DAVID STUDIED THE hand. A cigarette dangled from the right side of his mouth, its plumes of smoke a nebulous shield against the ugly smells of the Sundown Lounge parking lot. The worst of these rose from the hand itself, or perhaps the smudge of sticky pavement surrounding it. He slipped gloves over his own hands and hunkered down for a closer look.
It was an ordinary hand, as hands go—curls of black hair sprouting from between its first and second knuckles, calluses on the pressure points of its palms in a weightlifter’s signature pattern, fingernails squared and trim and free of dirt. The strangeness began below the wrist, where slightly hairy flesh gave way to a ragged stump of bone and sinew. A wild fringe of tattered flesh described its edges, suggesting a less than clean cut. The last of its blood had long since drained to a tacky film on the pavement, giving the exsanguinated flesh a pale, marble cast.
“What you think, should we bring him in for questioning?” asked Walter. A cigarette jutted from beneath his grey moustache. He took a drag, filling his pudgy red cheeks, and exhaled a long jet of smoke through his nostrils.
“I dunno. You think he’ll talk?”
David sketched a chalk outline around the hand and picked it up. Walter snapped on a flashlight and held it aloft, giving David enough light to work. Rings decorated its pinky and middle fingers, bands of solid gold bejewelled with tiny diamonds and an ostentatious ruby, respectively. David clucked his tongue. The hand had been out here for at least an hour before the cops had showed up, lying unprotected in the parking lot of one of the city’s less reputable strip clubs—as if any strip club in Niagara Falls could be considered reputable—and yet its rings, worth thousands of dollars apiece by the looks of them, remained unplundered.
A few rubberneckers, obviously drunk by the look of their droopy-eyed grins and teetering postures, stood behind the yellow police caution tape. The first responding officer was in the process of brushing them off, a task impeded by their inebriation and the fact that at least one of them was busy hitting on her.
“Shit, that’s fucked up, though, huh? You must be a pretty tough chick, lookin’ at shit like that all day.”
“There’s worse parts of my job, sir, believe it or not. Now, I’m going to have to ask you one more time to move along. This is a crime scene.”
“We’re just lookin’,” the second man said.
“Yeah, view’s not all bad,” the first man added with a wink.
The officer rolled her eyes.
“I’m going to speak to the detectives. Stay behind this line. If you’re not well on your way home—in a taxi—by the time I’m done, then both of you are getting a ride with me. And not the kind of ride you’re thinking of.”
The two men giggled to each other as the officer walked over to David and Walter, shaking her head. “Idiots. This poor schmuck had to get offed at the Downer.”
“Is there a better place?” asked Walter.
“A park. A church. Somewhere with less booze and testosterone. Forensics guys are on their way to bag and tag. I asked around inside, but no one seems to’ve seen anything.”
“So they say,” said David. “Hard to imagine something like this was quiet.”
The officer shrugged. “Manager says he heard some shouting, but I guess that’s about par for the course outside this place at two AM. Most of the regulars had already called it a night, so parking lot was pretty sparse. First guy says he saw anything claims he spotted the mess walking to his car.”
David set the hand down gently where he’d found it and did a quick tour of the scene. The hand was far and away the biggest part of the victim in evidence. Otherwise. all that remained were a few scraps of cloth and denim.
And blood. Lots and lots of blood. A severed hand on its own wasn’t necessarily evidence of homicide—David had seen folks survive some serious butchery in his time—but a quick glance at the breadth and depth of the red puddle drying on the tarmac told him that whoever had lost this hand wouldn’t be stumbling into the precinct to claim it. That left the question of where the body went. And who took it. And why. As questions went, David figured he wouldn’t encounter a shortage for some time to come.
Clicking on his own flashlight, David traced the perimeter of the puddle. He made it about halfway around before spotting an irregularity in its grim coastline, a few rivulets of dried fluid that had flowed mysteriously uphill. With slow, measured steps, David marked their trajectory, and after five or so paces noticed a few red droplets scabbing the otherwise dry pavement. He followed the dots to a field at the edge of the parking lot. Bulrushes and crab grass cluttered a shallow culvert, their blades bent double and dyed a deep shade of crimson.
Well, that answers one question. Probably. He snapped off the flashlight. “Call in a team,” he told the officer. “We’re gonna have to do a little exploring, and it’ll be a hell of a lot easier once we get some daylight.”
“You need me for that?” the officer asked. “I’m an hour past the end of my shift as it is, and this mess is sure to leave a bitch kitty of paperwork.”
“I got the deets from her already, Davey,” said Walter. “She should be good to go.”
“Yeah, I think you’re all set. Thanks for keeping the scene.”
“No worries.” A look of sudden disgust congealed on her face. “Ugh. Idiots.”
Across the parking lot, the two drunks had wandered away from the police line and were climbing into their car. The lead one gunned the engine and peeled out of the parking lot, nearly scratching the fender of the manager’s BMW on his way out.
David shook his head. “There’s a traffic fatality in the making.”
“Worse,” said the officer, trotting off to her squad car. “Even more fucking paperwork.”