Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

full of cowboy stubble. Whatever he was looking at, it had his full attention. Cooper was just a few paces away when he looked up.

His expression changed immediately.

‘I’m Dr Allen,’ she said. She always led with the ‘doctor’. It had weight where weight was needed.

He didn’t say anything. He looked like she’d just stepped on his shoe.

Something felt odd to her too. ‘Have we met?’ she asked. ‘You seem familiar.’

‘No,’ the man said, blinking. His face grew calmer. ‘I’m sorry – no, I don’t think we have.’ He scratched his neck before suddenly trying to smile, extending his hand. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Alec Nichols – nice to meet you.’

His handshake was firm, but she was ready for that, and gripped back firmer. His eyes were shot red. He was clearly a strong man, but he didn’t exactly look well.

She looked down past him.

There was a crow on the ground. It had dried blood speckled across its body. Most likely something had mauled it.

‘Sorry if I’m a little out of it,’ he began, and then hesitated, wiping his eyes. ‘I was out all night on a job . . . didn’t get much sleep . . .’

‘I can imagine.’

She looked back down at the bird, and so did Alec.

‘Not sure if it’s relevant, but it wasn’t here yesterday.’ He paused. ‘I was the one who found the horses. Well, after Mr Cole and his daughter, of course.’ He paused again. She looked up at him. He was a hard one to read. He seemed nervous, almost, at first. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?

Cooper bent down and picked up the crow in her gloved hands, holding it at a distance. She tried not to grip it too tight, lest she hurt it.

She felt along the keel of its body, gently examining its ruined wings and legs.

Wordlessly, it opened and closed its beak.

The crow had ventral swelling and was in considerable pain. It was emaciated and utterly infested with parasites, as she’d expected.

It was going to die. Even if they nursed it back to stability, it wouldn’t last more than a week in the wild.

Holding its midsection with one hand, she snapped its neck with the other. She placed it down to the ground and looked back at Alec. He blinked, clearly a little surprised, but remained silent.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the tents, large buckets and troughs had been placed where the water had collected and dripped through. Torches punctuated the gloom. Thin lights had been set up along the ground. Coloured string had been tied to pegs, marking the boundaries of each point of interest.

Alec assured her that the scene was already fully photographed. Cooper took a few of her own regardless. From afar, on approach, up close. Proper photographic documentation was essential for any criminal proceedings that might follow, even with animals – especially with animals.

Only images sold the potential for pain, for the discovery of malice.

Cooper’s life had been an education in this, in more, but the world had a way of surprising you.

The horse heads had been buried on their side. For each, the soil had been manipulated to cover everything but the region around the one open eye.

There were five in this tent, the heads all arranged a few feet from each other.

Cooper knelt down, her knees digging into the soil as she reached into her bag. She found her brush. She chose the nearest head and began her work.

She scraped some of the soil away from the horse’s eye, careful to look for anything caught within, gentle in her movements. She found nothing at first. After scraping a little more, she found another layer of soil, impacted below.

The killer had secured the horses in the ground by digging holes, dropping the heads within these holes, caking soil around the flesh, then spreading loose dirt to help the skin blend in with the surrounding earth.

The purpose was to delay them being found, but not indefinitely. To make the realization itself a moment of power.

She kept going. Next, she looked at the site of decapitation. She had to move carefully, gently displacing foreign matter from the base of the stump while trying not to affect the tissue below.

‘This one was beheaded with something sharp,’ Cooper said. ‘But . . .’ She hesitated. ‘It took multiple cuts. Possibly with different tools.’

‘Slashes?’ Alec croaked. Something seemed wrong with his voice.

‘More like some of the head was sawn off,’ she said, looking back at the horse. ‘We’ll know more when we get to the lab.’

The horse appeared to have been a healthy weight before death, based on the amount of fat around the crest of its neck, at least. She felt its skin, cold and almost limp.

Around its nose, there were traces of dried blood. Rigor mortis was fading and the eyes were cloudy, more than Cooper would expect for November deaths. Decomposition was proceeding unusually rapidly, but at least there was not much insect activity. There were more things in the air outside than in the dead.

She pulled the horse’s mouth open a little, the weight heavy against her hands. A small section of tongue poked through the teeth. She checked the gums. The mucous membranes were pale on both sides. She palpated the submandibular lymph nodes, but these were unremarkable.

She rose to her feet.

‘Where are the tails?’

They went through to the second tent.

Alec kept looking at her as they walked, shifting his torch each time he turned. A tell-tale wobble of the light.

He seemed uneasy in her presence. He acted like he was responsible for every piece of contamination.

‘I picked one of them up,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know what it was at the time.’ He shuddered. Moments passed, and then, suddenly, his voice slightly higher, he asked her if she’d ever seen anything like this before.

‘Mutilations, sure,’ Cooper replied, stepping over the string boundary around the tails. They were located in the corner of another head-circle, away from the others, like the tip of a Q.

She knelt down