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

In an update on a recent story, the killer responsible for two murders in the Ash Park area may have used even more horrific methods than first speculated. According to an anonymous source, the victims were surgically opened while still alive, enduring the dissection of intestinal walls, and possibly the stomach, before perishing. Police have no strong leads. If you have any information, please contact the Ash Park Police Department.

Now they needed someone to cover the false confessions from the crazies. Fuck it; he’d have Morrison get one of his buddies to do it. Or he’d just give the crazies the number to the goddamn newspaper office.

Petrosky slammed his fist against his desk. “Hookers are killed every day, and they pick my case to publicize? Why do they care all of a sudden?”

But he already knew. If it bleeds, it leads.

Morrison looked up from his desk across the aisle and shrugged as his phone rang.

Petrosky righted his upended coffee cup. “I swear to God if I find out who the hell—”

“Petrosky!”

He startled at the strain in Morrison’s voice.

Morrison was already out of his chair and pulling on his coat. “We’ve got another body.”

“This doesn’t fit, Boss.”

The building was a skeleton of a factory. In some places, towering pillars of cement and steel reached toward the sky; in others, there were only piles of rubble. Petrosky grimaced at the steel ribs as he passed underneath, wondering how much jostling it would take to make them fall.

The basement seemed sturdy enough, at least for now, with steel support poles like the kind found in an underground garage. The concrete roof was cracked in places, but intact, blocking the elements and protecting anyone inside from the falling debris of the upper stories. Off the main area, smaller rooms with cement walls offered even more privacy—probably why their killer had chosen it, along with the building’s distance from the more populated areas of the city. It was dumb luck that some homeless man had snuck down here during last night’s snowstorm and found the body.

Petrosky followed the murmur of voices to a back room. In the center, a man lay on a bloodied plastic tarp on top of more cinderblocks, his eyes closed, his mouth open in a silent scream. At each of the four corners of the makeshift table, bolted-in metal cuffs secured the man’s wrists and ankles. A straight cut ran down the center of the body. The man’s intestines were piled on his scrawny bird chest in filmy coils.

Crime techs bustled around the concrete blocks, dusting the restraints with fingerprint powder.

“Got an ID?” Petrosky said.

A dark-haired, darker-skinned tech stood from where he’d been crouching behind the concrete block. “Jacob Campbell. Wallet was in his pants pocket.”

“He’s not wearing pants, tech.”

“They were in the corner, Detective.”

Petrosky glowered at the tech until he crouched behind the cement wall again. “Any sign of a poem? Lettering?”

Another tech, who was working on something on the floor, shook her head without looking his way.

Petrosky peered at the ceiling. “Too far away for anyone to hear much. But to know the basement was down here…he knows the area. Gotta be a local.”

Morrison nodded stiffly.

All of this was shit they knew already. What they didn’t know was why they had a new victim who didn’t fit the original pattern. Looked like McCallum was wrong about their killer having a type. What else had he been wrong about?

The medical examiner arrived with a stretcher and acknowledged Petrosky with a twitch of his bristly jaw.

“Wait a second,” Morrison said it so softly that it took Petrosky a minute to figure out who had spoken. Morrison rifled through his notebook, brows furrowed, until he tapped a sheet with his index finger. “Got it, Boss. His address is the same one I pulled the other day from the domestic violence shelter file.”

“Why was his address in the files for a women’s shelter?”