CHAPTER SIX
It was just after one in the afternoon when Faith, Jessica, and Turk pulled up to a beautiful Colonial-style home in Newton, Massachusetts.
The house was a brilliant, freshly painted white with blue trim and gleamed in the sunlight streaming through a moderate cover of fluffy white clouds.
Though not oceanfront, the salt spray of the Atlantic carried to her nostrils, wafted by a steady cool easterly breeze.
A late-model Mercedes SUV was parked in the driveway, a bright silver number that probably cost close to twenty times what Faith’s old Crown Vic was worth and at least three times what the rental Nissan she was driving cost.
“Robbery, maybe?” Faith asked.
“Doubt it,” Jessica said. “Based on what I heard, this was personal.”
“Right,” Faith said. “Torn apart.”
“That’s verbatim from the police report. It’s about the only real piece of information we have. She was brutalized so badly she was unrecognizable.”
Faith had seen similar things before. In a past case, a former animal behaviorist had drugged dogs into a highly suggestible state and used them to essentially hunt and eat his victims. She wondered if some of that research had made its way to the 93rd.
That conjured up an image of David attacked by the 93rd’s dogs and left like those victims. Torn apart.
She shivered and pushed the image from her mind, but the fear lingered in the background.
A dog barked as they approached the house.
Turk barked in answer, announcing his presence.
Possibly communicating something else, but Faith couldn’t tell.
Whatever he said, the soft chuff of claws tearing through dirt approached, and a moment later, the head of an unusually large German Shepherd poked above the fence.
It saw Turk and barked again, clearly terrified.
Turk barked back and looked soberly at Faith.
“Hang in there, buddy,” Faith said, not sure if she was talking to Turk, the new dog, or herself. Hell, make it all three.
They entered the house to find the interior similarly posh. Expensive leather couches and some sort of odd, flowy aesthetic to the wooden coffee table, and a few decorative pieces hanging on the wall. Driftwood came to mind, but Faith wasn't sure if that was right.
Turk’s nose wrinkled, but Faith didn’t need to observe her dog’s reaction to recognize the smell of blood. The detective standing in the entryway to the kitchen noticed her expression and said in a sharp Boston twang, “Doesn’t smell like a rose, does it?”
“Not any rose I’ve ever encountered,” Faith agreed, extending her hand. “Special Agent Faith Bold.” The detective took the hand, and Faith said, “This is my partner, Special Agent Jessica Torres. The German Shepherd waiting patiently for you to let him through is my K9 unit, Turk.”
“Oh,” the detective said, sidestepping. “Sorry about that, sir.”
Turk barked politely, took two steps past him, then stopped and stared. Faith had rarely seen her dog stunned. She shared a look with Jessica, then stepped past her into the kitchen.
And mirrored Turk’s reaction.
“Had to look for her driver’s license in her purse to make the ID,” the detective said. “I’m Detective Riley Jenkins, by the way. Forgot to tell you.”
“I don’t blame you,” Faith said.
Jessica looked over her shoulder and made a wet hurk noise before jogging back out the front door. More retching noises reached Faith’s ears as she examined the remains.
Remains was the appropriate word. What was lying on the ground was barely a body.
Tatters of flesh lay in a pool of blood.
They formed the vague shape of a woman, but that was the closest Faith could come to identifying features.
The victim’s face had been almost completely torn off.
One ear was severed in half, the lower half sagging a full three inches south of the upper half.
Both eyes were gone, and the nose was stripped to the bone.
Thicker squares of flesh might once have joined to form lips.
Below the face, the picture wasn’t any more pleasing.
The woman had been wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks.
Both were ripped to shreds, and the skin beneath was a cluster of wide, suppurating lips parting to reveal the mangled fat and muscle below.
A thick rope of something pushed through one of the tears in her abdomen.
The victim morphed into the shape of David, shredded into unrecognizability, and that was when Faith decided she’d also had enough and turned around.
Jenkins gave her a sympathetic smile. He was also a little green around the ears. "Yeah, I had to take a minute too. A few years back, when I was a beat cop, I responded to a scene where a tweaker fell into a wood chipper, and that's the only reason this isn't the goriest thing I've ever seen."
Faith nodded, not quite able to speak yet. Her stomach wasn’t ready to release its contents, but it was thinking about it.
Turk sniffed around the body, more shocked than nauseous. His footsteps padded softly around the tile as he tried to avoid the blood.
“Name?” Faith finally managed to ask.
“Margaret Hayes. Forty on the dot. Market analyst for Goldman Sachs. She’s got a pretty nice computer setup in her bedroom, so I think she works from home, but we’ll confirm that.
In any case, she had the day off because we have her phone in custody, and no one’s calling to ask why she’s not sending them some report or another. ”
“Who called it in?”
"Neighbor. Gave us an earful about her fake service dog barking up a storm, and she wasn't answering the door when he came over to tell her to shut the dog up.
" He hooked a thumb at the two uniformed officers in the living room.
"They stopped by to talk to her about the noise.
