Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (latest ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Rotting garbage and animal urine curdled the air. The silence resonated with the eerie heaviness of a ghost town if you were prone to fanciful bullshit. Petrosky wasn’t. He squinted at the house.

The building was beyond repair, part of a housing project long abandoned by any developer or landlord. Even panhandlers would not come out this far to squat for a night when they had to trek five miles back in the morning to beg for their breakfast.

So why here?

Behind him, rubber soles on gravel crunched closer.

“Morning, Boss.”

“California.”

“I brought you some coffee and a protein bar. I’ll get them after we finish up here.”

Petrosky grimaced.

“Come on, Boss. You’ll like it.”

“That’s what you said about tofu. I will take the coffee, though. Later.” Petrosky walked up the front steps, Morrison at his heel.

“He killed another one pretty fast, didn’t he?” Morrison said.

“Too fast.” Only ten days between murders, highly unusual even for a serial killer. They ducked through the front door, kicking up dust and mold that sat, itchy, in Petrosky’s throat.

“I don’t like this.”

“I bet she liked it less.” Petrosky glanced around the living room where pieces of roofing tile had tumbled haphazardly to the splintered floor. He followed the low hum of voices and the phosphorescent ricochet of floodlights down the groaning basement stairs and inhaled deeply when he reached the lower floor. The scent of mushrooms and dank earth clung to the back of his tongue. A dull sheen lit the basement windows from the outside, the sunlight struggling to illuminate through years of filth.

The woman lay prone on an old dining table; wrists and ankles each bound to a different table leg with leather restraints. Blond hair fanned around her head, mussed as if she were merely asleep, but there was no mistaking the vacant death stare in her hazel eyes.

A few techs bustled around the dim space, tweezing and bagging and scraping. Petrosky ignored them and scanned the victim’s extremities. Graying skin covered her arms, and the fingers of her left hand were contorted like a claw on the table. Stiff. No maggots yet. She hadn’t been dead for long. “Do you have a positive ID?” Petrosky asked no one in particular.

“Jane Trazowski,” someone behind him said. “She’s in the system, got a couple charges for solicitation of prostitution. We need the family for a positive ID, but Connors here recognized her from a domestic violence arrest where her kids were—”

“Fine,” Petrosky said. He cleared his throat and dragged his eyes over her belly. Her abdomen had been hacked apart, revealing gelatinous blobs of organs and the slick sheen of intestine. Like the first body, the long whitish tube was splayed open, a sheet of bloodied tissue, more torn and gnarled in some areas than others. Either their guy had been pissed, or the rats had gotten to her already. Petrosky squinted at the ruin. Probably both.

“Damn. I feel bad for them.” Morrison’s voice was irritatingly nasal.

Fucking surfers. They always sounded high. Though maybe he was just trying not to breathe through his nose.

“You feel bad for who? The woman or her kids?”

Morrison’s face went red. “Both.”

Morrison would have to cut out that blushing shit before he was allowed to handle any perps. Too much visible emotion and suspects would eat him alive.

The stairs wept behind them with a shuddery scree, and Petrosky and Morrison turned to see Brian Thompson, the medical examiner, coming down the last few steps. He was tall and lanky with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and teeth like a mule. He nodded at Petrosky and approached the table reeking of cigarette smoke—good tobacco, none of that pepperminty menthol bullshit. Petrosky’s mouth watered.

“Suspect used standard metal clasps to keep the skin peeled back while he worked.” Thompson circled the table, gray eyes wandering like he was bored as fuck to be there. “You can get them from any hardware store. Usually these guys are perfectionists. While the dissection is pretty meticulous, there is a brutality to it that goes beyond the simple cuts themselves. See this here?” Thompson gestured to a series of scrapes visible along the underside of the body. “Splinters in the skin. Looks like she was rubbing against the table, trying to escape.”

Petrosky peered at the cuts. “You think she was captive for a while before—”