Or even better, a documentation of the sick bastard's suicide.

Her trained, police, rationale told her to reign in those thoughts. A modest amount of hopeful conjecture was harmless at this point, but she knew better than putting too many eggs in the old basket of imagination. Besides, whatever secrets — if any — that disc contained, she'd know soon enough.

"When can I see it, Danny?"

"Chain of evidence, love, you know the rules. I'll have everything bagged, tagged and logged in about an hour. After that, you can follow me downtown if you want, but the M.E. decides who sees what and when. You might want to consider skipping it altogether and come back in the morning."

"As if that were an option," she said. Susan knew full well the entire department was in a state of frenzy. No one was going home tonight.

So much for Monday night football, she thought.

The tension in Carter's expression was palpable. His brow was a mass of deep furrows. Shit would only get worse after the press in Indy got wind of this mess, and once the big boys in Chicago stormed into town, Lieutenant Nathan Emil Carter's pain-in-the-ass headache will have blown into a full migraine.

"Who's got the M.E. rotation tonight?" she asked Danny.

"Jack Pulliam. And just beware, love, he's a stickler even under normal circumstances: and this is hardly what you'd call a normal situation, so take heed."

"Got it, Danny," she said. "And thanks, you're a peach. I'll see you and the gang downtown. Later."

Her cruiser was parked on the basketball court where she'd left it, blue lights still beating out their ominous, warning, strobe.

"Later, Suze — Jesus fuck!"

Danny had fallen off his haunches, ass on the ground.

"What? What is it?"

"I know this guy ..."

She watched as he regained his legs, manipulate the extricated skin over the skull, holding it in place. The pallor of shocked recognition covered his face.

"I'll be damned," he said.

"What?"

"It's Kessler. Doctor Wesley Kessler. He's a kid-doctor at First Pediatrics on Madison Street. Christ, my sister's gonna freak. Kessler's my nephew's pediatrician. Was."

Even as he'd said the name, Susan felt the hackles rise on the back of her neck. The flashback was instant, a clean, vivid snap to that nasty little room in that horrible clinic when she was twelve years old.

"What's wrong?" Danny asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

He let go of the skin. Kessler's face returned to an amorphous flesh-pile on the lawn. He tagged a forty-gallon bag, unzipped it, and began working the dead doctor's torso into the plastic.

Susan's crazy nostalgia kicked in like a shock-wave. It made her shiver. "Nothing," she lied. "It's just that I used to go that clinic when I was a kid."

"So?"

The ghosts were screaming now. Her memory was alive, rife with smells: alcohol, antiseptic, baby-shit, bad breath. At that point, she made a mental decision to let sleeping dogs lie and shook it out of her head.

"Never mind," she said. "That place just gave me the creeps is all. You finished here?"

"Not long," he said. "Man, this is bad. What's the point of all this overkill? It's stupid if you ask me. You wanna kill the guy, alright, kill him. Isn't that enough? What's the point of gutting him, ripping him to shreds, then running off with the parts? All this theatrical bullshit?"

He zipped the bag, gathered his tools, unable to resist baiting his boss one last time before she left.

"But that, my wise and reigning queen of sleuth, is exactly what you're going to reveal to us mindless morons when you've got the goods, right, Susie-Q?"

"You bet your ass I will," she said. "Bet your wise and nerdy ass on it."

But she wondered. This was no horror flick at the local Cineplex from which she could simply get up and walk out when the screen had insulted her sensibilities. She was stuck in this one sure as the imprint on her badge. To say she was out of her comfort zone — way out — was gross understatement. Not because the level of butchery was off the charts, which it was, nor because she'd never encountered such madness, which she hadn't. The underlying fact that pissed her off more than anything else, was the blatant insult to humanity. The uncaring, heartless, cold-blooded and callous disregard for life in general.

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Excerpted from "Boy Interrupted"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Patrick King.
Excerpted by permission of Page Publishing, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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