One of 'em felt off about it when she still didn't answer the door.
Got permission from the watch commander to force entry, walked inside, and found this. "
Faith turned to the uniforms, both of whom were shaky and glistening with sweat. Nausea was going to be a problem for everyone who looked at Hayes’s body unless the ME had a cast-iron stomach, which, to be fair, most of them did.
“Did you interview the neighbor?” Faith asked.
“We talked to him,” the taller of the two men replied. “Kept ranting about the fake service dog until we told him Margaret Hayes was dead. Then he fell all over himself proving that it wasn’t him because he’d been in his house all day, and his security camera would prove it.”
Faith nodded. The fake service dog was still barking, voice hoarse from its constant cries. “Animal control’s coming for the dog, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah, they’re on their way,” the shorter uniform replied. “We were going to take it out of the yard so we could see if the killer might have come in that way, but the dog attacked us as soon as we opened the door. I barely escaped getting my fingers bit off.”
Faith listened to the barks for a moment. They weren’t angry. They were terrified. Desperate. His human was inside here, and someone dangerous was here too, and he couldn’t get to her to protect her.
She took a deep breath and turned around, keeping her eyes on the door. “Turk.” Turk lifted his head from the remnants of Hayes’s own head. “Outside. Let’s go see the dog.”
Turk barked, then trotted to the door. Faith followed, skirting the edges of the kitchen to avoid the blood. The barks from outside intensified as they approached the door. Faith reached across, turned the handle, and pushed open the door.
Twin tornadoes of fur collided. Turk lowered his shoulder and planted his back feet, pushing the younger, bigger Shepherd against the wall.
The younger dog wore a service dog vest that was now scuffed and covered in dirt and grass stains.
He growled and scrabbled, trying to push past him and get to Hayes.
He had a good ten pounds on Turk and could probably have overwhelmed him if he thought about how to get Turk off of him, but he was so consumed with fear that he didn’t seem to register that it was Turk’s weight on him that was holding him back.
Turk barked once, firmly. The dog stopped and looked ahead.
Its eyes were wide open and dazed. Turk barked again, more gently, and the dog lowered its head to the body—the remains—of Margaret Hayes.
It yelped and tried to push past Turk again, and this time when Turk held him, he snarled and bit Turk on the hindquarters.
Faith moved to intervene, and Turk whipped his head toward her and barked twice. Back off. I’ve got this.
Faith obliged, taking a step away. The bigger dog tried once more to move Turk, but its legs were shaking now.
It looked back at the body, then sank to the ground, shivering and whimpering.
Turk lay next to him, laying his head over the other dog as it wept.
A trickle of blood ran down his flank where the other dog had bit him, but the wound didn’t seem too concerning.
Faith reached down to pat Turk’s head. “Good boy.”
She stepped through the door into the yard.
The back porch was covered in dirt, and dozens of scratch marks stretched across the wood from the dog’s desperate efforts to get inside.
The first few feet of grass beyond the porch was similarly torn up, but past that, Faith saw a trail of footprints leading to a back fence.
She followed the trail and noted the dirt and scuff marks on the boards.
She took two long strides to the right so she wouldn’t contaminate evidence and climbed the fence herself. She landed on the other side, almost directly on top of a yellow plastic poncho.
“Shit!” she cried out, pushing off the fence. Her balance wavered, and she decided to let herself fall, performing a forward roll up to her feet.
The poncho was covered in blood. One sleeve was extended outward, and Faith could see small tears at the end of it. She cupped her hands over her mouth and called, “Detective! I have something!”
A moment later, Jenkins and a still shivering Jessica joined her. Jenkins whistled when he saw the poncho. “Well, that’s our silver lining, I guess. We’re bound to get something from that.”
Faith hoped he was right, but she feared the killer’s choice to leave the poncho was predicated on confidence that they wouldn’t find anything. “Have CSI put a rush on this. Anything that doesn’t match Hayes’s body is our killer.”
“You think she had a chance to defend herself?” Jessica asked.
“No way to tell until we get the results back, but if so, then we might have the who of this dunit faster than normal. Which means no more bodies like that one.”
“Had me at dunit,” Jenkins said.
He issued the command to the uniforms, who apparently were serving double duty as evidence collectors.
Newton was a short drive from Boston, but it had its own police department and medical examiner’s office, and apparently this didn’t rate a phone call to Boston.
Or, more likely, Jenkins knew this would get buried among the dozens of active cases that city was probably dealing with, and he was trying to find answers quickly before whoever had done that to Margaret Hayes had a chance to do it to someone else.
“It’s kinda funny,” Jenkins said. “In a not-actually-that-funny kind of way. If Hayes had a doggy door, then that shepherd would have probably come into the house and made the killer look like she does now. Instead, he had to listen while his human got torn to shreds.” He shook his head.
“Fake service dog or no, I feel bad for him. No one deserves this.”
Faith looked back toward the house where the tatters of what had only a few hours ago been a living, breathing human lay in a mess on the kitchen floor. “I know at least one person who would disagree with you.”