1
Rise and shine, bitches.
I don’t need to look at my phone to know who’s calling. There’s only one person—and one reason—my phone is ringing at five-thirty AM. Only a mile into my run, I stop, breath clouding around me, and pull my phone from my armband. A bead of sweat rolls down between my breasts.
“Bisset,” I answer, and start walking to keep my muscles warm.
“Sorry to wake you, Detective,” the officer on the line says, and I recognize the voice as Mike Anderson, a rookie cop working the graveyard shift.
“I was already up. Have a body for me?”
“We do. Joggers found it about twenty minutes ago on a run. Just another reason not to be a runner, eh?”
“I’m literally on a run right now.”
“Well, too bad you didn’t find it. These girls are pretty shaken up.”
“I can imagine.” I stop at a crosswalk and take a minute to stretch my calves. “So why are you calling me?”
“Once you see it, you’ll know why.”
Desperate to work my way up the ranks, I took on the cases no one else wanted. The ones deemed “spooky” or “weird” that got me the nickname of Mulder amongst the other detectives. What started as a joke quickly became a compliment. The occult and magic don’t exist. There was always a logical explanation, well, as logical as any murder can be. Taking on—and solving—some of the Philadelphia Police Department’s most obscure cases was no easy feat, but I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge.
“Text me the address.”
“Sending now.”
“Thanks, Anderson.” I stretch my legs and wait for the text to come through with the location of the body. Then I’m off, turning around and running home to change and take off again, though this time by car.
The body was found along a road on the outskirts of town. Three college students stumbled upon it on their run this morning, noticing a bloody shoe sticking up from the weeds.
I park behind a marked police car and get out, looking at the small gathering of people. Most are official law enforcement, and a few others are gawkers. There aren’t too many houses on this road, which is both good and bad. The road has been blocked off on either side, stopping any traffic from coming through and tampering with my crime scene. The area around the body has been taped off, and the girls who found it are sitting inside a squad car to keep warm.
“Morning, Detective Bisset.”
“Morning,” I say, ducking under the yellow police tape Officer Nick Beasley is holding up for me. I gather my hair at the nape of my neck, securing it in a messy bun to keep it out of the way. Nick casts me a sideways glance, one I purposely ignore, and walks in stride with me to the crime scene. “So what are we looking at here?”
“I’m not really sure. We can’t make sense of it. Just wait and see.”
I pull latex gloves from my pocket and put them on. The body is in a ditch on the side of a rural road, and I can smell it before I can see it, letting me know right away it was dumped here days after the murder took place. I move down the ditch, careful not to get my feet tangled in the tall dead grass that’s been buried under snow until recently.
Flies swarm around the body, landing on the man’s face. His lips are dry and cracked, parted slightly. One fly lands on the side of his mouth and crawls inside. His eyes, once brown, are slit halfway open and sunken into his skull. I start with the head like I always do, well, when my victims have heads, that is, and scan my eyes down.
There are multiple puncture wounds on his neck. At first glance they look like they’re from barbecue skewers, but the bruising around them looks more like a hickey. I run my eyes down his arms and—fuck.
Now I know what everyone was talking about.
Both of the victim’s arms have been sliced open from the elbow to the wrist and his bones removed. That is definitely something I haven’t seen before.
“Do we have an ID on the vic?” I ask, crouching down to further inspect the body. I turn my head and inhale. Even after years on the force, the smell of a rotting human body doesn’t get any easier to take in.
“Yes,” Officer Beasley tells me. “Eric Brownell, thirty-two. He lives alone in an apartment downtown, and wasn’t reported missing. We did call the gaming store where he worked and he was a no-show for his shift on Wednesday.”
“When was the last time he was at work.”
“Tuesday. He closed the store along with one other person. She said she saw him get in his car and drive away.”
I nod, looking at the victim. He wasn’t murdered on Wednesday, I can tell from the state of the body. Today is Monday, and I’m guessing he wasn’t killed until Friday, left to decay over the weekend. Once he started to smell, the murderer dumped him.
