The Chimera Secret

11

Ethan stood in the clinical surroundings of the autopsy room and looked down at the corpse before him. The body was that of a young, athletic male, probably no more than thirty years old. Broad chest. Narrow waist. Long, strong legs and muscular arms. Only one thing was missing.

‘Where’s his head?’ Lopez asked, her normally olive skin pale and her eyes wide with horror.

The body of Gavin Coltz ended abruptly at his neck. A bloodied stump of bone protruded from the flesh, the remains of where his spinal column and vertebrae had been snapped off with unimaginable violence.

The consulting pathologist, Dr. Jenny Shriver, gestured to a nearby box concealed beneath a sheet of blue plastic.

‘It was found fifty feet below where he died, in the bed of a shallow creek. It’s not in good shape.’

Jenny Shriver was a middle-aged woman whose features might once have been considered attractive but had been creased by years of seeing human bodies tragically mutilated or decayed to the point of being unrecognizable. Ethan guessed that no matter how detached a person might become to death, it still left its somber imprint on their faces.

‘Did the water accelerate the rate of decay?’ Lopez asked.

‘No,’ Shriver replied. ‘The impact shattered the skull like a bag of chips under a car tire. The jaw was broken in fifteen places and both of the eyeballs had been blasted from their sockets. We weren’t able to recover them.’

Ethan looked at Gavin Coltz’s corpse. The skin was a pallid white but the upper chest was stained with huge purple bruises, each the size of Ethan’s hand and surrounded by a halo of sickly yellow skin.

‘What are those?’ he asked, gesturing to the marks.

‘Compression fractures,’ Shriver identified them. ‘Caused by blunt trauma.’

‘So he was attacked by another human and not an animal?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Somebody must have hit this guy with a truck to cause that much hemorrhage.’

Shriver did not reply, simply casting a serious gaze in Lopez’s direction before she rested one gloved hand on the body.

‘He was not attacked by a human being, Miss Lopez.’

‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked, eager to cut to the chase. ‘We have a man locked up in a cell in Riggins under suspicion of murder who swears that he didn’t do it, and there’s still one other person missing. We need to know what we’re up against here.’

Shriver lifted her hand from the corpse, took a deep breath and gestured to the various lesions lacing the body as she spoke.

‘The victim was killed by a single blow to the head that resulted in decapitation, the neck severed between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. That blow was sufficient to send the severed skull flying more than thirty feet through the air to land in the creek bed.’

Ethan ran what she had said through his head for a moment.

‘But you said that the skull landed in the creek, causing the massive damage.’

‘The impact that blew this man’s eyeballs out of their sockets was caused by the blow that killed him,’ Shriver corrected. ‘The skull hit the water below but not with enough force to cause this kind of damage. All of the major fractures were caused by that first, single, lethal impact.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Lopez said. ‘Nobody could hit a man that hard, certainly not Jesse MacCarthy.’

‘Correct,’ Shriver replied as though congratulating a schoolgirl. ‘The amount of force required to physically tear a man’s head from his shoulders via a single impact is the equivalent of being hit by a thirty-pound sledgehammer traveling at sixty miles per hour. No human being can produce that kind of physical power.’

Ethan looked down at the bruised, battered corpse.

‘So something hits him so hard that it kills him instantly, and then it continues striking him?’

‘The sign of a frenzied attack,’ Shriver acknowledged. ‘A crime of rage.’

‘So maybe it’s a bear attack, a mother protecting its young or something?’ Lopez suggested.

Shriver walked across to the box beneath the blue plastic. She lifted the sheet off and picked the clear acrylic box up. The head within the box was a macabre visage, the empty eye sockets black and lifeless, the tongue poking fat and bloated from a slack mouth. The once-clean line of the man’s jaw was crumpled and bulky, shards of shattered jawbone trying to push through white skin. But it was the impression on one side of the skull that instantly caught Ethan’s attention as Shriver set the box down on top of the corpse’s chest.

Gavin Coltz’s head had been stoved in on one side, the skull crushed almost flat but the skin unbroken. Shallow depressions ran from the rear of his skull across the side of the face, like channels beneath the skin.

‘We made a scan of the face and skull,’ Shriver informed them, ‘to digitally preserve the details of the impact. One of my lab assistants reversed the image to try and deduce the shape of whatever hit this man.’

‘What did they find?’ Lopez asked.

Shriver turned and picked up a glossy black photograph, then pinned it to the wall nearby. Ethan felt something squirm through his guts as he looked at the image, like a primal fear seldom felt but never forgotten.

‘Jesus,’ Lopez whispered.

The image was that of the base of an enormous clenched fist, the channel-like depressions crunched into Coltz’s skull formed by broad, fat fingers with an opposable thumb folded beneath them.

‘The hand was clenched into a fist but struck the victim flat on the side of his head,’ Shriver explained. ‘It’s a way of striking somebody without risking the damage to the hand that can be the result of punching in a more classic, knuckles-first way.’

Earl Carpenter looked away from the gruesome imagery and caught Ethan’s eye.

‘Now you see why we didn’t want to deal with this alone,’ he explained. ‘The Bureau walked before we found Coltz’s body, and frankly I don’t see the need to bring them back in. Sure, we might possibly have the world’s largest fugitive on our hands, but my guts are telling me that this isn’t a human being.’

Ethan stared at Coltz’s remains for a moment before replying.

‘You say that you didn’t find any other remains at the scene.’

‘Nothin’,’ Carpenter confirmed.

Ethan looked at Shriver. ‘So this mystery animal kills Coltz with a single blow, beats the hell out of his corpse, then carries off another body without leaving a trace? Why attack one so savagely and then carry another away while letting the third, still-living witness, flee the scene unharmed?’

Dr. Shriver shrugged.

‘It’s not my place to solve the crime, Mr. Warner. All that I can tell you for sure is that whatever killed Gavin Coltz was more powerful than any human being could ever be, and it most likely will kill again if it encounters people out there in the woods.’

Ethan briefly recalled an image that had haunted his thoughts for months, when Jarvis had used Project Watchman to show him a glimpse of the future. Time had blurred his memory, but he remembered enough to know that whatever was hunting people in the forests of Idaho truly was something inhuman and that Lopez would inevitably find herself in danger.

Ethan forced the images from his mind as Lopez gave the corpse one last glance and then turned to Ethan.

‘We need to talk to Jesse MacCarthy. He’s the one that witnessed Coltz’s death.’