The Death Sculptor

Fifty

The blood had coagulated and dried onto the floor and walls, and as the red blood cells died and started to decompose, the odd, metallic smell had faded, giving way to a much stronger odor – something like rotten meat mixed with sour milk. Many who’d been to a brutal crime scene would argue that that was exactly what a violent death smelled like.

Hunter paused by the door to Nashorn’s boat cabin once again. Revisiting crime scenes, alone, in the dead of night, had become almost an obsession with him. It gave him a chance to look around uninterrupted, to take his time, to try, if only for a split second, to adopt the same frame of mind as the killer. But how could anyone make sense of the senseless?

Hunter had read and reread the forensic team’s crime-scene report. The many shoeprints he’d seen around the cabin’s floor the day before were very inconsistent and couldn’t be matched to a specific shoe size. There was so much blood covering the floor that, as soon as the killer moved his foot, more blood seeped back to obscure its outline. That made the forensics analysis a lot more difficult. Mike Brindle, the forensics agent who led the team that attended the scene, told Hunter earlier in the day that he’d found something odd about the shoeprints. The distribution of weight from each step seemed to be unequal. That suggested that the killer either walked with an asymmetric abnormality – as if he had a limp, or had deliberately worn wrong-sized shoes. It was a trick that Hunter had encountered before. Forensics couldn’t identify a sole pattern, either, which suggested that the killer had covered his shoes with a thick plastic cover, or something on those lines. That would also explain the lack of bloody footprints outside the cabin.

Brindle had assured Hunter that his team had left the cabin in the exact same state in which they’d found it. The objects that had been removed for forensic examination had been listed in the document Hunter had with him. Everything else was left in its place.

Hunter zipped up his Tyvek coverall and stepped into the cabin. He wasn’t worried about contaminating the scene; he just didn’t want his shoes and clothes to get smeared with blood, or drenched in that sickening smell. He knew that when that smell found its way into any fabric, no amount of washing or dry cleaning would get rid of it. It was a psychological thing. The brain would associate the clothes with the smell, even after the smell was long gone.

He paused in the center of the room and slowly allowed his eyes to roam the space around him.

Was the killer already on board when Nashorn got to his boat?

The cabin door showed no signs of forced entry, though picking the two locks on it wouldn’t pose a great obstacle to anyone with experience.

Hunter went over most of the same movements he and Garcia had gone through the day before, making sure he hadn’t missed anything. He walked over to the small fridge and pulled its door open. It had been well stocked – several bottles of water, cheese, cold meats and plenty of beer. He rechecked the trashcan – a candy-bar wrapper and an empty bag of beef jerky. No beer cans. No glasses out in the small kitchen either. If Nashorn had invited anyone on board just before sailing off for two weeks, it probably hadn’t been to shoot the breeze.

So what then?

Garcia had suggested earlier that maybe the killer had approached Nashorn outside the boat first with some sort of weapon, forcing him to open the door before striking him across the face. Given both crime scenes, and Doctor Hove’s conclusion that the killer’s weapon of choice had been an electric kitchen carving knife, Hunter found that theory very unlikely. This killer didn’t like firearms.

He crossed the room to the far wall, where the largest concentration of blood splatter was located. The chair in which Nashorn’s body was found had been taken away by forensics, but its spot was marked by masking tape. Hunter paused at the center of it and looked around. There was nowhere to hide. Anyone attempting to conceal himself would’ve been spotted straight away, unless he was a midget. From the door, Nashorn would’ve been able to see the whole of the cabin, with the exception of the bathroom’s interior, but only if its door was closed. If the killer had hidden in there, then he would have had two options: wait until Nashorn pulled the bathroom door open and club him across the face with whichever weapon had been used; or pull the door open himself and storm towards Nashorn once he’d entered the cabin.

Hunter immediately saw two problems with that theory. As in any small boat cabin, the bathroom wasn’t very spacious. Doctor Hove was certain that Nashorn had been knocked out with a single, powerful blow to the face, and the blow had come from right to left in a swinging motion. That was impossible to achieve if standing inside the bathroom. There simply wasn’t enough space. If the killer had stormed out of the bathroom towards Nashorn, no matter where inside the cabin Nashorn had been, in such a cramped environment, it would’ve taken the killer at least two to three seconds to get to his victim. That was enough time for Nashorn to notice the attack and assume the most basic of defensive positions – hands up to protect the face. Even though his arms had been severed from his body, there were no defensive wounds to his hands or arms.

Hunter’s gaze circled the room again and paused on the small door to the inboard engine compartment. Like most things at that end of the cabin, it was covered in dried blood. With the forensics team in a hurry to start processing the scene last night, Hunter had not had a chance to properly check the engine pit. He crouched down next to it and lifted the door open. The compartment was small, not much bigger than a regular cupboard. The engine itself occupied most of the space. Blood had leaked in through the top of the door and dripped onto the engine and the oil-stained floor of the pit. Hunter was about to close the door when he saw something that caught his attention. A pattern of blood across the center part of the engine. Not dripped blood that had seeped through the door, but splattered blood. Hunter had seen that type of splatter many times – wound-spray, usually caused by a rotating motion, like when an assailant hits a victim across the face. The force of the blow would cause the victim’s neck to rotate, and blood from the inflicted wound would fly out in a thin arc.

He reached for the forensics-report folder and quickly flipped through the evidence photographs. As he found what he was looking for, his brain went into overdrive, calculating all the possibilities. He reached down, stuck his head into the pit, and fiddled with the underside of the engine, as if feeling for something. When he pulled his hand out, it was covered in a thin sheet of slimy liquid.

Hunter felt his blood warm inside his veins. ‘Smart motherfucker.’