“A professional one.” I moved to his face, and the damage there made me pause despite myself. His nose had been shattered, the cartilage collapsed inward, the bridge flattened. Left eye swollen completely shut, the orbital socket likely fractured beneath it. Jaw hanging askew, broken in at least two places. Lips split in multiple locations, teeth knocked out or broken off.
“Somebody worked on his face with something hard. Bat or a pipe, maybe. This isn’t fists.”
Jack leaned in closer. “The bruising patterns. They don’t look random.”
“No. They targeted specific areas.” I moved down to his torso, lifting the edge of the blanket to expose his ribs and back. “Face, ribs, kidneys. The places you hit when you want someone conscious and talking.”
“Textbook interrogation,” Jack said.
I found the burns on his lower back and felt my stomach clench for reasons that had nothing to do with morning sickness. “Cigarette burns. Eight of them.” I pointed to the differences—the dark angry ones, the lighter ones that had started to scar over. “These aren’t all from the same session. Some of these are a couple of days old.”
“So someone had him for a while.”
“Someone had him and took their time. You see this burn here?” I asked, pointing to one directly in the center of the back. “This is a postmortem burn. You can compare it to the other burns. There’s no inflammation or damage to the surrounding tissue in the postmortem burn.”
“One last insult,” Jack said.
The zip ties on his wrists had cut deep grooves into his skin, raw and bloody, the flesh shredded where the plastic had sawed through. “He fought against the restraints,” I said.
I moved to his hands, and that’s when I stopped talking. Jack noticed.
“What?” he asked.
“His fingers.” I held up one of the bound hands carefully, angling it so Jack could see. “Every one of them. Both hands. Broken.”
Jack looked. I watched his expression shift. Not shock, he’d been doing this too long for shock, but something colder. Recognition.
“Not all at once,” I continued. “Some are clean snaps at the knuckle. Others were twisted until the bone gave way. This was done one at a time. Deliberately.”
“God,” he said on a sigh.
“But look underneath the damage.” I turned the hand slightly. “The calluses on his first two knuckles. See how thick they are, even through the swelling. And the old fractures here and here.” I indicated the remodeled bone with my fingertip. “These knuckles have been broken and healed and broken again over years. This man was a fighter. Not a weekend warrior. Someone who trained seriously and hit things for a living.”
Jack sat back on his heels. “And someone broke every finger he had.”
“Knew exactly what they were taking from him,” I said. “You don’t break a fighter’s hands by accident. That’s a message.”
Jack was quiet for a moment, processing. “So we’ve got days of captivity. Systematic beating. Cigarette burns. Broken hands. And then a .22 to the back of the head while he was on his knees.” He looked at me. “That’s not a murder, Jaye. That’s a professional interrogation that ended in an execution.”
“That’s what his body is telling me.”
I moved down to his feet. They were bare, filthy, and caked with a grayish-brown residue that didn’t look like ordinary dirt. Powdery in some places, packed hard in others, ground deep into his calluses and the creases between his toes. I scraped samples into an evidence bag.
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know yet. The lab will tell us. But wherever they held him, he was walking around in it barefoot.” I sealed the last bag. “It’s specific. If we find the location, I can match it.”
I made a thin incision and inserted a thermometer. “Core temp is ninety-one. With the ambient heat and the dumpster acting like an oven, I’d put time of death somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours ago. Rigor’s fully established, which supports that.” I checked the lividity, the purple-red discoloration where blood had pooled after death, fixed and unmovable along his back. “Lividity’s fixed on his posterior. He was lying flat on his back for hours after he died. Then someone moved him and dumped him here.”
I stripped off my gloves and stood, feeling my knees pop from crouching too long.
Jack stood with me. “He’s a big guy. The chances of this being a one-man show are slim.”
“This was organized. Structured. They knew where to hit. What to break. Whoever did this has probably done it before.”
I looked down at the young man on the ground—broken, discarded, nameless. But not voiceless. Not anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
