Twenty miles away, in the damp, pine-choked woods that bordered Oaktown, Detective Kraven was not feeling normal. He was staring at a body, and his stomach was telling him to run.
Kraven was a man made of straight lines and hard angles, in a rumpled coat that smelled of stale coffee and disappointment. He'd been a cop in this county for fifteen years. He'd seen ugly. He'd seen suicides, meth-lab explosions, and the bloody, intimate wreckage of domestic disputes.
He had never, ever, seen this.
The victim was a hiker, a college kid from the looks of him. He was lying face-up on a bed of pine needles, his expensive hiking pack still buckled. His eyes were wide open, staring at the canopy of trees with an expression of faint, frozen surprise.
There was no blood.
That was the first wrong thing. Not a drop. Not on his shirt, not on the ground.
The second wrong a perfectly empty, cauterized hole.
"God," his partner, Harris, whispered, turning to brace himself against a tree, his breakfast making a second appearance.
Kraven crouched, pulling on gloves. He was all business, his face a mask of cold observation. He wasn't a doctor, but he knew what a chest cavity should look like. This wasn't a wound. It was an absence. The ribs were spread, but not broken. They looked... warped, as if they'd been softened by a blowtorch and bent outward. The cavity itself was smooth, sealed, and utterly empty.
"It's... it's like it was scooped out," Harris said, wiping his mouth.
"No," Kraven said, his voice a low gravel. "Scooping is messy. This... this is neat." He pointed with a gloved finger. "Look. The arteries. The aorta. They're sealed shut. Like the end of a plastic straw that's been melted."
He stood up, scanning the clearing. "No footprints but his. No fibers. No struggle. He just... lay down and let someone take his heart?"