Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

You didn’t know what was or wasn’t relevant until you had more of the picture. Neither could you make assumptions. Evidence could lie.

She’d strung the police photos above each head.

One taken when they were mostly buried, back when they were dry and fresh.

One from the morning, taken when she’d first seen them, still unexcavated.

One from when they had been dug up, but still not moved from the scene. Alec had already numbered each of the horses, so Cooper numbered the photos accordingly.

The lack of waterlogging was reasonably consistent with what she would expect – the heads had not been there long enough to take on much water. Only one of them was worse than the others. The photographs helped explain the abnormality. This particular specimen had been placed to the side of a small mound, that was all. Water had doubtless pooled on the uneven ground.

She went through the tails. It was not possible to definitively match most of them without DNA testing, but for three or four where the hair colour was unique and similar enough between tail and head to support an educated guess.

As she moved from horse to horse, she followed an identical procedure, logging the results on her tablet then backing them up. She looked, first of all, for signs of trauma or disease that might lead to potentially distracting lesions on the skin.

There was some bruising on a few of the necks, very light.

A few nicks in the skin, probably made with a knife. For the most part, these were only found on the larger horses.

There was scuffing above some of the eyes, suggesting they had been dragged across a hard surface.

The majority of the damage had come after death, beyond the severing of the heads themselves.

Next, as best as she was able, Cooper completed identification.

Strangers became individuals. There were chips in most of their necks.

She could access identity and owner via these microchips and cross-reference them with the vet practice’s intranet, detailing age and treatment history. They had given her a temporary login.

For almost all the horses, the only reported problems in the past year had been various degrees of lameness, and that was to be expected – not because there had been an absence of other conditions, but because few other problems would affect the primary value of the horse for most people: their ability to ride it.

Only two horses were unknown and, chipless, unclaimed by any owner. The only way to determine their age was via their teeth. Both of them had Galvayne’s groove, an indentation on horse incisors that was found to appear shortly after a horse turns ten, and extends with age, only to disappear as they grow older. It ran halfway down for one, slightly less for the other. Based on the condition of the other teeth and the head itself, she’d place the first around seventeen to nineteen years old, the other perhaps early to mid-twenties. An old girl for a horse. The thought came, strange and discarded. There was no way of knowing the sex.

She cleaned herself up at the sink in the corner. Her throat was dry, even a little sore, but she didn’t want to call it a night yet.

She looked at each stump with a black-rimmed loupe, its high-power glass lens magnifying the flesh below, its ridges and its furrows. She shone light at the dead. Each decapitated stump bore signatures, both in the flesh and in the bone. The deaths had begun with the slitting of the necks, ventral soft tissues cut smoothly in a curve. The skin, the trachea, the major blood vessels were all severed in two. In some cases the bone and cartilage itself had been nicked in the same motion, but whatever blade had done this could not contest against the skeleton beneath. In most, decapitation had occurred through the vertebrae.

There were abrasion ridges in the dirty white bones. The bone cut ends were slightly charred, the soft tissues dorsal and lateral to the vertebrae frayed and singed. She found small wire fragments when she looked at a few of them, confirming her initial hypothesis that the heads might have been sawn off. But she doubted, based on the thread and the presence of knife cuts above, that all this had been accomplished with a power tool. It almost looked like what you’d see with a fetotomy wire, or something like it, at least. Old-school vets used to use – and sometimes still did use – this kind of wire to dismember dead calves within the birth canal, hacking off heads and limbs so they could be safely removed from their mothers. Nowadays such wires were also utilized for dehorning, or sometimes to amputate cow toes.

The overall effect and cleanness of the decapitation varied across the sixteen. The killers had, perhaps, became more and more practised as they went along, or more and more frantic.

Or one had known what they were doing, and the other had not.

A knife to slit the throat of a standing, partially sedated horse.

The animal’s legs slowly crumple.

It bleeds, barely able to breathe, until it falls to the floor.

A wire to remove the head as it dies. A knife in case it is needed.

She’d read the witness statement.

They – they were crying. One of them was crying, the hermit had said.

Cooper made a note to look for abuse cases in the area. Whether there had been any spikes in missing or mistreated animals.

She went on.

Cooper began to skin them. It was harder than with some other species; some you could cut into the skin and pull the face right off. With horse heads, the skin stuck closer to the skull bones beneath. You had to remove it in patches, in fragments, though she tried to do as much in one go as she could. She worked on the best-preserved specimens first, double-checking her initial work as she went. She was curious to