Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

clearing, his torso on its side, his legs bent, poised as if still running, even in death. His head was gone. Both arms severed at the wrists, his hands nowhere in sight. His flesh was blackened, but not to the degree Bobby’s had been. It was likely little or no accelerant had been used, just dead leaves and whatever the killer could find nearby.

What was distinctly different between this scene and the one at the post office was that good-looking, affable Mahon, who liked NASCAR and wet corn bread, had some sort of wooden rod protruding from his chest. He had been pinned to the ground, probably while still alive. It made the decapitation go easier.

Fia tried not to let the screams of the horses, the men that night, pierce her brain. Her brother Gill had been pinned to the ground by a broadsword and decapitated. She remembered the green wool of his cloak, still on his shoulders, bloody, fluttering on the morning breeze.

She heard Glen, just behind her, take a deep breath as he saw what she saw and it snapped her back to the present century. She could have sworn he said “Fuck me,” under his breath and it almost made her smile. Almost.

“Saved the best detail for last, did you?”

She hadn’t told him everything Uncle Sean had told her, but she hadn’t left the impaling out on purpose. Their conversation had simply been very short when she called him from her car to tell him to meet her in Clare Point.

“Look like maybe a bit of a struggle to you?” She glanced around. Some of the leaves and pine needles on the forest floor appeared to be disturbed. A few branches were bent. A couple broken. The disturbances in the ground cover could have come from the assailant scooping up leaves to burn the body, but that wasn’t the impression she got. Standing here, she could almost smell Mahon’s terror in his last breath. She could feel him fighting for his life.

“Came in through there.” Glen pointed to the northwest. “Not a lot of spatter for the quantity of blood here.”

“Soaked into the ground, maybe.” She crouched at Mahon’s shoulder and took a close-up of his neck, the ligaments, muscles, and his trachea easily identifiable. Like Bobby’s, the wound was relatively clean. He had been beheaded with something sharp. But, while Bobby had been beheaded face down, Mahon had seen what was coming.

She took a series of photos, taking care not to disturb the body, although the whole time she was doing it, she wanted to touch Mahon. To somehow console him.

It would be his family that would need comforting.

They worked for close to an hour without really talking and Fia found that Glen was easier to be around than maybe she had given him credit for the first time around. He was respectful of the body, conscientious of his work, and thorough. He carefully collected samples of leaves, blood, even snapped twigs from the immediate area, bagging them and logging where it was all found.

At the rumbling sound of approaching ATVs, both Fia and Glen took a moment to walk outside the immediate circle surrounding the crime scene. They were both bathed in sweat, their clothes damp and stuck to their skin. The mosquitoes were still buzzing in their ears but as the late afternoon lengthened into early evening, a slight breeze began to rustle the leaves of the trees. When Fia turned her head, she could faintly smell the salt of the bay more than a mile away, but the scent that was strongest in her nostrils, even stronger than the smell of Mahon’s blood and his burnt flesh, was the smell of Glen’s skin. His damp hair.

He smelled good and it was annoyingly distracting.

“Excellent. Two more men to help us move the body,” Glen remarked.

She passed him a water bottle from her backpack. “Three.”

He looked over at her, questioningly, as he twisted the cap.

“Three ATVs,” she observed, watching in the direction they would appear as she gulped her water. “One’s got serious transmission trouble. I hope it’s not the one pulling the trailer.” She screwed the cap on the water bottle, glancing away, realizing that the four-wheel-drive-all-terrain vehicles were still a good quarter of a mile away, and to the human ear probably just sounded like a bunch of noise.

She could tell Glen was wondering how she knew how many were coming. Back in the parking lot at the entrance to the preserve, Uncle Sean had specifically said Malachy had two ATVs. He’d apparently scared up a third somewhere.

“Find anything, Pete?” Fia called, not giving Glen a chance to say anything about the approaching vehicles. She’d have to be more careful. He was more observant than she’d first given him credit for, as well.

“Nothing of the head or hands. Nothing out of place except that path beat through the pines over there. I’m no expert, but it looks to me like someone was following someone else. You think you can take some of those fancy footprint molds like on TV?”

“Possibly.”

The engines of the ATVs grew so loud that they drowned out Pete’s voice. Fia looked up to see one come through the trees, then a second, then a third.

“Good hearing,” Glen remarked, meeting her gaze.

She held it for a second, then looked away. As her uncle and the two other officers cut the engines, she could hear the flies buzzing over Mahon’s body again. The minute she had moved away, they had moved back in again. “Let’s finish up and get Mahon out of here.”

Chapter 10

It was dark by the time Fia and Glen walked out of the woods, hot, tired, sweaty, eaten up by the mosquitoes. The parking lot was as busy as the Dairy Queen on a Saturday night in June, but the townsfolk had the good sense to keep their distance. They stood huddled in groups in the darkness, whispering, watching.

Fia and Glen waited