Raindrops played off a drumhead of blue-tinged flesh at John Penley’s feet. It was human, but it wasn’t a body. Ragged lacerations exposed thick strands of muscle and crushed sections of pale-white bone. Remnants of a headless, limbless shell of a male torso rested at the river’s edge. An open chest wound became a flesh-lined catch basin for the pelting rain. Each drop sounded with a deep plunk and swirled up a pink froth from within.
Portable halogen lights, erected on the levee road, bathed the muddy bank in a harsh glare. Red plastic flags atop thin metal rods sprouted up from the mud, marking the area around the torso. The little flags whipped and rattled in the wind that ran up the levee bank. Penley pulled up the collar of his raincoat against the driving rain, but the chill he felt didn’t come from the elements.
The malformed tattoo of an Aztec warrior on the victim’s chest was familiar to Detective John Penley. The unique prison tattoo identified the partial corpse as Daniel Cardozo, a high-ranking gangbanger.
Everything that made Cardozo human—and there were those who debated whether the violent drug addict was part of the species—was missing. The man’s chest held only a shallow pool of bloody rainwater. The remains were little more than a husk of a man.
A sucking sound in the mud behind Penley pulled his focus away from the broken gang member. David Potter, a crime-scene technician, struggled for footing in the thick ooze. Penley shielded his eyes from the lights as Potter made his way down the bank, mud leeching to the ankles of the technician’s rubber boots with every step. The burden of bulky equipment and heavy nylon satchels threatened to topple the one-hundred-thirty-pound man.
“Where do you want me to start, Detective?” Potter asked.
“Let’s get some photos of the riverbank, below the body, before the rain washes everything away.” Penley pointed to a section of slick mud indentations that ran from the water’s edge to the torn human remains.
Potter placed the equipment cases down on a small patch of bent grass, avoiding the viscous mud closer to the riverbank. He unpacked a thick-framed digital camera and pulled a stack of numbered yellow signs from one of the nylon satchels. Potter took a wide approach to the riverbank, well away from anything in the area he was going to photograph. A yellow marker with the number one went into the ooze at the spot where the water met the slope of the levee. The mud held an impression, a deep, V-shaped indentation in the bank. The flash from Potter’s camera bathed the spot in artificial daylight for a moment and revealed several deep footprints.
“Detective, someone hopped out of a boat into the mud and sank at least calf-deep. The bow left a nice indentation.”
“What kind of boat?” Penley asked.
“It wasn’t one of those flat-bottomed jobs or a big fiberglass deep-hull boat either. It’s too sloppy to get an impression, but I’d be willing to bet it was a lightweight aluminum fishing boat—maybe ten to twelve feet.”
“Why go through all the trouble of dumping a body up on the bank? Had to know we’d find it,” Penley said.
“Maybe they wanted you to,” Potter said in between camera flashes.
The sound of car doors echoed down the bank from the levee road. Penley shielded his eyes against the halogen spotlights once more and saw the outline of Elizabeth White, deputy medical examiner, on the levee road. The detective pointed in the direction of the flags marking the trail to the body.
“Should we set up a tarp over the body?” she asked as she approached.
“Your call,” Penley said. “But he didn’t leave us anything. He was careful. He’s always careful. This is the third dump in the last six weeks, and we haven’t pulled so much as a carpet fiber from the bodies.”
Penley gestured to the remains. “Meet Daniel Cardozo. Gang member, drug dealer, and pimp.”
Elizabeth knelt next to the open torso and pulled up on a flap of rib cage with her latex-gloved hand. Severed arteries, torn diaphragm muscle, and an esophagus draped against the spine. “Have you located the rest of him? A limb? Anything?”
“Nothing, and we won’t. Just like the other two victims,” Penley said.
She traced the lines of the tattoo on the victim’s chest with her finger. “This is different. The others had no physical markers, no characteristics to identify them. Why did he leave this?”
“Might be the only thing Cardozo did that was worth a damn.”
“What?”
“Getting inked. That tattoo—it gives us a place to start. We don’t have to work through missing persons reports and hope for a DNA hit in the system. We know who the victim is this time.”
“You’re that certain?”
“When I was on the gang task force, we tracked Cardozo and the other West Block Norteños gang members. I never had enough to nail Cardozo, but he always ran on the fringes, you know? If drugs were moving across the river, he had a hand in it. Weapons? Same deal. So I’ve seen that tattoo more than a few times.”
Penley followed the trail of plastic flags back up to the road, leaving Elizabeth and two of her assistants to document the remains and pack what was left of the gangbanger in an opaque plastic sheet.
The killer did society a favor when he got rid of Cardozo, Penley figured. But the hairs on the back of the detective’s neck prickled looking at the lump of flesh wrapped like a birthday present. The feeling wasn’t from the savage brutality of the attack but rather from an unanswered question.
Why did the killer dismember Cardozo and the victims before him?